The first reponse from the Home Office to Cultures and Crimes was that the risk of being a victim of crime is at its lowest since records began.
No! Records began in 1857.
If no notice had been taken of the book, that utterly reckless statement would have done the job nicely.
But notice is being taken of the book, and the Home Office has decided that it will have to be more circumspect. Its latest comments on the book are now the much safer, “Your chance of being a victim of crime is now at its lowest level since 1981″.
I don’t know if the population figures they use are those of 2001 and 1981 Censuses.
If the Home Office did their calculations on a more refined basis than that of the total population, then they can supply the correction, and show what difference it makes to the percentage (and more importantly, to the argument), directly onto this site.
On the basis of the Census population, the risk of being a victim of a BCS crime was almost precisely the same in 2003/04 as it was in 1981, 22.5 per cent–in fact the 2003/04 figure is fractionally lower than the figure for 1981.
Unfortunately for the Home Office spokespersons, the relevance of their comments in relation to Cultures and Crimes is almost zero. The book starts with the fact that crime in general has fallen from the enormously high levels of its 1995 peak–to the still enormously high levels of 1981 and today. From 1955 there had been a relentless rise in crime, so that by 1981 the first British Crime Survey estimated that there were 11 million crimes in the year. In 2003/04 the BCS estimate was that there were 11.7 million crimes in the year.
Crime fell from the mid-1990s in both the BCS and police-recorded statistics because householders and car manufacturers took more and more elaborate precautions to keep criminals at bay.
The subject of Cultures and Crimes is the category of crimes and disorder where the numbers went on rising until 2001/02: the offences the control of which was least within the power of people themselves, and where dependence on the police was greatest–on the streets.
Sorry! I thought that the Home Office had had the sense to realise that they’d been rumbled. But my wife’s just come in with this morning’s Daily Express. ‘A Home Office spokeswoman said: “Latest figures show the the risk of being a victim is at its lowest level since records began.”‘
The BCS figures, by the way, do not attempt to touch some of the most rapid areas of crime growth.
In spite of the fact that the reduction in the age of both victims and perpetrators is a phenomenon of many years’ standing, the BCS excludes all crimes committed against under-16s.
The BCS excludes all drug crimes.
But, hey! The crime figures look a lot better without them!

On New Year’s Eve I posted an essay in which I predicted what the academic reaction to Cultures and Crimes would be.
Right on cue, Professor Mike Hough, the Director of Criminal Policy Research at King’s College, London, is quoted in the Observer this morning as saying that “This is nonsense. Academics mostly [sic]agree that crime in the UK rose in the early 1990s”.
He only goes so far as to say that academics “mostly” agree that crime was rising in the early 1990s. As I say it was, he can only think that the book is nonsense on that point if he is not among the academics who are now willing to concede that crime was rising, even if only “in the early 1990s”. He doesn’t tell us.
The book makes clear that from the early 1990s that the criminological and social policy establishment tended to drop the rhetoric of “moral panic” and admit that crime was then rising.
It had dawned on them that the rise in crime could be blamed on the harm that Mrs Thatcher did to 1980s’ Britain. But what Professor Hough elides is a core issue: the long period of denial that crime was rising rapidly before (and long before) the 1980s and 1990s.
Is the book nonsense when it says that crime did surge from 1955? Again, Professor Hough is silent.
Professor Hough says that crime peaked around 1995 and has been falling ever since. The book makes quite clear that general crime did fall from the mid-1990s. Professor Hough can’t think that bit of the book is nonsense, either, then.
Crimes that were most capable of being controlled by the security measures of householders and manufacturers themselves did peak around 1995 and have been falling ever since. The book gives the statistics that confirm this.
But one of the main points of the book is that crimes the control of which depended largely upon the effectiveness of the police soared away, until the robbery figure of 121,000 in 2001/02 at long last acted as Britain’s wake-up call. Professor Hough ignores this crucial fact. It is a fact that is at the very heart of the book’s argument.
The spokesperson of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), following no doubt his or her careful study of the book, provides what I called in my essay “contentless” criticism in its purest form. The book, according to the spokesperson, uses conflicting evidence to draw simplistic conclusions. What conflicting evidence? What simplistic conclusions?
The Association of Chief Police Officers, the Observer blandly reports, has reacted “with fury”. The Observer, usually alert to such things, makes no comment on the fact that “criticism” of this sort from the most senior police officers in the country is a little unsettling.
The book is “a criticism of the police” only in sense that it argues that the deterioration of the ratio of police officers to crimes, and the diminution of the rights protecting victims as compared with the rights protecting perpetrators, has made it sociologically impossible for the police to engage in effective crime prevention on the old Peelite model.
Police officers are bound to be stuck at their desks for long periods filling out forms, and talk about “beat policing” anything remotely as dense as it was up to the later 1960s, on present “record” police numbers (they are at a record) cannot be anything but moonshine.
As for the Home Office … “The risk of being a victim is the lowest since records began.” Well, who could have possibly worked that one out from the Home Office’s figures?

Ron Bramwell speaks of his gut feeling as a police officer that crime surged after 1955 because there were more things to steal.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, England was still reaping the benefits of having a head start on all other countries in the industrial revolution, and there were many more things to steal at the end the century than there had been in the middle. Criminal Statistics 1908 summed up the period in these words:
“Crime has increased very little in the past half century, and taking into account the greater opportunities open nowadays to an indiviudal of criminal tendencies through the greater profusion of wealth and personal possessions … it may reasonably be inferred that the members of the predatory classes are appreciably fewer than in 1857 in spite of the fact that in the interim the population has almost doubled.”
The pervasive tone of the literature of Edwardian times is a settled confidence that England was indeed steadily becoming a still more crime-free and civilised society. What George Dangerfield called “The Strange Death of Liberal England” did not occur until later, when George V was on the throne.

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