Anti-social Britain: why do we feel unsafe?
In Clapham earlier this year, hundreds of teenagers swarmed the high street, stealing from shops, intimidating locals and damaging property. The footage caused an immediate furore online, yet for all the apparent chaos, the physical toll was relatively limited: one member of the public was assaulted and just two girls were arrested. So why did it make us feel so unsafe? Was it the random, unpredictable nature of the disorder, the images of an overwhelmed police force seemingly unable to restore control, or social-media algorithms turning a few minutes of chaos into a national reckoning?
Certainly, journalists such as Fraser Nelson argue that our preoccupation with feeling unsafe amounts to something of a moral panic, citing the 35,000-household Crime Survey for England and Wales, which records crime at just a third of its 2004 level. To counter the suggestion that this decline merely reflects lower rates of crime reporting, Nelson also points to NHS hospital data, according to which assaults involving bodily force have fallen to just over 10,000, from a peak of 30,000 in 2006. London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, often stresses these statistics when he argues that London has never been safer.
Yet this is not to say that Sadiq Khan is correct when he accuses those concerned by the Clapham disorder of pushing ‘disinformation’. For one, some forms of crime have risen – notably shoplifting and fare evasion, both of which are highly visible to people as they go about their daily lives. Moreover, as the police fail to solve 92 per cent of burglaries, it is reasonable to question how accurately official figures capture non-violent crime. Victims increasingly believe that reporting an offence will lead to little or no investigation – even in cases where stolen goods can apparently be traced to a particular address. Perhaps in this case, we shouldn’t trust the statistics.
Further, we obviously do not measure legal anti-social behaviour: playing music on public transport, putting feet on seats, aggressive begging, public intoxication, littering or groups deliberately intimidating passers-by. Do these ‘micro’ instances of anti-social behaviour contribute to a feeling of unsafety, and if so, should they?
The changing nature of crime surely offers an explanation. Some acts of violence can appear increasingly random and inexplicable, making the threat they pose particularly difficult for the public to comprehend. Motivation can seem elusive when considering the disorder in Clapham or, at the most horrific extreme, the murders in Southport. Sexual violence – which has risen to its highest recorded level and is often amplified on social media, especially when associated with illegal migrants – can also feel increasingly random and difficult to anticipate, unlike violence rooted in an obvious grievance, robbery or organised crime. Alongside this, there seems to evidence of more frequent erratic, mentally ill or psychotic behaviour due to changes in psychiatric care. In short, there can be a menacing atmosphere on our streets regardless of statistics.
So, are our growing fears about crime a rational response to the rise of visible disorder and seemingly unpredictable violence, or are we allowing exceptional incidents to distort our perception of everyday risk? And if the crimes people see and fear are changing, can falling overall crime rates really tell us whether society has become safer?
