Crime: was it really as low as Frank Field claims?
This morning David Cameron spoke at Demos, launching an inquiry at the think tank about character — a subject which has been on Demos director Richard Reeves’s mind ever since his big Prospect essay on the same subject, which you can read here.
I didn’t go the launch (meetings, sadly), but just read the transcript. In similar vein to his big society speech, it sees the Tories engaging further with research normally cited only on the left, especially his quoting of Leon Feinstein —who “has shown that the extent to which positive attributes have developed by the age of ten has a profound impact on a child’s success in adult life”—a favourite thinker both in progressive think tanks, and Ed Balls’s DCSF. Its interesting too, given that the major initiative the Tories have for improving character amongst the
Richard Jenkins
Thanks heavens for Professor David Wilson. Without his wisdom and insight, I might have thought that the increase in the murder rate, starting in the mid-1960s, had something to do with the abolition of the death penalty in 1965. And to think that it was all down to the middle classes fiddling the figures to keep the rates down.
Victor Southern
Violent crimes are not limited to murder. Your statistics therefore prove little especially since Frank Field is talking about today, not 1997.
The table does not show that murders peaked in the 1990′s. It shows only that 1995 had a greater incidence.
Jon Norton
Tell Skidelsky to do one of his little articles, this time about “socially constructed”.
Chris Paul
Even with all these footnotes and riders Frank Field’s statistic is clearly way wrong. Particularly obviously if based on murders. If that was more than 120 (the miracle pre-war constant) nationally in 1960 as implied … is Frank saying there were two to three murders per week in Birkenhead in 2007-8?
With far more police officers, better recording systems and CCTV too there is WAY more recorded crime in many categories, though within this modern tranche there is a downward trend.
Leaving aside category errors – deliberate or otherwise – we get homicide rate 2-3 times the figure per 1000 as 1960. Field’s construction with Birkenhead (population 85,000) having more violent crime than UK 1960 (c 50M = c 600 times the population) is just plain crazy.
Biggest question here is whether Field actually made this claim in this interpretation or was misreported. And following that why the Spectator and the Telegraph and others repeated the thing so unquestioningly.
N J Mayes
Much has rightly been made of the violent crimes that would not have made it into the old statistics – but are we so confident that today’s are very accurate either? For instance, the British Crime Survey doesn’t even bother to count offences against under-16s.
Chris
Any evidence for Prof. Wilson’s outrageous claim? Or is the thinking merely that self-interest explains all human behaviour, and possibly that it fits his ideology to state that there was never a Golden Age?
Over the years in question the British working classes did build a pretty astonishing, tight-knit culture of mutual help and development (see Jonathan Rose’s book ‘The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes’ for example). This culture took a mighty battering from the 60s onwards as people began to see themselves as consumers rather than workers. It’s worth at least considering to what extent, if any, this culture contributed to a lower crime rate.
Glenis Devereux
It is one thing to say, as Professor Wilson says, that such a statistic cannot be proved, it is yet another to say if what is being said is actually or essentially true or not. The tone of the article and many of the posts seem to be saying, ‘if it can’t be proved then it must not be true’. But looking at the pictures of my parent’s childhood family days out in the sea-side fun-fair town of New Brighton – just down the road from Birkenhead – and comparing that to what you see there now in this run down, single mother, drug ghetto; where fatherhood means nothing more than getting a positive on a paternity test and where 3rd generation ‘free house on the social if I have a kid’ hair-trigger violent teenagers, along with their pit-bulls, scowl murderously at anyone who catches their eye along the promenade where once children skipped and played – then you can see that what Frank Field is essentially saying does not actually seem all that unreasonable.
If James Crabtree had been told that New Brighton had the best chips in the World – would he sound silly writing “Oh I am too busy in meetings to go there myself and try them, can any food-ologists tell me is this true ? – I think so. Well ditto with this. Stop doing your ‘safely tucked away in a nice safe area telling everyone that that they are panicking unnecessarily about violent crime and go live there yourself.