Crime, ‘disorder’, insecurity and social exclusion

Abstract

Crime is an inescapable feature of everyday modern life. According to the government’s own sources, crime has grown considerably in post-war Britain. Whereas 500,000 crimes were recorded in 1955, the extent of police recorded crime had reached 4.5 million crimes by the time New Labour took office in 1997 (Barclay and Tavares, 1999)1. Yet there is widespread acknowledgement that these crimes are just the tip of the iceberg, with a vast amount of crime being unreported, unrecorded and undetected (Coleman and Moynihan, 1996). According to the more reliable British Crime Survey (BCS), crime rose steadily in the decade from 1981, and continued to rise during the early 1990s, peaking in 1995 to over 16.5 million crimes. The most recent sweep, however, shows that since 1995, the risk of becoming a victim of crime has fallen from 40% to 26% (representing a drop in BCS crime by 40%), the lowest level recorded since the survey began in 1981 (Dodd et al, 2004). Despite being a vastly improved measurement method, the BCS is still likely to considerably underestimate the amount of crime. One study (Green, 2004) found that at least 10.9 million offences are missed from the most recent survey but even this estimate fails to include a whole raft of other crimes such as white-collar, corporate crime and environmental crime (Garside, 2004), which would indicate that the problem of crime is a much bigger one than evidenced by either police-recorded crime or victimisation surveys like the BCS (Box, 1983). In addition to these high levels of crime, the government argues that acts of‘disorder’, which often make people’s lives intolerable, have now reached unacceptable levels.