There are always members of our society who claim that everything is getting worse. It’s a play that politicians make, regardless of what the statistics say. It’s also one that we are prone to believe. The simplest explanation of this is our evolutionary past i.e., paying attention to threats/danger (bad things) was more important for our survival than focusing on positives e.g., consider two of our ancestors walking through a forest, one focusing on the beautiful flowers and birdsong, whilst the other notices movement in the bushes that might indicate the presence of a predator.  If the second person (considering a threat) was wrong, then they simply experienced unnecessary anxiety, however if the first person who was noticing the flowers etc., was “distracted” and didn’t focus on the potential threat then they might not survive. So, over thousands of generations, natural selection favored the focus on “negatives” more than the focus on “positives”. This is why we’ll believe politicians and the media who tell us that crime - and particularly violent crime - is increasing, when in fact it’s doing the opposite. We also suffer from an “Anecdotal Fallacy”, which sees us more likely to accept/believe a personal story or isolated example even when presented with “stronger” contradictory evidence, such as systematic research and/or statistical data. It’s one of the reasons why we fall for infomercials, where an individual “person” tells of their experience with a weight-loss drug despite there being no clinical trials to back their experience up etc. It’s easy to believe that any spike in crime is down to society creating more criminals, however this isn’t necessarily the case.

               The general pattern of crime, especially violent and property crime, tends to increase in summer. This is one of the most consistent findings in criminology, sometimes called the "summer crime spike" (perhaps only second to the agreement by criminologists that people generally age out of crime). Summer changes people's routines in ways that increase the three ingredients Routine Activity Theory (RAT) suggests that you need for crime to occur, i.e., a motivated offender, a suitable target, and the absence of a capable guardian. When you consider that kids are out of school and unsupervised more often (both as potential offenders and potential victims)  and that people generally spend more time outdoors, in public spaces, and away from home (meaning homes are more often empty  which creates more burglary opportunities etc.) and that more people are out in public interacting with strangers (more opportunities for assault, robbery) it’s easy to see why crimes can go up. Couple this with longer daylight hours (more waking hours during which people are out and about), and higher levels of social contact (parties, gatherings, nightlife, tourism in some areas) and it’s easy to see why there is an increase in the opportunities for everyday social disputes to escalate into physical/violent confrontations. During the summer months the “number” of “criminals” doesn’t increase, but the number of opportunities for people to engage in criminal activities does.

               There are few people who haven’t at some point in time broken the law but at the same time don’t view themselves as criminals e.g., there are few people who haven’t broken the speed limit, or failed to scan an item at a self-service checkout (or “inadvertently” scanned it as a cheaper item etc). When there is the lack of a “Capable Guardian”, such as a police cruiser on the side of a highway/motorway, many people will take their chances and break the speed limit etc. I’m not saying that anyone doing so should see themselves as “criminals”, but rather they should recognize they are engaging in a criminal act, rather than attempting to justify to themselves that they aren’t. For the crime rate to go up it doesn’t require the creation of more criminals, it simply requires a certain number of people to engage in more criminal activity, and this is usually/normally the product of “opportunity”. If everyone in a society engaged in and was caught committing one criminal act in a year, whether that was speeding, scanning an avocado as an onion etc., the crime rate would skyrocket. When presented with the statistics, we’d believe that society had fallen apart and that we were living in the end times. A good few of us (in the US), who’d never considered it before would be buying a shotgun, and preparing a safe-room in our home, in which to make our last stand. (I’m not anti-firearms or safe-rooms etc., just be educated as to your use of both.) However, the view that an increasing crime-rate is the representation of society’s moral decline needs a closer examination than simply looking at a bar-chart presented on a news channel (in next week’s blog I’ll look at how news media uses graphs and charts to “misrepresent” crime statistics).   

               A “spike” in the crime-rate, doesn’t mean a “rise” in the crime rate. Looking at this year’s crime rate from July-September compared to the previous year’s October-December rate doesn’t mean Armageddon is upon us. It doesn’t mean that suddenly society has failed or become more corrupt/criminal etc. A friend of mine working in law enforcement in the UK, told me about a single persistent offender in his jurisdiction who was regularly caught for auto theft. In the days when he was in custody, known incidents of auto thefts fell by 70-80% i.e., this individual was responsible for the vast majority of motor vehicle thefts where he lived. If there were two of “him”, car crime would have been astronomical, however crime doesn’t require more criminals to increase the crime rate, it just requires more, easier opportunities e.g., if this individual came across two unlocked cars for every one he found, he’d have personally doubled the crime rate.