Sunday, June 2, 2013

Is Crime in Australia really getting worse?

Sometimes my studies overlap what's going on in my real world, so I eagerly took on the following question that appeared in one of my subject question lists. I could have added so much more for there is a huge amount of material on this topic but I was limited to 1500 -+,

Enjoy.....


Question: Is crime really getting worse in Australia, or is it a figment of excessive surveillance, moral panic and the media?

If you get your news from any of the major media outlets such as newspapers, radio and free to air television, most days will have an update that has a crime related issue. These issues can relate to the actual occurrence of crime, court outcomes or political responses to crime. Reporting of crime can make us feel as though we live in a crime riddled world, that it is unsafe to walk our streets and contributes to our overall feelings of moral panic. This essay aims to examine if crime really is getting worse, is it a figment of our imaginations fuelled by excessive surveillance, moral panic and the incessant chatter of media outlets. This essay is not written in any way to devalue the victims experience and acknowledges the range of pain and damage that victims carry for all of their life.

Crime is recorded by a number of data sources including the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) who produces different data sets that look at specific crime data for specific areas and take a broader approach by including crime statistics in publications such as the ‘Australian Year Book’. The Australian Institute of Criminology (AIoC) synthesises data taken from these credible sources to produce Australian Crime: facts and figures. The aim of the publication is to give an overview of what has been happening to Australian crime figures throughout the year with some longitudinally comparison since 1993 (AIoC, 2011). The AIoC report selects the following profiles for reporting, homicide, assault, sexual assault, robbery, motor vehicle theft, other theft, drug arrests, federal charges, unlawful entry with intent, and fraud and deception related crimes (AIoC 2011). The AIoC provides details on the logistics of crime and crime categories such as crimes against males and females. Some of the crime categories are broken down into sub categories such as murder and manslaughter, in the murder category there has been a steady downward trend with the usual highs and lows that comes with record keeping eg. in 1993 murders were just under 300 in the calendar year, in 1999 it peaked at 344 and has decreased by 3% per year and stood at 229 recorded for 2010 ( AIoC 2011pp 16/179).  Manslaughter in the same period has remained steady with under 50 crimes recorded each year since 1993(AIoC, 2011pp16). The AIoC provides on-line research tools including longitudinal graphs on crime categories; these graphs clearly show an increase in assaults but a decline in the theft of motor vehicles (AIoC. 2013). The AIoC reports ‘Highlights’ that violent crime and property crime incidents are decreasing.  The NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BoCSaR) in their brief ‘An update of long term trends in property and violent crime NSW 1990-2012’ correlates with the AIoC and comes to the following conclusion.        

 In the period since 1990, assault and sexual assault rates recorded significant long term upward trends whilst the other eight offences analysed in this report were trending down or stable. The 2012 recorded sexual assault rate was marginally above the previous highs of 2009 and 2010 and the rate since 2000 has recorded a significant uptrend. Apart from sexual assault, the remaining nine offence types have recorded significant downtrends in recorded rates since 2000. The three robbery and three property crime rates have all recorded falls of more than 55% since 2000.’ (NSW bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, April 2013)

‘Is crime getting worse in Australia?’ A brief investigation of statistics reveals that finding an answer is complex as there are many categories of crime and locations for crimes to be committed. However if we take the overall conclusions and highlights from annual or topical publications such as those produced by AIoC and BoCSaR we can arrive confidently to make a  broad statement that crime is in fact decreasing in Australia other than the category of assault which is increasing and is often fuelled by alcohol abuse.

Acts of crime in particular violent crime such as assault, shootings and murder are often subject to dissemination through the mass media and in our high speed digital age we are often ‘witness’ to these violent acts committed in our own and other western countries in a rapid fashion. In reporting violent crime we are often subjected to ‘eyewitness accounts’ video clips and journalist reports. Crime is a staple in our ‘news’ diet. Williams and Dickinson (1993) argue that the over representation of some categories of crime in newspapers is partially responsible for perceptions held by the public that crime is rampant and much higher than the statistics reveal, they describe this as ‘fear of crime’ which is a form of moral panic. Williams and Dickinson are cognisant that Newspapers are not the sole basis for opinion forming, their research reached an indecisive but indicative conclusion that ‘papers that report the most crime…in the most salient fashion (visually and stylistically) have readers with the highest level of ‘fear of crime’(Williams and Dickinson 2003 pp51). American researchers Gilliam and Iyengar found that television that relied on a ‘crime script’ such as the news has a socialising effect on its audience and that the audience was more likely to demand ‘more punitive policies’ to deal with crime (Gilliam, and Iyengar, 2000, pp571). Although Gilliam and Iyengar focused much of their work around attitudes towards ‘race’ we can draw many similarities here in Australia in regards to racial prejudices and mainstream news.

The 2005 the Cronulla riots is an example of racial prejudicing in the media. Poynting (2006) is forthright in his criticism of Australian media for ‘whipping up hysteria’ in the week before the racial clash that involved around five thousand people on Cronulla beach. Poynting believes the evidence is ‘clear cut’ that the media incited a racial hate crime and cites the actions of the tabloid paper Daily Telegraph as conducting a ‘classic morally outraged campaign’ (Poynting, 2006). The article goes on to reveal how radio and newsprint outlets continued to contribute to the moral panic after the riots and how the government responded with a ‘law and order’ auction (Poynting, 2006).

In response to constant reporting which gives the consumer of daily news the impression that crime is increasing, Governments have reacted to the induced moral panic by declaring that they are tough on ‘law and order’. Macionis and Plummer describe this heightened demand for tough law and order as ‘penal populism’ a ‘punitive stance towards crime…that politicians can benefit from exploiting this belief’ (2012,pp602). Macionis and Plummer also argue that to maintain moral panic and drive a penal populist belief requires ‘creating enemies, scapegoats and images of threatening people, welfare scroungers, immigrants… a sense of a dangerous world’ (2012p 602).  The threat of ‘illegal immigrants’ is one of the current drivers for moral panic in Australia.

One government reaction to get tough on law and order is to support further installations of Closed Circuit television (CCTV). The use of private and publicly funded CCTV according to Macionis and Plummer has grown in intensity so that we now live in a ‘surveillance society’ (2012,pp597). CCTV gives a community a sense of safety; even though it’s benefits are limited with the best results for crimes such as car theft. Wilson and Sutton argue that CCTV is best suited to confined spaces and the long term benefits in open street situations need to be measured against displacement effects (Wilson and Sutton, 2004). Wilson and Sutton go on to say that statistics on the number of surveillance cameras in Australia and their effectiveness is lacking and needs to balance between being fit for purpose and rights for privacy (2004). With so many cameras in operation both publicly and privately we are assured of one thing-that there is more grist for the media mill.

Crime statistics may relate to volume not severity and once passed through the justice system may change. According to the credible sources at BoCSaR and AIoC there has generally been a steady decline in crime, however statistics do show an increase in assault. Even though it may be difficult to show a completely definitive causal link between the media and the population’s fear of crime there is enough prima facie material to make a broad statement that Australia’s violent crime such as assault is on the rise, but it is over amplified by the presence of surveillance, the media’s insatiable appetite for ‘news’, moral panic and the political response to penal populist belief which seems to create a self-perpetuating loop. Other crime categories are on the decline but that doesn’t sell ‘news’ or help reinforce moral panic.

 

 

 

 

References

 

Australian Government Institute of Criminology 2012,  Australian Crime: Facts and Figures 2011, http://www.aic.gov.au/documents/0/B/6/%7B0B619F44-B18B-47B4-9B59-F87BA643CBAA%7Dfacts11.pdf.

Gilliam FD Jr. and Iyengar S, 2000, Prime Suspects: The Influence of Local Television News on the Viewing Public, American Journal of Political Science, Vol 44, No 3, July 2000. Accessed online via JSTOR May 2013.

Macionis JJ and Plummer K, 2012, Sociology, A Global Introduction (5th Edition), Pearson Education Limited, England, UK.

NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, Issue paper number 84, April 2013, An update of long-term trends in property and violent crime in New South Wales: 1990-2012, http://www.bocsar.nsw.gov.au/Lawlink/bocsar/ll_bocsar.nsf/vwFiles/BB84.pdf/$file/BB84.pdf

Poynting, S 2006 What caused the Cronulla riot? In Race and Class, Vol48 Issue 1, pp 85-92 7/2006 accessed online via Sage journals, May 2013.

 

Williams P and Dickinson J, 1993, Fear of Crime: Read all about it? The Relationship between Newspaper Crime Reporting and Fear of Crime. British Journal of Criminology, Vol 33 No1, Winter 1993

Wilson D and Sutton A, 2004, Watched Over or Over Watched? Open Street CCTV in Australia, The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology,  Vol37 No 2, 2004,  pp211-230

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