What, me scared?

James Petty

In an article published in The Age last week Ross Gittins, the economics editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, wrote about that persistent and vexing criminological conundrum: that crimes rates are steadily falling yet the public’s perception is that they are on the rise.

The most recent research from the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) indicates that rates of all types of property crime are falling, and the same goes for most types of violent crime. Only rates of kidnapping and abduction have risen since 2005 (also, while rates of sexual assault and rape have declined statistically, data collection on these is infamously unreliable so it is hard to draw much from this).

His brief explanation for the public’s continuing misperception is firstly that people like drama, hence why so much of the fiction— literature, film and television—we consume is dedicated to stories of crime, deviance and violence. It makes sense then that we seek similar thrills and chills within the news media that we consume. Of course the boundary between fiction and news gets very blurry indeed in regard to certain types of media nominally referred to as ‘news’, particularly in regard to how crime is reported.

His second point was that the news media didn’t think the public would be particularly interested in hearing that we are in fact less likely to be victims of most types of crime now than we were five or ten years ago.

This explanation is more or less accurate, if a little forgiving—I would say the media’s role in determining what is newsworthy (and therefore what the public consumes and wants to consume) is a little more complex than Gittins’ explanation implies.

But if crime and violence do constitute such a significant part of our collective social anxieties, why the disinterest? The regulation of crime and violence is something the public howls for and demands from politicians (and if they want any chance of getting elected they’ll deliver it). But news that should allow us breathe a sigh of relief hardly rates a bar—it is just not that interesting.

Even though Gittins decided to buck the trend and report on this, his article did not rocket around the Twitter stratosphere, become a point of debate on The Drum or even get a mention on QnA. We will gobble up news about riots, brawls, rape and murder—if the story is local we think ‘that could’ve been me’, if interstate or international we put on our global citizen hat and worry about what Australia/the world is coming to. But a story about civil rest, of safety ‘out there’, of an increasingly ‘ordered’ society, this warrants a glance and a shrug, if that.

Perhaps, somewhat counter intuitively, being told that we are in fact safer and less likely to personally experience crime or violence actually provides little comfort. We cannot consume safety in the same way we consume violence and danger— we don’t buy a DVD box set about safe communities, law-abiding citizens or incorruptible politicians of impeccable moral standing, we can’t buy things that make our houses, our cars, our bikes, our children ‘less safe’ because, as we’ve been told, we can let our guard down a little.

It is an interesting paradox, though one that does make sense in a way. Just as there can be no pleasure without pain, no good without evil, no sacred without profane, we cannot feel safe unless we are scared, unless we perceive danger, unless we can protect ourselves from something ‘out there’. We like to be told we are in danger so we can take steps to protect ourselves— this is a tenet of modern capitalism and basically the foundation of the insurance industry. Being told that we are statistically ‘safer’ by the media is the equivalent of being assured by a hypochondriac that your weird rash is “probably nothing”.