One of the debates at this year’s Battle of Ideas festival asks Anti-social Britain: why do we feel unsafe? It seems like someone intervening to stop shoplifting is more likely to be arrested than the thief. Mobs of young people can gather in high streets, like Clapham earlier this year, seemingly without intervention from the authorities. Anti-social behaviour, from playing loud music to harassing pedestrians on e-bikes, seems rife. Yet many commentators claim this is all mere perception – the crime figures are down, so the fear of crime must be overstated.
Here, festival speaker Rory Geoghegan – a former police officer who is founder of SafetyScore and The Public Safety Foundation – argues that those who rely on the crime figures are missing the point.
Rory is speaking in the Battle of Ideas debates Anti-social Britain: why do we feel unsafe? and Middlesbrough: what just happened? – looking at the aftermath to the deaths of two police officers in a crash caused by a car driven the wrong way on the A66, revealing a town living in the shadow of a gangland siege.
Tickets for this year’s festival, which takes place on Saturday 17 & Sunday 18 October at Church House, Westminster.
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There’s more to crime and disorder in Britain than the latest crime statistics
RORY GEOGHEGAN
A familiar debate plays out in Britain. Someone says their town feels less safe, that shoplifting seems routine, that people openly take drugs in the street, or that anti-social behaviour has become part of everyday background noise.
They are told that, in fact, crime is down.
The Policy Institute at King’s College London recently doubled down on that position, publishing research as part of a new ‘Mistaken Britain’ series.
It alleges the public routinely gets crime wrong - we’re ‘mistaken’ and hold ‘incorrect beliefs’. The research argues we overestimate our likelihood of becoming victims, assume some offences are rising when they’re falling, and imagine others are more fearful than they really are.
One group of voters is even described as ‘consistently most wrong’.
But being told we’re mistaken isn’t an effective answer to legitimate concerns about the state of local neighbourhoods, town centres, or cities. Are the voters so very wrong?
Towns and neighbourhoods have been described as ‘consequence-free zones’ and the ‘wild west’. Even the beautiful and much-loved Lake District is having to confront rising anti-social behaviour, and social media is awash with clips of violence, theft, and poor behaviour.
Theft from shops has exploded, prompting stores to resemble Fort Knox more than local supermarkets – aisles wrapped in security mesh, staff wearing body cameras, some separated from customers by reinforced floor-to-ceiling barricades.
Meanwhile charge rates - the odds of being caught and prosecuted – have plummeted for years, and detection rates matter for preventing crime, so a feeling of lawlessness is unsurprising.
Then there’s conduct that damages quality of life without often registering on the radar of authorities. Dog fouling is a classic example: a menace to everyone, especially those with a pushchair or wheelchair, often caused by one or two prolific offenders, yet it never appears in crime statistics.
This points to a bigger problem. After a decade of real-terms cuts to policing and the criminal justice system, authorities retreated behind assessments of threat, risk and harm when deciding what to tackle. The result has been a widespread stepping away from so-called ‘low level’ crime and disorder – without truly appreciating the harm embedded within it.
This has opened a chasm between public expectations of a response and what authorities actually deliver – a chasm that has proven corrosive to people’s willingness to report crime at all.
Why report illegal trading or drug use if authorities seem uninterested, or if reporting leads nowhere?
This demoralisation of the law-abiding is particularly damaging: it discourages people from reporting issues, acting as witnesses or intervening – which, in turn, feeds an increasingly incomplete statistical picture of crime and disorder.
It’s true the public might misjudge their statistical risk of victimisation while still accurately sensing that a place’s atmosphere has changed. People can live somewhere where serious violence is rare, yet still contend with street drinking, open drug use, vandalism, threatening behaviour, reckless e-bike riding, harassment, shoplifting, or groups making public spaces unpleasant.
None of this may properly show up as a recorded crime or in the Crime Survey for England and Wales, but it still alters how a neighbourhood feels.
That distinction matters, because public safety is about more than the probability of becoming a victim of a serious offence. It’s also about whether you can use a park, high street, bus stop or station without having to calculate who’s around you and whether anyone would intervene if things went wrong.
Tellingly, even the King’s research found that while the public overestimates how many people feel unsafe after dark, the real figure is far from trivial: 39 per cent say they don’t feel safe walking alone in their area after dark.
We can correct people for guessing too high, but that shouldn’t distract from the fact that nearly four in ten people feeling unsafe in their own neighbourhood is a serious problem.
There’s a further issue with the phrase ‘crime is down’: crime is not one thing.
A national trend can mask huge differences between offences, places and people’s experience – and conceal the cumulative effect of behaviour that falls below the threshold of a recorded crime.
One smashed window, one person shouting abuse outside a shop, one abandoned vehicle, one patch of graffiti, one person repeatedly letting their dog foul the same street – each can look minor in isolation. But the effect is cumulative.
When such things happen again and again unchecked, people draw a rational conclusion: the rules are no longer enforced here.
That conclusion matters well beyond the immediate nuisance. Disorder changes behaviour. People avoid places; our economy suffers – research commissioned by policing’s chief scientific adviser found the cost to business of anti-social behaviour rivals that of violent crime.
Parents restrict where children can go. Older people stay home. Those who can afford to leave, do. Public space risks becoming the territory of whoever is most willing to make it unpleasant for everyone else.
Perhaps we’d understand public anxiety better if we stopped treating it as a statistical error to be corrected and started treating it as information to process, rather than dismiss.
The condition of our shared spaces tells us something real: whether rules are understood, whether authorities respond, whether citizens will step in, and whether society can maintain basic standards of behaviour.
That is why tackling anti-social behaviour and visible disorder matters – and why we should be wary of calling the public ‘mistaken’ simply because their perception and experience doesn’t mirror the official statistics.
Rory Geoghegan is a former police officer, government advisor, and creator of FixASB, an online platform to help tackle persistent anti-social behaviour in shared public spaces.
Why discuss a topic that we already have the answer too? Socialism is a disease