Crime is down, but headline-grabbing heists suggest otherwise | Martha Gil

CRhyming stories convey a reliable set of emotions – shock, sympathy, horror, outrage, morbid curiosity and fear. But there is something different, I think, in the news of a burglary. Against your will, in the crime pages of all places, you suddenly find yourself rooting for the bad guy. Ingenuity! Skill! It’s highly unlikely that a semi-retired burglar could sneak down a drain in full view of five sleeping XL tyrants and still escape with the loot. Will he get through it? Should he? You are no longer reading an airport thriller, but a novel of deep moral complexity.

Let us turn, for example, to the recent robbery in Primrose Hill, north London, which sparked a media frenzy. More than £10 million worth of jewelry and £150,000 worth of designer handbags stolen in one fell swoop from a Hong Kong socialite’s home, in shenanigans involving the roof, a blowtorch, a banister along a concrete gutter, near misses with a resident. housekeeper, and the ability to climb onto a sink without disturbing a single cosmetic product scattered on the rim. In a BBC report showing footage of the burglar at work, a family spokesperson described him as moving “like a cat”. Regardless, the “hunt” for the suspect (how exciting) is on.

Perhaps what is most striking about this story is how unusual this type of crime is these days. You may remember the Hatton Garden heist, in which six elderly thieves – the ‘Diamond Geezers’ – made off with £14million of valuables. But that was in 2015 and it was so eccentric that two films have since been made about it. Bank robberies used to be everywhere – in the 1990s they were almost daily in London – but their numbers quickly declined. In 2020, for example, there were only 58 in the UK.

This is just part of a larger, underappreciated trend. Overall crime rates are falling. According to the Crime Survey for England and Wales, incidents have fallen from 19,786 in 1995 to just 4,722 in 2024. The latest ONS data, meanwhile, shows that crime in England and Wales is now to its lowest level ever recorded. Burglary rates are 70% lower than in the year before March 2003, when police began making recordings. Some types of laws buck the trend: Fraud and computer misuse are on the rise, for example, but domestic violence and automobile crime have fallen precipitously over the past three decades. And not just here, but in other rich countries.

For what? The most obvious reason seems to be that many crimes have become more difficult to commit, particularly “opportunistic” crimes. Cars are fitted with central super-locking and immobilizer systems, house stronger door frames and better alarms, and cameras and DNA databases also help deter. Only the most experienced cat burglars should apply: sloppy teenagers don’t stand a chance and are therefore not introduced to a life of crime. Not that there’s much incentive for break-ins these days: TVs, stereos and most other electronics are cheaper and therefore less desirable. And as society goes cashless, there’s also less money lying around.

This idea is reinforced by the fact that when certain crimes increase – phone theft and shoplifting, for example – it is mainly because they have become easier. People who scroll through social media on their way home become targets for phone thieves on bikes. And while big supermarkets have beefed up some forms of security, including door alarms and tags, they’ve removed others: automated checkouts and fewer staff mean customers can easily walk out the door with goods additional.

So why don’t we believe the good news? Ipsos Mori finds that a majority of Britons – 61% – think crime has increased. A YouGov poll, meanwhile, shows that concerns about crime have increased over the past three years. And as of last month, 20% think it’s the biggest problem facing the country. Crime is down, but it’s not.

One explanation lies in the mechanism of media coverage, which draws public attention to shocking or unusual events. Instead of seeing this as a sign of rarity – ingenious heists make headlines, unlike common crimes – one might believe the opposite. Politicians might also prefer to escalate the threat. On Thursday, Donald Trump said the United States was “collapsing” under violence, even as data revealed violent crime and murder rates fell in 2024. In the United Kingdom, the Labor Party led a fierce campaign to “take back our streets”, with a focus on anti-social behavior. behavior, which has been declining for three decades.

And good intentions can get in the way. Those who want to invest more in the justice system may fear that falling crime will prompt governments to shift their priorities elsewhere. But the danger of downplaying success is that we fail to learn from it. If better security is the solution, how can we improve it? How can the successes of burglary deterrence be applied to department stores?

And can falling crime rates test our ideas about why this is happening in the first place? Conservatives once insisted that the decline of the nuclear family and the popularity of video games would trigger a crime wave. Not true. On the left, there was an idea dear to everyone, according to which violations of the law increase with inequalities. That’s not true either. Tougher sentences, meanwhile, appear to have little to do with falling crime – a trend visible in the Netherlands, which has reduced the length of time people are detained.

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Amid this noise, important trends can be overlooked. As crime rates decline, it becomes increasingly clear that a small number of people are likely to suffer disproportionately. Criminals tend to prey on the same vulnerable people – for domestic violence, sexual abuse, shoplifting, burglary. By focusing on general crime rates, policymakers and police may overlook these “repeat victims.” These days, most people are unlikely to be victims of the crimes they write about in the headlines – but for some, the situation is worse than ever.

Martha Gill is a columnist for the Observer