James Button
"London can seem like a heavy place at times. The yellow police notices go up regularly beside our park: a man bashed here, a woman assaulted. Such stories get massive coverage in the media, signs of the times. Except that they aren't. The good news, revealed last week, is that the murder rate in England and Wales has fallen for the third year in a row, the first sustained fall since the 1960s. Violent crime is slightly up, partly because London has seen a recent surge of muggings of young people carrying mobile phones, iPods and laptops. Yet all crime has fallen 44 per cent since its peak in 1995. A Briton is less likely to be a victim of crime than at any time since 1981. But here's the paradox: many Brits don't believe it. The proportion of people who see crime as society's most important issue has nearly doubled, to 40 per cent, since 1997. A significant minority actually think crime is rising. Why?"
