[Htb48JBf]

http://www.world-productions.com/out..._justice_6.htm

Last year, 100 times more children were murdered by strangers on TV than in real life.

In the same year, there weren't any real serial murders. But God knows how many were portrayed on BBC and ITV.

There were 886 real homicides, compared to an estimated 1800 pretend ones on terrestial TV.

If you exclude the 800 "domestic" homicides, i.e. killings committed by a member of your extended family or a close friend, there are 20 imaginary murders to every real one.

30% of tabloid news coverage is devoted to crime. 60% of that coverage is devoted to non-domestic murder which represent less than 0.1% of reported incidents.

A study in Birmingham found that 53% of crime coverage concerned the 6% of known crimes involving offences against a person.

In an NOP poll, the British public estimated that 47% of reported crimes involved violence. The real figure is 6%.

Another poll for the BBC found that on average the public believed that one in four people would fall victim to violent crime in the next 12 months. The true figure is one in a hundred.

If you are a child under the age of 10, you are 57 times more likely to be killed by a member of your own family than to be murdered by a stranger.

More than half of all violent crimes take place in the home with wives, girlfriends and children being the most likely victims.

Outside the family, 80% of violent crimes are committed by men between the ages of 16-24, but they also account for the vast bulk of the victims.

In one sense, the figures for violent crime aren't a reflection of a violent society, they're a record of domestic and family breakdown in the UK.

So our perception of the likelihood and nature of violent crime is wildly at odds with reality.

In 2001/2, there were 812,954 recorded crimes of violence:
650,154 crimes against the person
121,375 robbery with violence (muggings etc.)
41,425 sexual offences

Of the 650,154 crimes against the person, 32,350 are counted as serious offences.

The other 617,804 less serious offences are largely made up of common assault, other wounding (i.e. not life threatening), possession of weapons, harassment and assault on a constable.

You could call them "Saturday night" crimes: a punch-up outside a pub or a club or domestic violence usually fuelled by drink or drugs.

You could also call them crimes of the poor. They're not trivial, but by and large they're not pre-meditated either. So they're a long way from the public perception of violent crimes where organised gangs of thugs patrol the streets targetting perfect strangers.



They also probably involve a deal of double-counting. Let's say you go to the pub, come home drunk and start knocking your wife about. A neighbour tries to complain, so you pop him one and when the police arrive there's a struggle.

When it comes to court, you're charged with wounding, actual bodily harm, common assault and assaulting a police officer. So it's one incident, but four offences for the record.

If your neighbour wore glasses, they might throw in a few property offences like criminal damage as well.

We also don't suffer violence equally. 45% of all violent crimes are reported 14% of victims. In other words, it's not spread evenly throughout out society. The same people tend to be assaulted again and again.

Turning to the more serious offences, the first thing to note is they represent less than 0.6% of all recorded crimes and divide up as follows:

Homicide (inc. manslaughter and infanticide): 886
Attempted murder 858
Conspiracy to murder 13,648
death by driving 407
Serious Wounding 16,537

In other words, if there were such a thing as an average bobby, he'd only come across a serious wounding once every seven and a half years.

Equally, although "conspiracy to murder" is a serious charge, it may not have involved much or any actual violence.

Doing the Police in Voices:

I've yet to meet a policeman who doesn't love The Bill. But it's not the portrayal of coppers they prize, it's the picture of crime.

The Bill is full of professional criminals planning bank jobs, Mr Bigs supplying cocaine behind the barrels of Uzis and Kosovan gangsters muscling in on the Yardies patch. There are lots of murders and serious woundings and there are few juveniles or drug addicts.

In other words, it's a complete fantasy and the police know it.

But the police love violent crime. Without violent crime, the police are in big trouble. Without violent crime, the public might want to know what's happening to their £7.8 billion pa. Without violent crime, we might want to give the job to someone else.

Violent crime is what makes us want to put more bobbies on the beat or more criminals inside. Violent crime makes us happy to build more prisons and abolish the jury system.

When it comes to violence, we don't care about cost, we just want the job done.

And violent crime appears to be the one job the police are good at. The clear-up rates for property crime may look pretty sick, but when it comes to crimes of violence, the clear-up rate is an impressive 68%, rising to 92% for serious offences.

So we forgive the police their failings in other areas. When it counts, they do the job and they do it well.