There’s a mystery afoot, and it’s one that it will take more than a Sherlock Holmes to solve. The official statistics say that crime is down – but the public feel that crime is an increasingly serious problem.

Incumbent politicians jump on the stats, for obvious reasons. Last week Sadiq Khan proudly tweeted a graphic showing “key crimes [are] down in London”, though tellingly replies were turned off except for people he follows, seemingly anticipating a less than warm response from the general public. 

Meanwhile, opposition politicians jump on the public mood. Most famously, Robert Jenrick, the shadow Justice Secretary, challenged fare-dodgers on camera. Meanwhile Nigel Farage recently declared that “we all know that crime is going up not down”, and robustly challenged the Crime Survey for England and Wales, which had suggested the number of crimes has dropped from 19.8m to 4.6m a year since the mid-1990s. 

Both sides denounce one another. The incumbents are accused of complacency and of patronising the public, while their opponents are in turn accused of Trumpifying the public debate, whipping up fear in defiance of the facts.

Why the conflicting narratives? Partly because the picture is genuinely complex depending on the lens you view it through.

Crime – and particularly violent crime – has fallen dramatically across the Western........

© iNews