Shouts from the desert

The Greens candidate for the State seat of Ryde in the 2007 elections, Peter Bell, has played to "law and order", saying that:

We have become a more violent society and we need to reverse this. There would be very few in the community, including myself, who would say that they have not been touched by the rising tide of violence in society.

(Page 7 of the Northern District Times, 18 October 2006)

This seems to be unusual for the Greens - it is normally the Liberal and Labor parties who attempt to outdo eachother in establishing their law and order credentials. Unfortunately the above statement simply is not true. There has been to some extent an increase in reporting driven by factors such as better education (victims who were sexually assaulted in the past may not have been aware that the specific circumstances of the case constituted an crime), insurance contracts requiring reporting as a condition of obtaining a payout, and better investigative technology (fewer murders being treated as innocent deaths). The media also loves stories suggesting crime is running rampant because it sells papers, but the truth is that society as a whole is no more violent now than it has been in the past, and in many respects is considerably less violent.

Contrast Bell's position with that of the Director of Public Prosecutions, Nicholas Cowdery, QC who is reported as saying that:

[p]oliticians are increasingly basing law-and-order legislation on the opinions of "shock jocks" and the sensational reporting of crime, ignoring more rational approaches to the problem.

...

it [is] illogical for politicians to be swayed by comments from the likes of the Sydney radio announcer Alan Jones who commanded a small percentage of his timeslot's audience and spoke for listeners who were unlikely to change their votes.

Perhaps the key to Bell's statement is that he has pinned some of this violence on the Liberal Party by noting that some Liberal supporters had used threats of violence and engaged in trespass and outright theft against the Andrew Wilkie campaign in Bennelong in the 2004 federal election. While it is true that Liberal supporters and campaign volunteers engaged in lawless behaviour against other candidates and campaigns in that election in a manner highly inconsistent with the Liberal's purported love of law and order - and instances of this were also reported to me by some of my volunteers at the time - this is not a genuine sign of an increase in lawless conduct, but rather a demonstration that disregard for the law has not been entirely eradicated. The lawless Liberals were largely reported to be representatives of the Young Liberals, which is unsurprising - as I have noted before, the young are more prone to being drawn into extreme conduct.

It is trite to note that the older a person is the more anecdotal reports of crime they will receive - a person who is 50 years old has had twice as much time to hear reports of crime as one who is 25 years old. Furthermore, anecdotal reports of crime from earlier in life are likely to be lost in the memory - anecdotes fresh in the memory is not going to be compared to ones that have been lost in the back of the mind, nor will they be compared to anecdotes forgotten entirely. This may well give people the impression that violent crime is increasing, but the impression is a false one.