With the annual Police Performance Assessment reports for all forces in England and Wales due out today (27 October), new ESRC-funded research suggests that the focus on measuring crime detection rates has led to resources being diverted from tackling more visible crimes such as anti-social behaviour. According to the leader of the research team, this could explain why the fear of crime remains high, even though crime levels have actually fallen.
The new study, entitled 'Managing Police Performance: Accountabilities, Performance Measurement and Control', was led by Dr Paul Collier from Aston University's Business School in Birmingham, and was one of the Public Service research projects funded by the ESRC through its Advanced Institute of Management Research (AIM) programme.
Anti-social behaviour is usually dealt with at a local level by beat officers. However, it is difficult to measure, and the causes notoriously difficult to address. As a result of this, resources tend to get diverted away from this area when senior officers are under pressure to be seen to be tackling crime, and to provide detection figures. Thus, anti-social behaviour remains very visible, and, according to Dr Collier's research, this could explain why people's fears of crime are still high, even though crime rates overall are actually falling.
...anti-social behaviour remains very visible, and... this could explain why people's fears of crime are still high, even though crime rates overall are actually falling.
Nevertheless, in another recent ESRC-funded research project, Dr Stephen Farrall, from the Department of Criminology at the University of Keele found that the process of measuring the fear of crime was itself questionable, and tended to overestimate how afraid people actually were. According to Dr Farrall's research, which was completed in 2003, the inaccuracy was due to the fact that traditionally studies that estimate the fear of crime have tended either to ask leading questions, or questions that are not sufficiently detailed.
While the proportion of people who admitted to being afraid of becoming the victims of crime in Dr Farrall's research was roughly the same as those in other surveys, on further investigation it was found that only fifty per cent said they felt either 'very fearful' or 'quite fearful'. This was only half the number that similar surveys usually record as experiencing high levels of fear. Based on these findings, Dr Farrall has argued that it is crucial to ensure that studies of this kind ask questions that are clear and properly detailed, both in order to gain accurate results, and to be able to track any changes over time in the population's fear of crime.