Crime... boy, I don't know
The public perception is that our cities are in the midst of an unstoppable crime wave. This is reinforced by the nightly commercial television news, all of which seem to start with one or two crime stories (and one or more car crashes, which always have visual impact). In Sydney it's been all about ATMs blowing up, 'Middle Eastern gangs' and 'outlaw bikie gangs'; in Melbourne it seems to be about street crime and street gangs, particularly around the entertainment quarter; and the leftover angst from the gang warfare that gave rise to Underbelly.
The other night in Sydney, we saw another cash machine blown up, scattering debris across a residential street; a car, set alight, crashing into a Lebanese restaurant; and a man shot dead at a 21st birthday party. A bumper night for the crime-wave buffs.
But, is either city really in the grip of a violent crime wave that the media are promoting? And does the public still buy this narrative? The answers are simple: the evidence suggests that there is no increase in violent crime (in fact quite the opposite) and the public seems more and more unmoved by the crime wave stories and has begun to tune out.
NSW Police say that crime levels were actually falling in NSW, in some cases "significantly". And this is not just 'spin'. Robberies with a gun are down 31 per cent in the past year, while other armed robberies fell 19 per cent. robbery without a weapon is down 6 per cent.
NSW's top crime statistician, Dr Don Weatherburn, agrees with the cops: "The broad picture for violent acquisitive crime is way down in the state. The firearm robbery rate is lower than it's been since 1990. The robbery rate is down below what it was in 1995."
He acknowledges that despite a general reduction in crime, there have been surges in particular criminal activities: "There's no doubt at the moment that there's a problem with ATM robberies. There's a problem likewise with the bikies; they are real problems."
Uni of Sydney's Mark Findlay believes law and order is no longer a hot topic with the electorate. Because of the GFC people are more concerned with financial security than crimes that seem to have no immediate impact on their lives. "Our concerns have drifted to whether we're going to have a job and be able to pay our mortgage ... not whether some bikie is going to bash another bikie,"
Says Professor Findlay: "I think the public has very, very slowly realised that a number of the madder assertions about crime and justice just don't hold."
These days then, serious violent crime is ameliorating and the media still sensationalise it but the public may be unconcerned about the alleged increase in crime (that doesn't really exist). All of this is different from 1994 when I last looked at the disjunction between crime statistics and public perception. In those days, a significant number of Australians thought that crime was getting worse (and in many cases it was) but that the media understated its seriousness.
While the media were often criticised for perceived sensationalism, nearly a third - 32 per cent - thought the media were being fair in their coverage and more thought the media understated the situation, with 45 per cent saying that crime was more serious than reports indicate.
In 1994, only 18 per cent of interviewees thought that crime is not on the increase but that the media's interest in it was. Three per cent thought that crime was not a serious problem and that the media are fair in their coverage.
I wonder if that survey were repeated today, what the various percentages would be.
Stranger things in the strange land
Things are looking increasingly odd in the USA.
- Senator Arlen Specter, the once and future Democrat, has switched sides again. He was elected to the Senate, and re-elected four times, as a Republican, but says that party has moved too far to the right. His defection means that there are now 57 Democrats and 2 fellow-travellers (including Joe Lieberman, who endorsed John McCain) in the Senate. If the Governor of Minnesota ever signs off on the election of Al Franken, that will be 60 - a filibuster-proof majority. (In the US Senate a Cloture motion needs 60 votes to over-ride a decision by a minority of Senators to hold the floor indefinitely - for corroborative details, see Mr Smith Goes to Washington and The West Wing episode, "The Stackhouse Filibuster".
- Al Franken, the comedian, actor and author (I reviewed his book, Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right in my ANZAPA magazine), has beaten Norm Coleman in the election of 2008. The vote count says so; the bipartisan the Minnesota State Canvassing Board's recount says so; and a lower court three-judge panel says so. But Coleman has appealed to the Minnesota Supreme Court and Governor Pawlenty, a Republican, won't sign off the returns. The Supreme Court is dragging its feet. As a result, seven months after the election, Minnesota still has but one Senator and Coleman, who won in 2002 after the tragic death of Paul Wellstone in a plane crash a few weeks before the election, has led the way in demonstrating an absolute refusal to acknowledge the election outcome. Ironically, in the days after the election, before the vote was completely counted, when he led by a few hundred votes, Coleman urged Franken not to challenge the result and thus seek to thwart the will of the voters.
- President Obama remains obstinately popular, despite the best efforts of Fox News and other wingnut media outlets (particularly the shock jocks). Nationally, his favorables outweigh his unfavorables by an almost unprecendented 45 points (70-25). However, the coming balkanisation of the US is reflected in the sectional figures: Obama is +60 in west and midwest; and a staggering +83 in northeast. However, in the south, he is -8; that is, in one section of the country, his unfavorable ratings are 8 per cent higher than his favorables. Of course, according to empty vessels like Rush Limbaugh, it just means that the rest of the country is out of step with the south.
- And, given the attention paid to "Boss" Limbaugh by the Republican Party, and the activities of some of the state governors affiliated with the party, it is unsurprising that it has become out-of-touch and seen as extremist, leading to a widening "partisan gap". Gallup has some fascinating data, based on more than 120,000 interviews over the past four months, on US partisan identification by age:
You'll see that there is no age group where there are more USAmericans who identify with the Republicans than with the Democrats. The largest partisan ID advantage is among Gen Y'ers (18-26), followed by among Baby Boomers (50-66). Republicans do relatively well (although are still at a net disadvantage) among Generation X'ers and the pre-war crowd.
- The inability of the rest of the country to agree with the south has led to talk of secession returning to the agenda. After Texas Governor Perry raised the issue, a survey revealed that the Republicans in Texas are evenly divided over whether the Lone Star state should secede from the United States and a new poll from Research 2000 shows that 43 percent of Republicans in Georgia say their state would be better off as an independent nation than as a part of the United States (52 percent preferred staying in the union, no doubt having read something in history books about secession's results in the nineteenth century). Mind you, even 8 per cent of Georgia Democrats prefer to be independent of the US - they're a strange lot down there. Apparently, the most conservative of Republicans only love their country when they're in power. And this has further exacerbated the partisan gap referred to above.
- On Comedy Central (that's the name of a channel in the US pay-tv spectrum), there is a satirical show called The Colbert Report. Comedian Stephen Colbert (pronouncing it in the French style, "cole-bear") graduated from The Late Show, an epicentre of progressive comedy, but his character purports to be a straight-down-the-line wingnut, a parody of the sort of raving loony 'journalist' replete on Fox News. But conservatives don't understand that it is satire. Even allowing for the name of the channel on which he appears. In fact, they don't really understand parody in particular and comedy in general. This is the conclusion from actual academics at Ohio State University who actually did a study to prove it. They think that the failure to understand humor probably has something to do with "belief in simple absolutes" or "sex shame" or even "childhood brain damage". This new study gells with research from 30 years ago, which showed that dogmatic people tend to be both dumb and unable to comprehend satire (that study, "Dogmatism, Intelligence, and the Understanding/Appreciation of Editorial Satire" was the product of Charles R Gruner, in 1979 and was presented at the Annual International Conference on Humor in LA). The 2009 Ohio academics say of the Colbert study:
This study investigated biased message processing of political satire in The Colbert Report and the influence of political ideology on perceptions of Stephen Colbert. ... [W]e found that individual-level political ideology significantly predicted perceptions of Colbert's political ideology ... [C]onservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements.First written: June 2009
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