You might have noticed that the public’s fear of crime, and how to reduce it, is in the news at the moment.
We went along to the Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership day at Medina a couple of weekends ago and sat down with Norman Mellors, Police Commander for the Isle of Wight, to have a chat about how crime on the Island is falling – numbers dropped from 14,000 to 10,000 in the last three years.
Being an Island and the advantages that brings – surrounded by water, so people can’t just fade across the ‘border’ of the county; people keeping an eye out in the local areas; and the community is supportive of initiatives – were listed by Commander Mellor as contributing factors to the success.
Interesting figures
There is, on average, only one burglary every two days on the Island.
Speaking to the Commander, he told us these numbers could be cut in half by people simply actually locking their houses up.
Fear of crime – static or getting worse
While Police stats are tell us that the number of crimes is reducing, this hasn’t affected the fear of crime.
“It’s a massive concern of the police,” said Commander Mellor commenting that they’ve done a a lot of work to try reduce crime rates, but people perceive that they need to be worried.
He told us a tale of an ex-paratrooper, decorated in the war, who had said that he was fearful of leaving his house on the Isle of Wight after dark.
Fear far outweighs actual crime
Concerned at this, Commander Mellors went away and did some research on local crime figures. He found that on average someone was robbed in his street, on average, once every 2,600 years.
Clearly the fear of crime was completely disproportionate to the actual danger of crime.
Balance this with some considerably more disturbing numbers, like the number of fatal road crashes in the UK.
On average 350 people will be killed or seriously injured on the roads in a week. “That’s a jumbo jet load in a week.” (quick sum – that’s over 18,000 people a year).
On the Island, people are more like to be assaulted by a partner in their home than if they go out for a drink on a Friday or Saturday night.
Why are the police not around?
Many people have questioned why we don’t get to see the police in our towns and villages.
“We concentrate (police) resources where the problems are the greatest.”
The Commander then went on to use an interesting analogy – “If you got to a supermarket on a Friday night, you have lots of people working at the tills, but if you go on Tuesday morning at 10am there will be less.”
All of which appears to make sense.
He then finished, by saying that his feel for it was that there are more community safety officers in problem areas than there were than in 1982 when he joined.
As ever, a lot more detail in the podcast … [audio:http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4663767/Audio/commander-norman-mellor-crime-on-the-island-and-the-fear-of-crime.mp3]
