FEATURE INEQUALITY AND THE CRIME DROP
Scottish police fell by an incredible 60% between 1991 and 2016/17. A growing body of literature has focused on changing patterns of crime across different countries; however, crime impacts on people and places so it is imperative to understand how any changes impact at both those levels. Using a number of quantitative datasets and methodological approaches, the AQMeN research centre set out to examine whether there was a dark side to the crime drop in terms of an increase in inequality between those who experience crime and those who don’t.
How has experience of victimisation in Scotland changed? Falling crime is always portrayed as good
news for society, but surely this is only the case if any reduction is experienced equally across the population. Analysing Scottish victim survey data from 1993 to 2014/15, the AQMeN team found that people could be grouped according to the frequency and type of crime they were likely to experience. Overall, the crime drop reflected a large reduction in people experiencing sporadic or one-off incidents of crime, mainly a property crime such as car theft or burglary. There was also some reduction in the likelihood of people experiencing low-level repeat victimisation of various types. But there was no significant change in people experiencing frequent victimisation, which included a high risk of violence. In other words, the crime drop in Scotland mostly benefited those people who were at least risk of victimisation while, for those at higher risk, the threat of crime remained stubbornly persistent. Looking at the characteristics of these frequent victims, the evidence suggests that they were more likely to be from socially disadvantaged and vulnerable households. A similar story emerged when looking at
Scottish communities. Greater Glasgow is an area of Scotland that has historically been plagued by high crime rates. Modelling police-recorded crime data over a 14-year period, AQMeN researchers found that crime had fallen by around 40% on average. But some communities had benefited more than others. While crime had fallen within very high crime communities, the scale of the drop was far less than for many communities that already experienced low levels of crime. As with victims of crime, therefore, the communities that
32 SOCIETY NOW AUTUMN 2018
Inequality and the crime drop L
IKE MANY OTHER countries worldwide, Scotland saw a significant reduction in crime from the early 1990s onwards. Indeed, the number of crimes recorded by
Analysis of various datasets by the ESRC-funded Applied Quantitative Methods Network (AQMeN) research centre indicates that the significant fall in crime in Scotland has benefited some communities more than others, increasing inequality between areas
were most blighted by crime had benefited less from falling crime than other neighbourhoods that were already safer for residents. These findings are important because there has been very little research internationally on the impact of the crime drop at a local level. So, the evidence from the AQMeN research highlights a dark side to the crime drop – an increase in inequality between those people and places that experience crime and those that don’t. Has Scotland fared better than other parts of the UK? Recorded crime in England, Wales and
Northern Ireland also declined during the last three decades, albeit to a lesser extent than in Scotland (although it is difficult to make direct comparisons due to differences in crime recording rules and practices). However, it is the recent trends in violence and knife-related crime that has drawn the attention of policymakers and criminal justice practitioners to two very specific locations: Glasgow and London. The very high number of knife-related murders in London since the start of 2018 has been contrasted with the exceptionally low homicide rate in Glasgow, which was once famously dubbed ‘the murder capital of Western Europe’. There has been significant speculation about Scottish exceptionalism in the way that Glasgow has dealt with its violent gang problem, predominantly through the work of the Violence Reduction Unit; however, there has been very little research on the topic.
“ Communities that were most
blighted by crime had benefited less from falling crime
Using police-recorded crime data for Local
Authorities in the previously-named Strathclyde Police Force area (which includes Greater Glasgow) and the Metropolitan Police Force area (which includes City of London) between 2004/5 and 2015/16, the AQMeN team found stark differences in violence trends. In the Strathclyde police force area the local authorities showed a consistent downward trend in violence across the whole time period (with some increase at the beginning of the period for two local authorities). Whereas, for all of the local authorities in the Metropolitan Police Force area violence fell at the start of the period, and then started to increase again (mainly around 2012/13).
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