The current state of law and order in Australia: not as simple as it seems

It seems everyone wants to reduce crime, but when it comes to discussion of the best strategies to achieve this laudable objective, agreement becomes much harder to reach. Proposals range from nurturing the un-nurtured and understanding the misunderstood, to strengthening families and communities, to building bigger walls and getting stronger locks, to policing more aggressively, to imposing severe jail sentences and throwing away the key, to inflicting cruel and unusual punishments.

In very few areas of public policy does everybody consider themselves an expert. We leave policy on defence, health, transport, the economy, communications (and so on) to appropriate experts, yet on crime reduction policy everyone has their own expert opinion on what 'they oughta' do. In this article, for what they are worth, I offer my own views on the crime reduction issue.

Has crime changed over the years?

Every generation will tell their young that it was better in the old days - when you could leave your doors unlocked, sleep with your windows open, and leave your keys in your car. My colleague Peter Grabosky published a book entitled Sydney in Ferment on crime in colonial Sydney, which showed that the city was in fact a lot more dangerous in its early days than it is today. Paradoxically, although most of Australia is comparatively safe, the incidence of crime is much greater than it was 20 years ago. Criminal activity hurts and outrages people, and costs the community billions of dollars.

Not surprisingly then, the one question the media always ask is: "Is the crime rate up or down"? However, at base this is not a helpful question. (How long is a piece of string? Are tomatoes better than cauliflowers?) The definition of crime is itself a moving target.

What mattered 100 years ago and what we consider unacceptable today are in some respects very different. A century ago there was great concern about drunkenness, gambling, and 'Chinese opium dens'. Yet a century ago, crimes such as superannuation fraud, health insurance and Medicare fraud, theft of telecommunications services, electronic vandalism and varieties of computer hacking, credit card fraud, internet child pornography, electronic funds transfer crime and electronic money laundering were not even on the criminal horizon. (Nor for obvious reasons was there any motor vehicle theft!) However, nude or even topless bathing, or homosexual acts between consenting adults brought criminal sanctions, and public drunkenness comprised more than half of all offences brought before the magistrates' courts in the early years of the twentieth century, and this persisted until the 1950s.

On a per capita basis, considerably fewer people today appear before the courts than did 100 years ago. Of those who do, fewer go to jail. Today, women who appear topless on the beach, and men who have sex with other consenting men, don't find themselves before the court. In both cases they regularly did a generation ago. On the other hand, men who bashed their wives or children a generation ago did not find themselves before the court, but they do today.

Why then do we have the crime we do? Ideologically polarised positions offer competing explanations for increases in crime. One end of the spectrum of views blames permissiveness, bankrupt moral values, contempt for authority, inadequate penalties, while those at the other end of the spectrum blame poor social conditions, unemployment, lack of life and educational opportunity, poverty traps, deprivation, and so on.

There may be other ways to look at the issue beyond these opposing views, however. From a different perspective, there are probably many more opportunities than ever before for criminal behaviour. One could argue that the crime we have is the price we pay for living in a part of the world that offers high material benefits and a very mobile lifestyle. Put that against a context of tremendous social and technological change, and we have a complex set of ingredients that don't seem to fit the standard explanations.

How do we reduce it? In essence there are two main challenges in crime reduction from a systemic (as opposed to moral) point of view. One is to reduce the supply of motivated offenders, the other is to make crime more difficult to commit.

Do we have a law and order problem?

Participants in the law and order debate, or the part of it that focuses on crime rates, are at once cursed and blessed with an abundance of statistics. Such data are produced by police, then aggregated and worked by the Australian Bureau of Statistics into uniform national crime figures. But what do the statistics mean? Not all crimes are reported to the police, not all that are reported are recorded, not all that are recorded are acted upon, not all that are acted upon result in an apprehension, not all apprehensions lead to a court appearance, not all court appearances lead to a trial, not all trials lead to a conviction, and not all convictions lead to a penalty. The figures we choose to use will make a significant difference to the sense we get of the law and order situation.

It is a complicated picture. What measure shall we use to judge the 'law and order problem'? Certainly, crime has increased recently. But the details defy this simple characterisation. Australia is a less violent society today than it was 100 years ago, but more violent than 20 years ago, though today's rates of property crime appear higher than 100 years ago.

Even so, most places have no crime, and crime is highly concentrated in a relatively small number of places. Some shops have no robberies, while a few have lots. A few entertainment venues have a lot of problems; most have none. Even in high-burglary neighbourhoods most residences have no burglaries, while a few suffer from repeat burglaries. It will come as no surprise to note that crime is not an equal-opportunity predator. That is; who you are, where you live, who you know, and who you hang around with all affect your chances of victimisation.

On the International Crime Victimisation survey conducted by the Australian Institute of Criminology, Australia ranks poorly against similar wealthy countries. We topped burglary and assault, came second in motor vehicle theft, and third in personal theft. Australian homicide figures are relatively low, the rate being the same as it was 100 years ago. Sexual assault is a difficult type of crime to compare internationally, as Australians are more likely to report incidents than victims in most countries.

What lessons are there for crime control?

There have been documented instances of and inquiries into corruption in Australian police forces. Queensland was the first state to have a Royal Commission into the issue, followed by New South Wales, and Western Australia is currently conducting its own. However, occasional concerns about corruption in policing notwithstanding, Australia has been quite fortunate in this regard when compared with most other countries.

Clearly, having more police won't necessarily reduce crime, but more good police can have an impact. Of course, the criminal justice system is much more than just the police. A lot depends on what happens to people who break the law, and how the general public reacts.

Over the past century the criminal justice system has become much more complex. In 1900, people confronting the system faced one of four types of sanctions: absolute or conditional discharges, fines, imprisonment, or execution. At the beginning of the twentieth century, executions took place in our prisons (there were 55 executions in the first decade alone). The last execution in Australia was in 1967. Today there is a multiplicity of sentence types and diversion processes, which causes some people consternation; not everybody is happy with the range of options. One interesting option is the whole process of restorative justice and conferencing. (Kathy Daly of Griffith University, Queensland contributed an excellent chapter on this to the Cambridge Handbook of Australian Criminology.) Further innovations of this type are still being developed and trialled in various places.

So what advice may be drawn out of all this for policy makers?

First, it seems important to stick to the evidence of crime reduction. Better data are needed than those currently available. Data-driven policy puts Ministers on the front foot. There is a substantial body of evidence from criminologists around the world - rigorously developed, and often replicable - about what measures have and have not proved effective. Part of the task ahead for Australian law and order is the systematic gathering and evaluation of this kind of evidence. We would, however, be extremely naïve to believe that political decisions are made on the basis of scientific evidence alone. Having the good sense to see where science is tempered by political realities is part of the policy package in crime reduction. It is equally important to acknowledge local variations and idiosyncrasies in the crime situation. Innovations that have worked in Balmain, Birmingham or Barcelona will not necessarily work in Brisbane.

Second, I would remind policy makers of the wisdom in the old saying, "if a piece of string has one end, then it has another end". As individuals, we too often focus only on one end, and those with whom we interact focus on the other end. Sometimes the bit in the middle gets a bit frayed, and sometimes there are impossible knots. To tie this metaphor back to the question of crime prevention, it must be understood that the work of the criminal justice system alone will not achieve all the results we desire. Co-operative thinking is required so as to produce policies and programs in this area that harmonise with those in health, housing, education, employment, and so on. Those with a stake in the issue should all be involved: communities, professionals, voluntary agencies, social groups, victims, and others. In thinking about the string we have to think about inter-agency activities, partnerships, and the boundaries that challenge us all. An important insight to make is that criminal justice agencies are not the best or only agencies to prevent crime - crime prevention is an important by-product of many activities in education, health, and urban planning, for example, although it is not the core activity of these policy and program areas.

Third, we need conceptual clarity on the type of crime we wish to see reduced. There are activities that offend people, and there are activities that hurt people, and then there are crimes that actually change the way people live. A bundle of different reduction strategies is available for each of these, and there are also some common crime-prevention strategies. It is the activities that offend that typically cause a lot of difficulties in respect of when and how much to intervene. A group of boys on a street corner making suggestive comments to the girls walking by; a group of kids smoking a joint behind a tree; the public use of disrespectful and obscene language; family altercations, and that sort of thing. The key here is having sense of when this sort of behaviour might get out of hand, and it is part of a broader challenge faced by the state to develop a public commitment to civility - and to try to make this spill over into private behaviour - while not intruding unduly into private behaviour. Crime prevention, when too zealously pursued, nudges a society towards the sort of ominous thought policing that Orwell warned us about.

However, crime prevention is not a challenge for governments to face alone. We all can contribute to building the partnerships to meet the emerging challenges. The safest communities are not those with the most police and prisons but those with the strongest community structures, including socialising institutions, families, and economic opportunities. Those opportunities exist and can be moulded to socially productive ends. Crime prevention is something that requires good conceptual thinking and a vision way beyond police, courts and prisons - a multi-faceted policy and practice approach, in which all of us have a role to play as citizens, as parents, as consumers, and as thinkers.