Common Crime Myths That We Need To Challenge

There’s always heated debate about crime in the media and a lot of political argument about how we should respond to it. Leading crime experts bust crime myths:

1. Playing Grand Theft Auto makes you a criminal

Making Sense of Crime / Via senseaboutscience.org

Violent video games are routinely blamed for causing crime in young people. But there is no evidence playing video games causes crime. In fact, rates of crime have actually fallen as the number of violent video games has gone up.

2. More police on the streets = less crime

Dave Conner (CC BY http://2.0) / Via Flickr: conner395

Promising “more bobbies on the beat” is an easy way for politicians to appear as though they are acting tough on crime. Evidence shows that simply adding more police doesn’t reduce crime, in fact it can increase people’s fear of it. Working with hospitals, police can target patrols to reduce violence in hotspots. Some crimes, like online fraud, can’t be tackled by officers on the street.

3. Lead in petrol turns people into criminals

Making Sense of Crime / Via senseaboutscience.org

When Mother Jones reported on research linking lead in petrol to crime many people interpreted the correlation as causation. But not all crimes are the same: crime ranges from murder to illegally downloading music. The amount of lead in petrol does correlate with violent crime, but not as well as was originally claimed. However, the link to other types of crime, such as property theft, is weak at best.

4. The fall in local crimes is due to local policing measures

Prateek Buch

Are these claims based on anecdote and not evidence? Police across different wealthy countries have done many different things over the last 25 years and crime rates have been going down in all of them. So showing that one particular intervention is responsible for crime dropping in a specific area is more complex than just showing crime has gone down from one year to the next.

5. There is a law abiding majority

angus mcdiarmid (CC BY-NC http://2.0) / Via Flickr: angusmcdiarmid

It may be comforting to think of us and them, but in reality criminals come from all sections of society, from bankers to benefit cheats, and under the ‘right’ circumstances anyone can become a criminal. One study even found that a third of people born in the 1950s had a criminal conviction. We cannot be separated into ‘angels’ and ‘devils.’

6. Taking kids to prison will scare them away from crime

[AndreasS] (CC BY http://2.0) / Via Flickr: norue

The idea it’s possible to turn kids away from a life of crime by showing kids what life in prison is like is very appealing. Unfortunately, the evidence is that these programmes are more likely to make criminality look attractive. Money spent on these projects may inadvertently be creating the criminals they aim to prevent.

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