Criminal violence falls (again!)

Nigel Williams, 24 April 2014

The violence research group of Cardiff University has presented us with a valuable set of data. They have anonymous records from Accident and Emergency Departments and Minor Injury Units relating to violent incidents going back to 2000. There was a big fall in 2012, which has been repeated in 2013. By this measure, violent incidents are happening at half the rate they were in 2000. This is excellent news and it deserves a bit a thought about where to give the credit.

Possible Causes

Top of the list are all the non-offenders, the people that have chosen not to pick a fight, take revenge or escalate a situation. Incidents that half a generation ago were sending people to hospital are being handled with less or no violence. Previous cohorts of 18 to 30-year-olds would do well to listen to the current cohort to learn what they are doing differently.
All sorts of things have changed since 2000. Some of them may be reducing criminal violence. Others are just contemporaneous.

• Reduced unauthorised absence from school
• Less lead but more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
• Increasing rainfall, especially in summer
• Higher youth unemployment and student debt
• More relaxed licensing laws
• Greater use of plastic glasses
• Street Pastors
• Smartphones
• Greater European immigration
• Major sporting successes (think Mo Farah, Ellie Simmonds, Jonny Wilkinson, Andy Murray, Andrew Flintoff)
• Different Saturday-night television schedules
• Changing patterns of drug abuse
• CCTV’s proliferation
• Higher alcohol prices
• More people in prison

Alcohol

It’s possible to construct causal pathways by which all of these could be reducing the propensity to violence. A 2006 paper from the same violence research group found a link to the price of beer. Although there are undoubted connections between excessive alcohol and violence, there is still a lot more to investigate. That paper’s R squared statistic of 0.19 within groups suggested that the price of beer could explain about a fifth of variations in levels of violence. That leaves plenty of scope for other effects as well as the possibility that the beer price is just moving in parallel with some other cause. Among people willing to contemplate violent assault, there is every chance that higher prices could lead to more shoplifting rather than reduced consumption. Price alone is unlike to control all the violence.

Data Sharing and Police Deployment

A similar story is possible for other changes, some with more tenuous links than others. For the authors of the report, sharing anonymous hospital information with the police was an important contribution, noting that of ten Government Office Regions, ‘decreases in violence occurred in regions where ED information sharing was most developed‘. If they are right, then there is more to look forward to. Criminal violence has halved but not been eradicated over that period but in 2012 two thirds of Community Safety Partnerships were below the College of Emergency Medicine’s standard for data-sharing. That involves Emergency Departments (EDs) passing on details such as the time and place of an injury and any weapons involved, while maintaining confidentiality for the patient.
That people are exercising more self-restraint is very welcome but a strategically-deployed police officer at a potential trouble spot does no harm either.