The bad old days of burnt out cars

Nigel Williams, 11 April 2013

There’s always a grey area concerning anti-social behaviour and when it crosses the line into notifiable offences. The Crime Survey of England and Wales asks about people’s experience and perception of anti-social behaviour to try to get an understanding of its extent and any trends. The latest analysis was released this morning (11th April) by the Office for National Statistics and relates to the year 2011/12.
The headline statistic, that of the estimated proportion of the population perceiving a high level of anti-social behaviour is at the low end of the range it has occupied for the last ten years. More revealing are the changes in particular items that contribute to the overall level.

Fewer people are bothered by teenagers hanging around. That chimes with improved levels in school attendance that I have described elsewhere. In 2011/12 one person in four was bothered by it, against one in three in 2002/03. However, being drunk or rowdy is showing no improvement. The proportion troubled by it has fluctuated around 24 per cent for a decade and has held steady at that level for three years. Though less common problems, noisy neighbours and loud parties have got worse. Littering and drug dealing or use have stayed fairly steady but vandalism and abandoned cars have improved markedly. 25 per cent of people were concerned by abandoned or burnt out cars in 2002/03, compared to only 4 per cent in this most recent year.
The favoured explanation for a reduction in vehicle-related crime is that cars have become harder to break in and steal. This may well reduce the number of cars abandoned but drivers are quite able to be anti-social in their own cars. Speeding traffic caused problems to 42 per cent of people, ten times the number affected by seeing them abandoned.
The survey also asked about some personal characteristics of the respondents. Although people typically perceived less anti-social behaviour than they experienced, for groups hanging around and drink-related behaviour the situation was reversed: perception was worse than actual experience. Partly this reflects a different set of questions. Experience of anti-social behaviour could include public indecency, dangerous dogs and anything vehicle-related or, a large category, inconsiderate behaviour. This last category extended from too many fireworks to throwing stones and bottles. At opposite ends of the newspaper spectrum, Guardian readers experienced the most alcohol-related bad behaviour, at 17 per cent, but perception of the problem only magnified it half as much again to 26 per cent; for readers of the Daily Express, direct experience was only 7 per cent but 19 per cent, two and a half times as many, perceived drunken rowdiness as a problem.
Because these questions about experience and witnessing are new to the survey, it may take a few years for the results to settle down. While that happens, there may remain further apparent inconsistencies such as the 3 per cent experiencing vehicle-related anti-social behaviour and the 42 per cent complaining about speeding traffic.
Happily, the majority of England and Wales considered their own area to have below average crime and anti-social behaviour. Less happily, this was because they considered their own areas to have got only slightly worse but England and Wales as a whole to have deteriorated a lot. So much depends upon point of view, but even as other misdemeanours reduce, reports of drunken rowdiness continue to upset a great many survey respondents.