When ministers, spin doctors and police officers talk about crime, one is often struck by their tone of exasperation. They have what they believe to be a genuinely good news story — that crime is coming down — but the public simply refuses to believe it. ”What’s wrong with these people,” you imagine them asking each other. ”Don’t they get it? Can’t they see that things are getting better?”
On one level, it is a fair reaction. Crime rates really are falling: murders and car thefts — the two best-reported and recorded crimes — have both been coming down for some years; hijackings are down, a fact confirmed by the vehicle tracking companies and insurers; so, too, are burglaries, again endorsed by insurers.
Despite this, increasing numbers of respondents tell surveys that they fear crime and believe it is rising.
So we sit with a paradox: crime comes down, but fear of crime rises. And government officials work out their frustrations by passing pictures of journalists and news editors through the office shredder.
For all the official frustration, however, the coincidence of falling crime and rising fear can be explained and unfortunately, nor is it something that can be readily addressed through better messaging.
The most obvious reason is a matter of simple arithmetic. It seems fairly obvious that even if crime in one year is lower than it was the year before, a large number of people who had previously had no direct, personal experience of criminality will have been added to the existing population of victims.
Last year, 19 000 families lost someone to a murder. Even though this is lower than the 20 000 of the year before, it still represents a significant increase in the number of families that have experienced such a tragedy.
People do not reset their fear levels at the start of the government’s financial year, as one might turn back an odometer after filling the tank. Because of the ever-growing number of people who have experienced crime at some point, more and more people will tell researchers they are fearful.
The problem for the government’s message is that, over time, fewer and fewer people have never been victimised. Some victims may get over their fear quickly. It is likely, however, that many won’t.
But fear of crime is not driven solely by personal experience.
In a blow to those who prefer to believe the best of humanity, surveys all over the world have found that the fear of crime is higher in diverse societies than it is in uniform ones.
One reason, no doubt, is that a lot of people are racists. Another, however, is more subtle and intractable.
Modern societies are large and anonymous; we all live among strangers. By itself, that can be enough to make people fearful. Add to this differences of culture, language, income and lifestyle, and the effect can be over-powering, leaving people burning with doubt and distrust: Who are these people? What do they want? Why do they crowd in on me? Why is this one looking at me in that way? Why is that one avoiding my eyes? What are they talking about?
Because these questions can’t be answered satisfactorily, many respond with fear and suspicion.
Readers may think I’m trying to explain the fears of white South Africans. Indeed I am. But the same points apply as forcefully to anyone who has gone though the seismic changes under way in our society.
Take, for instance, the millions who have migrated to South Africa’s cities over the past decade to try their luck in the modern economy.
They have left families and communities that, though poor, were thickly woven with webs of personal connection. Now they live among strangers. They have neighbours whose behaviour can seem obscure and dangerous. Their daughters go out with men they meet at work, in a taxi or in the street. Their sons mix with boys who come from families they’ve never met.
Nor will all the neighbours of these new urbanites be entirely thrilled by their arrival.
Looked at from the actuary’s cold-eyed perspective, there may be no reason for people to fear strangers more than people they know. This is something sadly reflected by South Africa’s high levels of interpersonal and domestic violence, phenomena which may, in any event, stem from the lack of social bonds.
Still, most people think they can predict how their friends and family will act. Strangers, on the other hand — who knows what they’re capable of?
Some of the changes our society is going through are almost impossibly disruptive. Living through them takes courage and faith. But change, as the poet sang, is pain. Often, it is also fear.
Antony Altbeker is a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies. His first book, The Dirty Work of Democracy: A year on the streets with the SAPS, will be out next month