Are our crime rates really that bad?

I went to an AFL game at the Gold Coast’s Metricon Stadium on Saturday night and what I saw got me a little concerned.  There was police in bulletproof vests EVERYWHERE!  On the field, on the train station, in the crowds and even standing in the stands.  What are they protecting us from?  

Apparently, according to the quantity of police, the fear of crime in our home country is real, and rather terrifying. Looking through news reports, there has been four murders of international students in Brisbane alone in the last five months!  MURDERS!

That is four young, carefree people, of the kinds we are trying to attract to our country so we can profit from their desire to be educated in our top tier universities have been killed in just one of our capital cities over a five month period.

I don’t know about you but I have noticed my own desire to stop reading the papers’ coverage of murders, death and crime.  I fear I am even becoming a little immune.  The stories of young men king hitting each other after drinking binges, of unnecessary violence seems to be getting worse and more common.  And the tales of shootings, crime problems, robberies, and armed robbery seem to be constant. But when I looked into it, there was an amazing disparity of information showing the opposite to what we see in the media.

In fact, truth be told, crime rates appear on ABS data, to have fallen.

When I compared the number of assaults and robberies in 2012/13, with 2007/08 the number has fallen, as has the number of break-ins and car thefts. The ABS Crime Victimisation Survey, from late 2013, showed the number of assault victims aged 15 or older fell by 0.4 percentage points to 2.7 per cent.  (Hardly a huge number but a decline nonetheless).

In comparing the same timeframe, the survey also found face-to-face threatened assaults dropped 1.1 percentage points, robberies fell 0.2 points and break-ins dropped by 0.6 points. The rate of sexual assault stayed steady, at between 0.2 per cent and 0.3 per cent. Australians were most likely to be threatened with violence out of all crime categories, with an estimated 576,800 people experiencing a threat of some kind in 2012/13. But only half of all assault and robbery victims ended up reporting the crime to police, the survey found.

So I ask you to reflect on the crime statistics of today, and consider whether it has at any other time in your life felt more worrysome? Is the overt presence of police in our day to day activity a good thing or a sign that crime is massively out of control? And how do you feel about the rates of murder and violence in the community?