Just before midnight on January 12, 2006, Tom ap Rhys Pryce, a 31-year-old lawyer, left a London party and telephoned his fiancée to say that he was on his way home. He emerged from the tube station at Kensal Green about 20 minutes later and began walking toward their apartment. That was when two teenage gang members attacked him. Donnel Carty kicked Pryce in the back, sending him flying to the ground, and Delano Brown kicked him in the face. When Pryce tried to defend himself, the attackers stabbed him in the legs, hands, face, and heart. Then they took his cell phone and public-transportation pass, the only valuables in his possession, and ran off, leaving him dying on the ground. The paramedics who strove unsuccessfully to revive him found his wedding vows strewn on the pavement.
The British press, particularly the tabloid press, carries stories like this nearly every day—lurid accounts of drunken vandals, teenage murderers, child abuse, knifings, and gang violence. “After bingeing on lager, vodka and cocaine, twisted Jobson launched a frenzied attack, stabbing Samantha TEN times with an eight-inch blade,” the Sun reported this past November 26. drunken yob who left teenager with part of his skull missing after party attack gets just one year’s detention, cried the Daily Mail on the same day—about a different incident. Collectively, these reports paint a portrait of a nation terrorized by vomit-spewing, tattooed thugs. And according to polls, British citizens also consider crime an exceedingly grave problem.
But here the British government is strikingly at odds with both the press and popular opinion. Supported by Britain’s most prominent criminologists, the government insists that the country has, in fact, been experiencing the longest period of falling crime since record-keeping began. Indeed, it says, the rapid and sustained rise in crime that began in Britain in the late 1950s has been entirely reversed: crime reached a peak in 1995 but has since dropped by 48 percent. Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has declared herself “extremely pleased” by the dramatic improvement in public safety.
Someone in this story is wrong. But who? Have the British people succumbed to mass hysteria? Or is the government’s methodology flawed?
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