This Truth Might Surprise You

(4-5 minute read)

We often hear that society is sliding into chaos. News presenters speak in urgent tones, social media amplifies every frightening headline, and the old newspaper maxim still rules the day: if it bleeds, it leads. Violence makes dramatic viewing. Fear grabs attention. Anxiety keeps people watching. Advertising means that the news media have a vested interest in keeping us frightened.

Yet beneath all the noise, the figures tell a very different story. Something extraordinary has happened.

Across most developed societies, violent crime has been falling for decades. Homicide rates have plummeted. Assaults and robberies have dropped to levels not seen in half a century. In many cities in Western Europe, North America, East Asia, and Oceania, you are statistically less likely to be murdered today than at any time in living memory.

The United Kingdom’s murder rate has fallen by roughly half since the mid-1990s.
The United States, despite fluctuations, remains far below its early-1990s peak.
Canada’s homicide rate is near a 50-year low.

Japan and Singapore remain among the safest countries in the world, with numbers so low they barely register per hundred thousand.

So why does it feel the opposite?

Because our perception of crime has moved in the opposite direction. Fear rises even as danger falls. Not because crime is increasing, but because the coverage of crime has become relentless. The media learned long ago that frightening stories outperform comforting ones. Fear keeps people watching and advertising dollars flowing. Calm does not.

The Quiet Power Of Modern Policing

What changed? Not human nature. Not poverty levels. Not a sudden outbreak of goodness.

What changed was technology.

CCTV networks now track streets with an unblinking eye. Doorbell cameras capture doorstep thieves before they’ve taken three steps. Cities like London and Beijing have millions of cameras. And in Singapore, a police officer once told me something that stayed with me for years:

“Anyone can commit a crime here once. But very few can commit one twice.”

He meant the probability of being caught on camera is so high that repeat offending becomes almost impossible. Criminals know it too. Fear of being identified before they get home has become one of the greatest deterrents of the modern age.

And then there is DNA.

In the 1980s, it was cutting-edge science. Now it is routine, woven into every serious investigation. A single cell left behind can identify a suspect with near certainty. Old cold cases are reopening. Murderers who believed they had escaped justice for decades are being arrested in their seventies because a relative uploaded their DNA to an ancestry website. Burglars cut themselves on broken glass. Attackers leave microscopic skin cells. Car thieves shed hair.

Every mistake is permanent.

DNA is unforgiving in a way police work never was before.

Combine that with improved forensics, faster response times, and national databases, and it becomes very difficult to be a career criminal in the physical world.

The Strange Economics Of Burglary

There is another factor criminals rarely consider.

Crime often follows economics.

In the 1980s or 1990s, stealing a television or stereo could fund weeks of living. Today, a burglar risks DNA capture, CCTV exposure, and a prison sentence… for perhaps £20 of scrap value. Phones are locked, tracked, and useless once reported stolen. Televisions are cheaper than a week of groceries. Laptops are password-protected and traceable. Cash is disappearing.

The burglar faces higher risk and lower reward.

The result? Burglary has fallen dramatically across the developed world. In England and Wales, burglary is down more than 70 percent since the mid-1990s. Similar declines show up across Europe, Canada, and Australia.

Crime has not stopped. But the economic engine that once powered everyday property crime has been dismantled one cheap electronic item at a time.

The Media’s Love Affair With Fear

If the world is getting safer, why do we all feel so anxious?

Because the worst events rise to the top of every feed.

A stabbing on a train becomes the top headline for an entire continent. A dramatic incident circulates on television, YouTube, and TikTok for days, repeated so often that it lodges in the mind like a personal threat. Our brains, wired for danger, interpret repetition as frequency.

Two tragedies replayed a thousand times feel like a thousand tragedies.

This is not deceit. It is economics. Fear draws the eye.

But thousands of peaceful, uneventful days never make the news.

The New Frontier: Cybercrime

As violence falls, a different threat has grown.

Cybercrime.

Fraud. Ransomware. Identity theft. Phishing. It is no longer the alley behind a bar that criminals prowl, but the inbox and the broadband router. Digital criminals do not need weapons, only persistence and a large supply of stolen email addresses.

This is not evidence of a darker society. It is an adaptation. Crime follows opportunity. As wealth and life have moved online, so too have criminals.

But here too, detection is improving. Encryption, biometrics, two-factor authentication, behavioural analysis. The arms race continues.

Why This Matters More Than We Realise

Viewed from a broader lens, the last fifty years reveal something remarkable.

Humanity is learning how to live together with less bloodshed.

We still have problems. We still argue, still divide, still struggle. But our societies are becoming more capable, more protective, and more connected every year.

DNA evidence. CCTV networks. Safer vehicles. Better emergency medicine. Mental health awareness. Quicker communication. Communities that refuse to let crime define them.

These victories are quiet. They rarely trend.

But they matter.

A Hopeful Truth Beneath The Noise

When people believe the world is collapsing, they behave as if it is collapsing. They withdraw, distrust their neighbours, and assume strangers are threats. Fear spreads faster than fact.

This is why the truth matters.

Violent crime is falling.
Burglary is falling.
Homicide is falling.
Communities are safer than they were.
Our tools for solving crime grow stronger each year.
Most people in most places live peaceful, ordinary lives.

We are not spiralling into darkness.
We are climbing, slowly and imperfectly, toward a safer civilisation.

It is happening quietly.
It is happening steadily.
And it is happening everywhere you look, once you see past the headlines.

That is a hopeful truth worth sharing.

Until Next Time,

BA Gillies

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