Panicology
Page 20
Careful slicing and dicing of the data can make the trends in the serious crime figures bad news or good. An article entitled ‘Homicides soar by a quarter under Labour’ explained that, since 1997, the number of victims in England and Wales had risen since the first half of the 1990s, and ‘Killings up 35% under Labour’ compared the number of homicides in 2005 with the number in 1997, the first year of Labour government. In contrast, the story headlined ‘Murder rate declines but Home Office battles against belief that things are getting worse’, which claimed that the murder rate for England and Wales was showing ‘its first sustained fall since the 1960s’, was equally selective but presumably more welcome so far as the government was concerned.
Crimes recorded by the police, 2001
* * *
Homicides Homicides per 100,000 population
* * *
Australia 340 1.9
Canada 554 1.8
England and Wales 891 1.6
France 1,047 1.7
Germany 868 1.1
Ireland 59 1.4
Italy 818 1.5
Japan 1,340 1.1
Russia 33,583 22.1
Scotland 107 2.2
South Africa 21,683 55.9
Spain 494 1.1
US 15,980 5.6
* * *
Source: International Comparisons of Criminal Justice Statistics 2001, Issue 12/03, 24 October 2003, www.homeoffice.gov.uk. Some data relate to 2000.
As in many other areas of public policy, there are questions over the independence of government-produced statistics and research. The Statistics Commission, a watchdog set up by the government in 2000 but since disbanded, and an independent review team established by the then home secretary both published reports in 2006 recommending changes to the way the crime statistics are produced. When the basic bond of trust has been broken, it is easier for the media to get the wrong end of the stick and for the public to panic.
Panic-inducing crime news is not restricted to the UK. The Irish are told regularly that there is a murder a week and a rape every day. One article, with the subtitle ‘Welcome to Ireland, land of sex fiends and killers’, was about losing the war against crime as the latest figures showed a large increase in the number of murders. Another, ‘Blame game goes on in a society dogged by murder and violence’, told the sad tale of South Africa, where there are more murders than in the US and fifty times as many as in western Europe. South Africa tops most tables of murder and violent crime rates although precise figures are unknown. It is reported that the government does not like releasing figures for fear of them damaging tourism and leading to sanctions ahead of the 2010 football World Cup. There are serious concerns about their quality too – the police crime statistics showed nearly 22,000 murders in the latest year, while the Medical Research Council puts the figure at over 32,000 and the Department of Home Affairs has a figure close to 30,000. The figures from Interpol are even higher.
But the trend is not adverse everywhere in the world. The number of killings in Montreal is down on the previous year’s record low, and New York saw the murder rate drop to its lowest since 1963 on the back of the ‘zero tolerance’ policies pursued from the mid-1990s. New York is now the safest big city in America, while others, such as Boston, Houston and Philadelphia, see rising crime rates. The Houston murder rate rose by one-fifth in the year when 150,000 evacuees arrived following Hurricane Katrina.
Understanding what is going on is not helped by the fact that terms can often get confused, with reports switching between murder and homicide, and violent, serious and headline crimes. Violent crime is a very diverse crime grouping in the UK as it contains the full spectrum of assaults, from murder to pushing and shoving, which result in no physical harm, as well as sexual offences and robbery. A casual reader of a newspaper can easily be misled.
In the UK, as in most countries, there are two sources of crime data – police figures of reported crime and surveys of people asking how they have been affected by crime. The British Crime Survey is considered the more reliable measure of violent crime as the police recorded crime figures have been inflated over the last few years by changes in recording practices (including harmonization across police forces), increased reporting by the public (many people have seen no point in reporting crime unless it is serious or required for insurance purposes) and increased police activity.2 The problem with crime surveys, though, is that they do not cover all crimes. The British one does not cover crimes against business, crimes where there is no direct victim (such as drug dealing), crimes against victims younger than sixteen and crimes that have involved death (in good part because the victims cannot be interviewed). Surveys do not give crime figures for local areas.
The picture is complicated by the fact that some types of crime will be on a rising trend while others will be declining. One article referred to George Orwell’s ‘Decline of the English Murder’, which ‘lamented the disappearance of middle-class crimes of passion’, with their place being taken by murders ‘that had a background not of stifling domesticity, but of the anonymous life of the dance halls and the false values of the American film’, or, to put it in today’s terms, of the hoodie and the celebrity stalker.
Certainly, the chance of someone in Britain being involved in gun crime is very small as it is largely confined to small pockets of inner cities – two-thirds of the shootings are in just six of the capital’s poorest thirty-plus boroughs. Mostly the disputes are about drugs, and three-quarters of shooting victims are young and black. It is a similar story in the US, where both the homicide victimization rates and the offending rates for blacks are six to seven times higher than for whites. Statistics setting out the likelihood of different types of people dying as a result of homicide are readily available in America. One website coldly sets out the factoids: the 21.2 per 100,000 black people who died from homicide in the stated year compared with a rate of 8.3 for hispanics, 4.9 for whites and 3.3 for all women.3 As 85 per cent of murder victims know their killer,4 it is pretty clear that, unless you are keeping some bad company, you’re pretty safe.
For all the hyping of crime, however, there is some evidence that British people are more likely to be subjected to some crimes than their counterparts in most other European countries. One source, the International Crime Victims Survey, carried out four times since 1989 using standardized questions and data-collection methods with a view to obtaining comparable results for the participating countries, suggests that England and Wales have larger proportions of the population than other countries who have been victims of assault, burglary and car theft, but not sexual assault.5
Percentage of people or households victimized in the latest year
* * *
Assault Sexual assault Burglary Theft of a car
* * *
Austria 1.9 1.7 0.8 0.1
Belgium 2.4 0.7 2.2 0.9
Finland 4.3 1.8 0.5 0.5
France 4.5 0.8 1.6 1.4
Italy 0.8 0.9 2.4 2.6
Netherlands 3.8 1.1 2.2 0.4
Sweden 3.8 1.5 1.6 1.3
Switzerland 2.6 1.4 1.5 0.3
UK: England and Wales 5.0 0.8 3.0 2.8
UK: Scotland 4.9 0.4 1.5 1.2
* * *
Data shown for a selection of the twenty or so European countries that took part in the survey. Germany, Greece, Ireland and Spain are among the countries not participating.
If anything, we might expect crime to play an even greater role in the future in media-induced panic. More and more countries are coming under pressure to introduce national crime figures broken down by town or administrative area. Only then will residents have a better idea of the risks that they face and will police and others charged with keeping law and order be able to best direct their scarce resources. As more data become available, more stories will be written. In America, many of the newspapers keep a close eye on how the crime figures are moving. ‘Keeping monthly homicide statistics can be like watching a horse race. They’re ahead. They’re b
ehind. They’re neck and neck. But there are no winners. Only losers.’6
7. The Natural World
Early civilizations believed in a world ruled by angry gods with the power to unleash forces of destruction beyond our control. Today, we understand that these forces are natural and not divine. But for all our science, we still have a hard time predicting or controlling them. To make matters worse, the scale of human activity on the planet is now such that we are able to whip up global disasters all by ourselves – though perhaps also to prevent them.
Looking Up
‘Ozone layer healing, but more slowly than hoped’ Washington Post
We have grown up worrying about the hole in the ozone layer. From the 1970s, depletion of this fragile layer of the Earth’s atmosphere by man-made chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons had been forecast to expose humanity to unprecedented levels of dangerous solar radiation. Strong ultraviolet sunlight would penetrate the atmosphere, reaching the ground, where it would cause skin cancers and eye damage in humans, livestock and wildlife and impair the photosynthesis of plants. ‘What will it do to our children’s outlook on life if we have to teach them to be afraid to look up?’ Al Gore wondered in his first essay on environmental apocalypse, Earth in the Balance.1 Greenpeace ran an advertisement headlined ‘GOODBYE SUNSHINE’, showing a photograph of a baby shielding its eyes against the ‘harmful radiation reaching the Earth’s surface’.
Children are still able to look up. So what went wrong, or rather right?
Ozone was once regarded as a health-giving substance. In Victorian times, it was used in the way that chlorine is now for cleaning, bleaching, purifying water and preserving foods. People were sent to the seaside for their health, where the air was said to be rich in ozone, although you are more likely to catch a whiff of it near high-voltage electrical equipment, which can convert small amounts of the diatomic oxygen that we breathe into triatomic molecules of ozone.
The ozone layer had been known for more than fifty years when it first became a matter of environmental concern at the beginning of the 1970s. It lies in the stratosphere, the dry layer of the atmosphere between 10 and 50 kilometres altitude immediately above the troposphere. Whereas the troposphere is dominated by physical processes which we experience as weather, the action in the stratosphere is chemical. The fear at this time was that exhaust chemicals from supersonic aircraft flying at stratospheric altitudes would destroy the ozone, which blocks strong ultraviolet light from reaching the Earth.
Simultaneously, scientists had begun to realize that ultraviolet light might be a factor in causing cancer. The coincidence was too great to ignore, and both the danger of ultraviolet exposure and the potential dangers of fleets of supersonic aircraft crisscrossing the skies made the headlines. Any substantial threat was quickly nullified, however, when the United States Congress halted Boeing’s supersonic passenger plane development project, although the reasons for this were ultimately economic.
Meanwhile, the environmental scientist James Lovelock, later to become well known for the Gaia theory, had used a sensitive device of his own invention to detect minute concentrations of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the atmosphere. There was no other source for these chemicals other than the refrigerants, aerosol gases and foaming agents that had begun to be manufactured during the Second World War. A little later, scientists at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research discovered that chlorine atoms catalyse the breakdown of ozone in the atmosphere. Lovelock’s gadget had been built to monitor pesticide levels, while the NCAR team were concerned about chlorine spewed into the atmosphere by erupting volcanoes. Nobody suspected a link between ozone depletion and CFCs.
But in 1974 two chemists at the University of California, Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina, established that CFCs were the dominant source of chlorine that was indeed breaking down ozone in the stratosphere. The discovery was startling. It showed that the chemicals we had started putting into refrigerators, spray cans and air conditioners twenty years before could escape (due to inefficient factory processes and poor disposal practices) and drift lazily up through the atmosphere, taking years or even decades to reach the ozone layer. Even at concentrations of less than one part per trillion, these chemicals are there broken down into chlorine atoms, each one of which can take out tens of thousands of ozone molecules in a vicious cycle of destruction. When it appeared in Nature, Rowland and Molina’s paper, however, was not one of those highlighted by the magazine’s press office, and it was ignored by the world’s journalists.
The attitude of the media changed abruptly in 1985, when Joe Farman of the British Antarctic Survey reported a significant loss of ozone above the South Pole. Both the extent of the depletion and its latitude came as a surprise to scientists, whose models had led them to expect to see the first evidence of ozone depletion in the upper stratosphere above the tropics. When Farman’s findings were confirmed by NASA, the Washington Post reported the discovery and coined the phrase the ‘ozone hole’. No matter that it described the seasonal, partial depletion of a very minor atmospheric constituent and the consequently increased permeability of the atmosphere to merely part of the sunlight spectrum, the ‘hole’ had an undeniable graphic appeal. It was a rent in the firmament that would allow evil ultraviolet light to pour in, withering our crops and mutilating our bodies.
The advent of the ozone hole was an undoubted spur to those negotiating the Montreal Protocol to limit CFC production, although discussions had begun as early as 1981. When the protocol was signed on 16 September 1987, twenty-four countries agreed merely to level off and then gently reduce their output, not to an outright ban. Yet the Americans had legislated a decade before to ban the use of CFCs as aerosol propellants in response to the research into the likely effects of supersonic aircraft–and American consumers had actually done much of the work first by refusing to buy them in any case. This, and not Montreal, was ‘the first, and last, unequivocal application of the precautionary principle in the ozone story’ according to Joe Farman.2
The idea that Montreal would fix anything was slow to take off. In 1988, after the protocol was signed, the science writer John Gribbin published The Hole in the Sky, a popular account of ‘man’s threat to the ozone layer’. ‘This book is required reading for everyone who is concerned about the gigantic threat poised over us all,’ trumpeted the cover blurb. Gribbin was convinced that Montreal’s half-hearted measures wouldn’t be enough. ‘Tomorrow is too late,’ he wailed.3 In fact, of course, as Gribbin knew better than most, tomorrow would do pretty well because of the twenty-year delay built into the migration of CFCs up into the stratosphere.
The ineffectual original agreement was gradually strengthened at a sequence of later international gatherings, as more countries signed up, including the major developing countries, and reduction targets were made more onerous. Developed countries finally stopped making CFCs in 1993, several years earlier than originally planned. China is due to phase out production by 2010. In 1995, Rowland and Molina shared the Nobel prize. The Swedish Academy’s citation gushed that the researchers had ‘contributed to our salvation from a global environmental problem that could have catastrophic consequences’.
Not so fast. Even in the 1990s, it was not yet clear that the CFC deals would produce the desired effect. In 2002, NASA predicted that repair of the Antarctic hole would only be detectable by 2020. Annual monitoring since then has revealed no clear trend and suggests that atmospheric systems are more complex than scientists had hoped. The formation of the hole after each Antarctic winter is subject to disruption. The hole shrank significantly from 2003 to 2004 but grew in 2005 and then again in 2006. Temperatures in September 2005 were the lowest since 1979, accelerating the seasonal formation of a hole which in that year peaked at 24 million square kilometres. But the hole also healed again during October, earlier than in previous years, which scientists attribute to changes in local meteorological conditions, not to changes in levels of ozone-depleting chemicals. Such blips
, according to the World Meteorological Office,
cannot be explained by changes in the stratospheric halogen loading, but are due to interannual dynamical variability. This variability will make it difficult to detect the onset of ozone recovery in Antarctica, and in particular it will be difficult to attribute any positive change in ozone to declining amounts of ozone depleting substances.4
The latest measurements offer a little more hope. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced on 23 August 2006 that the Antarctic hole had stopped expanding and is expected to have healed by around 2060. ‘Healing’ is a relative term, of course, just as the word ‘hole’ marked an arbitrary threshold of ozone loss. Joe Farman is less optimistic. Although very little chlorine-containing gas is now being released, what’s there already can only decay very slowly. ‘One third of it will still be there in 2100: that’s an awful lot of chlorine.’5
The ozone hole clearly retains considerable scare value. Even the generation that has grown to adulthood since the Montreal Protocol was signed frets about it. Their fears may be seriously off target – two-thirds of a sample of people in one survey apparently believed that the ozone hole is causing climate change.6 But the fact that they persist indicates that the ozone hole has become an icon. It offers a ready image of man-made environmental degradation that increased emission of carbon dioxide does not.
So it would be a shame to let it go to waste. Fortunately for the environmental Cassandras, there is still the Arctic to worry about. Although NOAA’s latest estimate is that the smaller and less frequently appearing hole here will be repaired as soon as 2030, some scientists fear that it will continue to grow. A large Arctic ozone hole would lie far closer to major centres of population than the Antarctic hole, and pose a correspondingly greater danger to human health, exposing more than 700 million people to dangerous levels of ultraviolet radiation.