Crime and Bewilderment

My dear old dad died on is 96^th birthday two years ago. Like many a proud man, his “home was his castle” and I knew that needed to be there to the end if his final years were to be happy ones. And being proud and independent we needed to call his carers, housekeepers.

One day, when my dad was around 94, I got a call at the office from a very anxious housekeeper. “He’s got a gun under the bed and he won’t let me get it!”.

I could just imagine my dad standing in front of the bed with his arms crossed. “No, you’re not taking it. I might need it!”.

As it later turned out, it was only an air gun and he didn’t have any pellets anyway. But he wasn’t giving it up. I understood that he felt the need to protect his person and his property, so I needed to help him.

The next weekend I visited him in his country cottage with a present.

“I’ve got something for you dad”.

“What’s that son?”

“It’s a baseball bat. Give me the gun”.

And so, we swapped. He put the baseball bat under the bed and I wrapped the gun in a blanket, and feeling like a criminal, I put it in the boot of the car. I delivered the gun to the local police station where the coppers accepted it gratefully but laughed their heads off at the story.

Many people like my Dad worry about violence and the media is full of stories about street crime, home invasions and violence generally. It sparks fears that our communities are becoming more dangerous. We hear exploitative politicians saying, “it’s out of control”.

The other day, my researcher Charlie showed me an alarming press report with the headline “200 Youths In City Brawl”.  It went on “Police broke up 77 brawls among roving gangs in the city and 48 suburbs of Melbourne over the weekend”.

I was shocked and then I looked at the date of the report. It was Monday October 3, 1966.

So, we’ve had the problem of violence for a long time. We think it’s getting worse but a UN report by its specialist drug and crime agency, concludes that the worldwide long-term trend is for decreasing crime, primarily in developed high income countries.

And a report by the Victorian Crime Statistics Unit says that crime in my home city of Melbourne is actually dropping when allowance is made for population growth. In the last 5 years, the “victimisation rate” as they call it, dropped by 4.4%.

The biggest problem is the perceptions of crime. Headline chasing newspapers and internet sites worldwide, search out any story which makes us think it’s worse than it is. A mass killing, particularly in America, echoes around the world.

We should never relax about crime, but it’s not as bad as we are encouraged to think.

I reckon that every government in the world should show the guts that Australian Prime Minister John Howard did in 1996 and ban guns.

And regarding other forms of crime, we should look beyond the daily headlines to find the real facts and then just get on with job of contributing to the wealth and well-being of our family and friends. The richer the country or suburb, the safer you are.

After all, as Franklin D Roosevelt said in his inaugural address, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”.