The meaning of crime
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# 3.6 Summary

- The common-sense narratives of the crime problem in the UK can be broken down into a series of distinct claims that make assessing them easier.

- Those claims can be tested against quantitative and qualitative evidence. Both types of evidence suggest that the narrative of change from a secure to an insecure society is at best partial, overestimating the tranquillity of the past, and the uncertainty and riskiness of the present.

- One way of explaining both the origins of the common-sense story and our more general fascination with crime are the concepts of respectable fears and moral panics, in which crime and criminality, driven by the media's news values, become social metaphors for the problems and uncertainties of much wider patterns of social change. However, the case for dismissing the crime problem merely as a moral panic is not conclusive either.

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