The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined1 is a 2011 book by Steven Pinker, in which the author argues that violence in the world has declined both in the long run and in the short run and suggests explanations as to why this has occurred.
In the world dominated by sensationalist media we often forget to check the facts. Media companies thrive on churning out rubbish. The aim used to be to sell more newspapers, then it became to get a larger TV audience, now it is to get the click.
What hasn’t changed is that we are constantly fed a diet of sensationalist rubbish about crime rates even from otherwise respectable media. They tend not to report that worldwide violence is in the decline and has been for centuries.
As an antidote to this deluge of misinformation we can look at some hard data, compiled by an organisation that isn’t dependent on scaremongering.
As Ian McAuley writes in Pearls and Irritations2
Specific crime rates are hard to measure, because of changes in reporting, but homicides don’t go unnoticed or unreported. Over the last 30 years, since 1990, homicide rates have fallen from around 1.8 per 100 000 people to 0.8 per 100 000, shown in the graph below. (Note the Covid blip.)
Source Australian Institute of Criminology3
Ask the man in the street about crime rates and he will say they are increasing, but in fact over the past 30 years they have declined by more than 50%.
Sometimes numbers are important.
Full article here, scroll down for analysis of crime rates.
Bricknell S 2023. Homicide in Australia 2020–21. Statistical Report no. 42. Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology. https://doi.org/10.52922/sr78979