Crime One of the most popular TV programmes is Crimewatch. Unsolved robberies, violent attacks and armed raids are re-enacted. Appeals made to anyone who might have information to catch the criminals. Often police succeed, thanks to the programme. Each show ends with the presenter saying seriously, "Don't have nightmares!". Of course, despite the programme, England is certainly not a violent place. Unless you have a habit of jostling drunken men with tattoos in noisy town pubs, you stand only a microscopic chance of being attacked by someone you don't know. (Good news for those of us with few friends.) Drug dealers and criminal gangs exist of course, but like football hooligans, tend to attack their own kind. (Football hooligans have bizarre alignments. In a domestic fixture, Millwall hooligans would attack Leeds hooligans - but the two groups would unite in an international fixture to attack, say, the German hooligans.) Petty theft is something else though. It seems all of us, and all of our friends, have been victims. If you have a house, a car, a bike or a credit card, then sooner or later you expect that one of them will be stolen or broken into. (It's difficult to steal a house, it's true, but earlier this year some burglars managed to steal the entire surface of a cobbled street in Liverpool.) In 1997 there were 4.6 million offences, most of them theft of this sort. The crime figure has been falling for each of the last five years, and the good news is that the detection rate for murders is now 90 per cent. (Not much good news if you are the victim, of course.) However, for burglaries it is only 25 per cent. If your TV and video are nicked from your house, if someone takes your car for a joyride and smashes it up, if someone steals your mountain bike, if someone takes your wallet and spends four thousand pounds on your credit card - then three out of four times they will get away with it. When you report such a crime, the police officer on duty will wearily fill out a form, file it with the five hundred other for that morning, then go back to watching Crimewatch. Some figures suggest that up to a third of burglaries are purely by hard-drug users financing their habit. (If the people who stole my bicycle did it to finance their drug habit, they must have the cheapest heroin supplier in the land.) There has been a succession of retrials over the last few years where convicted criminals were shown to be innocent, or at least the evidence very suspect. This has shaken our faith in the ability of the police to match the criminal to robbery. It has also given us a strange view of police stations, the subject of much joking conversation. They are miraculous places. Illiterate suspects suddenly produce written confessions. Inarticulate druggies with hitherto hazy minds write in eloquent English about their crimes in detailed precision. And black youths suddenly sustain beatings and blows because they "fell down the stairs", even though the station is on one level. Our judges don't give us much confidence either. We imagine the typical judge to be a doddery old man. He keeps asking questions of the barristers that show he is totally out of touch with the modern world: "Who are the Spice Girls?"... "What is the Internet?" and so on. However, sometimes his knowledge and wisdom show through: "Cynthia Payne? Ah yes! She ran a famous brothel for fetishists, didn't she? Very reasonable too, I seem to remember..." Sometimes, hanged criminals of long ago finally are shown to be innocent, after long campaigns from their family. Capital punishment for murder was stopped in 1965, and we look down on countries which still have the death penalty as primitive, like Iran, or America. But as to more mundane crime, we have a flexible attitude. Take stealing for example. Taking five pounds out of the safe at work is stealing. Taking five pounds' worth of envelopes home is a perk of the job. Other drivers doing 50mph in a 30mph limit it proves they are stupid and dangerous and should be fined. When we do 50mph in a 30mph limit it proves the speed limit is too low because we are a safe driver. Suppose we are given too much change in a shop - for ten pounds when we only gave five, say. Whether we tell the cashier depends on the size of the shop. If it is a small corner shop run by a family we would tell them immediately. In a large department store chain... well, they won't notice five pounds, will they? Our attitudes are often class-based. For example, cannabis is known to be less harmful than tobacco. But the people who most violently oppose cannabis legalisation are typically middle-aged and old working-class people, who are the heaviest smokers. To them, smoking a joint is a crime; refusing to give a job to a woman because of her sex (which is also against the law) is not. To a middle-class professional, it would be the other way round. Especially if she is a female cannabis dealer. But then the older generation are fond of saying the world is getting meaner and nastier. When they were young, they say, they left their doors unlocked. Probably true - they had nothing worth stealing. They never used to hear of child abuse, armed robbery or violence, they say. Probably true - they didn't have the TV news. But one thing certainly hasn't changed: even back then, the old people were saying that the world was a dreadful and criminal place. That, at least, is the same the world over. Don't have nightmares.

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