Crime is falling, but heists that make headlines imply otherwise

Crime stories serve up a reliable set of emotions – shock, sympathy, horror, outrage, morbid curiosity and fear. But there is something different, I think, about news of a heist. Against your will, in the crime pages of all places, you suddenly find yourself rooting for the villain. The ingenuity! The skill! The sheer improbability that one semi-retired cat burglar could shimmy up a drainpipe in full view of five sleeping XL bullies and still escape with the loot. Will he get away with it? Should he? You’re no longer reading an airport thriller, but a novel of deep moral complexity.

Let us turn, for example, to the recent heist in Primrose Hill, north London, over which the media has been in a frenzy. More than £10m worth of jewellery and £150,000 of designer handbags were nicked in one swoop from the house of a Hong Kong socialite, in shenanigans involving the roof, a blowtorch, a crawl along a concrete gutter, near misses with a live-in governess, and the ability to climb on to a sink without disturbing a single cosmetic product scattered about the rim. In a BBC article displaying footage of the burglar at work, a family spokesperson actually described him as moving “like a cat”. In any case, the “hunt” for the suspect (how exciting) is on.

What may be most striking about this story, however, is just how unusual this type of crime is these days. You may remember the Hatton Garden heist, in which six elderly thieves – the “Diamond Geezers” – made off with £14m worth of valuables. But that was in 2015, and was considered so eccentric that two films have since been made about it. Once, bank robberies were everywhere – in the 1990s they were an almost daily occurrence in London – but their number has fallen rapidly. In 2020, for example, there were only 58 in the UK.

That is just one part of a wide and underrated trend. Overall crime rates are falling. According to the Crime Survey for England and Wales, incidents fell from 19,786 in 1995 to just 4,722 in 2024. The latest ONS data, meanwhile, shows crime in England and Wales is now at its lowest level on record. Rates of burglary are a whopping 70% lower than in the year to March 2003, when police recording practices began. Some types of law breaking buck the trend: fraud and computer misuse are up, for example, but domestic violence and car crime dropped precipitously over the past three decades. And not just here, but in other rich countries.

Why? The most obvious reason seems to be that many crimes have become harder to commit – especially “opportunistic” ones. Cars have central deadlocking systems and immobilisers, houses sturdier door frames and better alarms, and cameras and DNA databases help with deterrence, too. Only the most skilled cat burglars need apply: slapdash teens don’t stand a chance, and therefore don’t get initiated into a life of crime. Not that there’s much incentive for breaking and entering these days: TVs, stereo systems and most other electronics are cheaper and therefore less covetable. And as society goes cashless, there’s also less money lying around.

Reinforcing this idea is that when certain crimes do go up – phone theft and shoplifting, for example – it’s mostly because they have become easier. People scrolling social media as they walk home become targets for phone snatchers on bikes. And although large supermarkets have ramped up some forms of security, including door alarms and tags, they’ve done away with others: automated checkouts and fewer staff mean customers can easily slip out of the door with extra goods.

Why is it, then, that we don’t believe the good news? Ipsos Mori finds that a majority of Britons – 61% – think that crime has risen. A YouGov poll, meanwhile, shows concerns about crime have increased over the past three years. And as of last month, 20% believe it is the biggest issue facing the country. Crime is down, but it doesn’t feel that way.

One explanation is in the mechanics of media coverage, which draws shocking or unusual events to public attention. Instead of seeing this as a sign of rarity – ingenious heists make headlines, unlike common crimes – we may believe the opposite. Politicians may also prefer to ramp up the threat. On Thursday, Donald Trump stated that the US is “breaking down” with violence, even as data emerged that rates of violent crime and murder had plummeted in 2024. In the UK, Labour campaigned hard on “take back our streets”, emphasising antisocial behaviour, which had been dropping for three decades.

And good intentions can stand in the way. Those keen for more investment in the justice system may worry that falling crime could induce governments to shift priorities elsewhere. But the danger of downplaying success is that we fail to learn from it. If better security is the answer, how can we improve it? How can the successes of home burglary deterrence be applied to department stores?

And can falling rates of crime test our ideas about why it happens in the first place? Conservatives once insisted that the decline of the nuclear family and the popularity of video games would unleash a crime wave. Not true. On the left, there was a cherished idea that lawbreaking rises in line with inequality. Not true either. Tougher sentences, meanwhile, seem to have little to do with falling crime – a trend visible in the Netherlands, which has reduced the length of time people stay in prison.

Amid the noise, important trends may be overlooked. As overall crime rates dwindle, it becomes clearer that a few people are disproportionately likely to suffer from them. Criminals tend to pick on the same vulnerable people – for domestic violence, sexual abuse, shoplifting, burglary. Focused on general rates of crime, policymakers and police can overlook these “repeat victims”. These days most people are unlikely to experience the crimes they read about in the headlines – but for some, things are worse than ever.

Martha Gill is an Observer columnist