Driving past the M25 was never so chilling, as this billboard sent down cold shivers with its horror message, Red font over white: “KNIFE CRIME UP 80% UNDER LABOUR.” It was October 2019, and the Conservative Party was already on its way to a stunning victory, with this message constituting a major reason. One might say the ad was quite grotesque and terrifying—as well as on point with a statistic that was selectively chosen and presented in a misleading way. Enter fear of crime politics: a world where perception reigns supreme, and data is at the mercy of electoral ambitions.
This is not only a British quirk. The fire-starting lies which ignited Trump’s first speech “American carnage”, the abrupt transform towards law and order of Macron during the French riots in the banlieues, are only a few of the instances where politicians from the West had found the secret: you don’t need a surge in crime to profit from crime fear. In fact, the fear most effectively operates when it is most disassociated with the truth.
The Psychology of Fear-Based Politics
Fear of crime politics thrives on the electorate logic in a simplistic manner: those voters who are unsafe, would choose the security option offered by candidates who promise to bring back order. The act itself is illogical—perception of crime risk among people rarely matches actual crime figures. Rather, it is a very emotional thing, connecting to the basic and very deep fears of life, that is universal for all mankind, concerning personal safety, social cohesion, and cultural change.
It’s quite evident to the politicians, the disconnect is even in their thinking. While data scientists are engaged in disputing crime data methodologies, campaign strategists are busy forming gut-feeling messages. The outcome is a political environment in which crime perception vs reality has become a tool of political masters for the purpose of manipulating voters, irrespective of the true numbers.
Three Nations, One Playbook
United Kingdom: The Knife Crime Panic
Out of the entire world, the UK probably stands as the most detailed demonstration of the worrying deployment of fears of crime, one of the most recent examples in memory. Initially, violent crime rates had fallen significantly since the 1990s, but UK governments began to use in a very peculiar way the different crime categories, considering them as a source of maximum political benefits.
The Conservative Party’s knife crime focus during the 2019 election was of a satanic genius with its selectivity. The records of some major cities revealed that in several areas knife assaults had increased. Therefore, you could argue the Conservatives were being somewhat truthful in these picks. While knife offenses had indeed risen in certain urban areas, overall violent crime remained near historic lows. But the Tories, by directing a laser-like focus on knife crime – as well as associating it with Labour-controlled London under Mayor Sadiq Khan- went beyond simply raising a concern about one aspect of crime and instead forged a larger national narrative on the topic of lawlessness under their opponents.
His frame of mind as an ex-Public Prosecutor and Keir Starmers coming out as a jailing-instigator his method to win the next elections is not far from what was being done before, it is simply a little rework of the same script. He gets the voters to believe that none but his party can make them feel safe.
United States: The Eternal Crime Wave
The fear of crime has become the greatest achievement of the American political art, i.e. the artist keeps managing to frighten the audience, notwithstanding that crime falls dramatically. The murder rates were cut almost in half, yet every election campaign speaks of a volatile America where the law is losing its grip and chaos is around the corner.
The election of 2020 was a new extreme in the political usage of crime statistics. Both parties played the game of cherry-picking data with a new vigor, using the numbers to bolster their respective, and very different, interpretations. Republicans claimed that the increase in crime rates in certain cities was proof that the Democratic policies had failed, whereas the Democrats took advantage of the long-term decline trend to support their argument that their policies were effective.
This behavior is repeated infinitely: as the suburbs where no serious crimes in the last years vote prevalently out of fear to distant urban violence, the people that live in the city and experience the crime are the ones to whom the concerns are minimized or seen as an evidence of policy success depending on the speaker.
France: Order Versus Liberty
The fear of crime in France is one of the elements that intertwine with the anxiety over the culture as well. During the 2022 presidential election, all the candidates talked about problems that numbers showed were either stable or improving and nevertheless promised law-and-order solutions.
Marine Le Pen coined her campaign vehicle “ensauvagement”—a term that proposed France was going back to its savage or barbaric roots. Emmanuel Macron, who was at first rejecting such type of talk, came several times closer to her by taking a tougher stand on the police and migration. Both leaders recognized that French voters’ fear of crime was not separable from their other indistinct and nebulous fears about national identity and societal changes.
The 2023 urban riots following the killing of Nahel Merzouk provided fresh ammunition for this discourse, with politicians across the spectrum using isolated incidents to justify sweeping policy changes that bore little relation to actual crime trends.
The Data Gap: When Fear Diverges from Facts
Now, where this story becomes quite fascinating is the fact that in all the three countries, public fear of crime is never lower than actual crime rates. In the UK, the British Crime Survey is the main source of data and the trend that it has been showing lately is a decrease of violent crime by nearly 50% since the peak of 1995. On the other hand, public perception surveys persistently indicate that most people believe that crime is going up.
Similar is the narrative in America by the numbers. FBI stats depict violent crime rates to be far lower than in the 1990s today, although there have been a few categories on which the rate of violence has recently increased. On the contrary, Gallup polls repeatedly show that the majority of Americans think that crime is rising across the country, even if they say that they feel safe in their local areas.
The main factor behind these discrepancies is the representation in the perception of crime by the media.
Animus among the public is not fortuitous; such is the case of political actors, who leverage this public concern to their benefit.
Media Amplification: When Fear Sells
Both traditional and social media play important roles in the multiplication of fear of crime beyond what the facts justify. The media maxim “if it bleeds, it leads” is at the core of the systematic distortion in crime coverage and how it is understood by the public.
The telecast stories on violent crimes are disproportionately higher than the figures; meanwhile, the algorithms of social media platforms pull in contents with high sentiments irrespective of the representativeness of the content. Politicians take advantages of this system and use the media to give their announcements just when the crime theme is prevailing in the media to get the greatest media attention and also they turn a law that governs only one side of the phenomena by using a single incident as a trigger to justify a general policy.
Thus, there is a circle that works in a mutually reinforcing way: media coverage that intensifies fear, political rhetoric that expedites fear, which in turn creates more coverage and thereby more cycles of anxiety that are statistically detached.
Why Fear Works Better Than Facts
Fear of crime is a trump card in the hands of politicians, and, as they say, it always plays well. Fear encourages voter turnout, makes difficult policy issues seem easy, and lets candidates to offer themselves as a kind of savior rather than an official in charge. Unlike economic policy or healthcare reform, fear of crime need little or no technical background for full understanding, as every person can easily figure out how one becomes a victim.
Fear also acts as a substitute for other worries. Crime issues typically involve hidden fears of immigration, economical changes, new generation, or cultural transformation. Politicians promising to get rid of crime are, by default, promising to make these general discomforts disappear, although even the link is very weak.
Moreover, in a major way, fear campaigns are an excuse for politicians to keep away from the difficult part-the solutions to hard problems. Rather than dealing with the causes of crime, the social, economic and institutional factors, it is much easier to promise a “crackdown”.
FAQ: Separating Fear from Facts
Is crime really going up?
The answer varies depending on what is measured, where, and when. The overall violent crime rate in most Western democracies is still much lower than the past few decades. Although, there are establishments and timeframes within which crime is going up. What matters most is realizing that crime is not a single entity—different types of crime have different trends for various reasons.
Why do people feel less safe even when crime falls?
There are many reasons for this disconnect: media coverage styles, political speech, social media influence, and the human trait of putting too much emphasis on very rare but very memorable events. Besides this, people’s feeling of security is more than just numbers of crime—it includes their fears of changes in society and losing control of their lives.
Do fear campaigns win elections?
Sometimes, but not always. Voter turnout is one of the elements that fear-based messaging can influence in a positive way. It can also give the voters a hint about the upcoming elections. Besides these, it’s not much what fear-based messaging can do. A political context is the major determinant of the success of fear narratives, next comes candidate credibility, and, finally, whether opposing campaigns can efficiently along with alternative frameworks contest fear narratives.
Breaking the Cycle
The key to understanding crime fear UK USA France lies in the fact that crime is a hot topic in politics while policy on crime is not usually part of the political discussion. It is, rather, ‘the politics’ as a more complex and sophisticated system of people’s emotional manipulation which exploits people’s quite natural anxieties over crime for electoral winning.
This, of course, does not imply that crime issues are non-existent or that all politicians who raise their voices on crime issues always indulge in the spreading of terror. Real crime problems must be met with genuine policy responses grounded on evidence, not on emotions. The point is to identify security issues that are real and those which are just a source of panic because of the political games played by the authorities.
We as voters and citizens are powerful enough to require that. We can insist on crime policy discussion grounded on empirical studies, challenge fear-centric stories which, if compared with the facts, seem doubtful, and we can vote for politicians who look for solutions but not just create scares.
What do you think? Have you seen crime perception vs reality gaps in your neighborhood or country? How do you know when to believe the authorities if they say that local security is at risk or that they are just creating fear for political gain?
Subscribe for more political analysis that cuts through the noise to examine how power really works in modern democracies. Next time you come across a crime-focused political ad or hear a candidate promising to restore order, you should then ask yourself: are they selling what they say or are they trying to divert my attention from something else?
Write down your opinion in the comment area below—do not hesitate to have a frank discussion with other people about the mentioned above topics: fear shaping politics and what we can do to stop it.