Crime Experiments

This item from the BBC caught my attention the other day.

Interestingly, a charity is arguing that ‘fake muggings’ should be staged all around the country, in order to highlight the fact that people do need to react - although they should not, they are careful to point out, use physical force.

There’s some interesting sociology and indeed, social psychology in all this.

Firstly, as people are reflexive, the idea of raising awareness and showing what can be done - short of a ‘physical’ intervention, is interesting.

Would it work?

Advocates of control theory would argue that it would, since it would increase the costs, or the risk of being caught, and that would act as a deterrent.

But, to be effective, bystander intervention would have to be successful and would have to become the norm. If incidents dropped off and then increased again, there is the danger that once again, people would ‘turn a blind eye’, and what social psychologists call ‘bystander effect’ would kick in, all over again.

It’s also worth thinking carefully about the unintended social effects of the sort of policy advocated by Witness Confident, the charity concerned. Given what sociological research reveals about the relationship between social class, (and indeed ethnicity and gender) with crime, it seems that an initiative like this concentrates on only a small proportion of all crime. That is not to say that ‘street crime’ and violence are unimportant, merely to point out that there is a much bigger picture and this type of crime has to be seen in context. It is easy to see how such an initiative could in fact end up creating a moral panic and scapegoating one section of society. Will there be a similar scheme, I wonder, designed to identify dodgy bankers and insider dealers?