In explaining why Canberrans are feeling less safe in their homes and out in the community, and why their confidence in police is also falling, ACT Policing blamed social media and news media reporting as a "key driver" of perceptions of crime and safety.
This may well be true. But when perceptions are grounded in the realities of real people experiencing real crime, aren't they more valid than those based on a lack of information?
About 83 per cent of Canberrans responding to a government survey said they felt totally safe inside their homes at night, down from about 87 per cent the previous year. Nearly 45 per cent did not feel safe walking around their neighbourhoods at night.
The latest Productivity Commission data exposes some of the numbers behind this community anxiety: the ACT has just 169 sworn officers per 100,000 people - the lowest police density in the nation. While most of us rightly hold our police in high regard, the data supports the feeling that it is a force spread thin.
Police have been agitating for years about their inability to do much of the work they want to because of resourcing levels. Victims of property crime are routinely told that there are not enough resources to make investigations worthwhile. In that sense, reporting of community crime serves the police in arguing the case that they need more budget allocations to do their jobs.
However, perception of crime is a key performance metric baked into the ACT government's purchasing agreement with the Australian Federal Police for the service provided to Canberra. The police are scored by a government - notorious for its aversion to transparency - on how safe people feel, regardless of how safe they are.
When public perception is explicitly tied to a police performance scorecard, secrecy becomes an attractive strategy. It creates an environment where withholding information for "operational reasons" is easier than defending a grim reality. When the courts, the coroner and police all tend towards silence, it doesn't make the streets safer - it keeps the public in the dark.
To be clear, it is in no one's interest to unduly scare Canberrans. This is, and always has been, a generally safe city to live in. It's one of the reasons most of us love living here. But if all Canberrans learned about crime came from police or government media releases, their sense of reality would be entirely distorted. We certainly would not have had the recent raids on illegal cigarette retailers, for example.
The recent inquiry into the nighttime economy has shown just what anyone paying attention already knows: that drugs and alcohol are a blight on the city centre. And people's sense of safety in the suburbs is fraying. Residents are within their rights to worry when groups in balaclavas disrupt local soccer training or tear up fields mid-match, or when retail staff in places like Tuggeranong are left to confront intimidating and violent behavior.
What is happening in Canberra is not Sydney or Melbourne gangland war, by any stretch. But it is crime. It is real. And people are entitled to have their feelings of safety and security shaped by reality.
Most of us surely want to live in an informed community, and have the maturity to know that while crime does happen it's not happening everywhere and all the time.
We reject the notion that keeping the public in the dark is a valid crime-reduction strategy. The media's job is to hold a mirror up to our community. If police or politicians don't like what's looking back at them, they need to fix the reality, not blame the glass.
