Crime and the crazy season

Hettie O’Brien, in the current Guardian newspaper (UK) has posted this First Edition taster:<info@editorial.theguardian.com> https://www.theguardian.com/uk ‘Apparently, gangs of “feral yobs” now rampage the streets in “lawless Britain,” where even your wing mirrors aren’t safe from brazen thieves. It doesn’t matter that crime is decreasing: most people, when asked, seem to think it’s on the rise. This is the finding of a study from King’s College London published earlier this week, which surveyed nearly 4,000 people in Britain. It found perceptions of crime far removed from reality and shaped more by feelings than by facts. Reform voters are most likely to believe that crime is a growing problem, and many of them think that most people convicted of homicide are ethnic minorities (they aren’t). This isn’t confined to one party, though: the public as a whole tends to wrongly assume most people convicted of homicide are from an ethnic minority when they are not, and to think crime is…