Human Rights, Serious Crime and Criminal Procedure - College of ...

Why bother with Rights when Public Safety is at risk?category involve little in the way of violence or threats, and thecategory of drug offences includes possession, which accountsfor some nine-tenths of the total. As a result, the figure cannotbe used as an indicator of the growth in drug trafficking on alarge scale. Moreover, there are no separate figures for organisedcrime, which is often identified as a major threat to law andorder and to public safety.Although the figures are unable to offer a sharply focusedpicture of the risk to public safety, it would be fair to infer fromthem that the risk of serious violence is not decreasing and isprobably increasing. There are, however, two further questionsone might ask about public safety. One is whether the image ofincreased vulnerability to attack by strangers is itself an accurateone. The activities of organised crime are depicted as violent,and robberies usually involve attacks by strangers. But manyoffences of violence and sexual offences are committed byfamily members, "friends" and acquaintances rather than bystrangers. For example, in 62 per cent of homicide offences inthe last ten years the victim was acquainted with the suspect 116 ;a recent study of reported rapes showed that 43 per cent ofoffenders were intimates of the victim, a further 45 per centwere acquaintances, and only 12 per cent were strangers. 117 Thisis not to suggest that any of these offences were less seriousbecause of the existence of a prior relationship, but simply tomake the point that the objective risk to "public safety" mightnot be found where many people think it is to be found. Asecond question concerns people's fears of serious crime: thereis much debate about the extent to which fear and risk are out ofstep, and some groups of people have fears of crime that runwell ahead of the objective risks. This is not the place to enterinto the details of that debate. 118 However, it is possible thatsome of the public statements about threats to public safety referto, or even generate, fears that do not correspond to theobjective risks. The conclusion of this paragraph, then, is thatthere may be gaps between beliefs and realities about risks topublic safety. This is not to deny that there are real risks topublic safety, or that it is worth taking measures to try to reducethose risks.Whether those preventive measures should rely significantlyon court sentences is difficult to say. Because so few offences arereported, of those not all are recorded, and then only around aquarter are "cleared up", the proportion of offences that resultin the conviction of the offender is estimated to be around 3 percent. 119 The proportion is likely to be higher, perhaps around 15-16 per cent, for the more serious sexual and violent offences, 12040