The Science of Fear

The attorney general’s audience that day in February 2007 was trainees at the Project Safe Childhood Training Program, hosted by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. They had a mission, Gonzales told them. “It is our responsibility, in law enforcement and as adults, to find the predators first. To bring them to justice before they catch their prey: our kids. . . . At this training program, you will learn how best to pursue them, to interrupt their sadistic hunt. Together, we can make these hunters feel like they are the hunted. Because we all pray for, and work for, a day when children in this country are safe from the leering eyes, the insidious stalking, and the unthinkable cruelty that pedophiles inflict upon them.”

There is probably no figure more reviled in modern Western culture than the man—he’s always a man—who hunts, sexually abuses, and even kills children. In the tabloid press, he’s a “monster,” a “pervert,” or a “sicko.” A headline in the Lancashire Evening Post blares, “Sex Beast Caged.” The British tabloid Daily Star warns, “Pervs Now Rife in Our Schools.” The revulsion is so profound and universal that even quality American newspapers, which are normally scrupulous about avoiding prejudicial language, have taken to calling sex offenders “predators.” Politicians have reflected the shift by making promises to crack down on lurking pedophiles a staple of election campaigns.

He is worse than the drug dealer, the murderer, even the terrorist. He is the embodiment of evil, the stuff of nightmares. “It is every parent’s fear, having your child taken,” intoned Anderson Cooper, the popular host of CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, using the standard journalistic formulation to introduce a special hour-long edition of his show in January 2007. “No child, of course, is immune.”

The focus of Cooper’s show was the story of Ben Ownby and Shawn Hornbeck, two Missouri boys. When Hornbeck was eleven, he was abducted while riding his bicycle. Four years later, Ownby, thirteen, was snatched at his school bus stop. Acting on a tip, police found Ownby shortly after he was taken. They were also startled to discover a now fifteen-year-old Shawn Hornbeck. Both boys had been kidnapped by Michael Devlin, a seemingly ordinary man who is “a chilling reminder that the coworker and neighbor you think you know so well may be a monster,” Cooper said.

CNN is not tabloid TV, and this show—entitled “Taken: Children Lost and Found”—was relatively restrained in its presentation of what is an inherently terrifying issue. There were interviews with Hornbeck’s parents, Devlin’s former employer, and a psychiatrist who discussed why a kidnapped child may not run at the first opportunity. There was also a look at how forensic artists “age” photos of young children. But mostly, there were agonizing stories of lost children and shattered parents. “Four o’clock, the bus came and we heard it. And she just never came up the driveway,” said one mother who lost her daughter twenty years ago. “We were at home,” recalled another. “He decided he wanted to go out and ride his bicycle. I guess it was about two thirty, somewhere around there. . . . And I stood at the door and watched him get on his bike and ride down the street. And that was the last I saw of my son.”

The tips from “family safety expert Bob Stuber” included telling children that if someone is following them in a car, they should run in the opposite direction to buy time as he turns the car around. Stuber also suggested teaching children that if someone tries to snatch them off a bicycle—“a common scenario”—they should hang on to the bike in order to “make yourself too big and too bulky to be put into a car.”

“You know, there’s not a lot you can do in the trunk of a car,” Stuber replied. “You can kick and scream. Nobody is going to hear you, nobody’s going to see you. But here’s something that will work. Disconnect the brake or taillight wires. Now, you can teach a three-year-old, four-year-old how to do this. You pull them real tight, the wires at the rear of the trunk. It takes the brake or taillights out. Now, the police may pull that—in fact, there’s a 50 percent chance that the cops will pull that car over, not because you’re in the trunk but because it has no brake or taillights. Then they’re going to be able to hear you and come rescue you.”

Of course Cooper was right when he said at the start of the show that “no child is immune.” But saying that something could happen is close to meaningless. What matters is how likely something is to happen. On that score, Gut will definitely have a strong opinion: Having just seen a string of horrifying examples, Gut will use the Example Rule to conclude that the chances of this crime happening are high. What’s more, these crimes are so hideous that anyone watching the show will feel intense sorrow and revulsion—which will also lead Gut to conclude, using the Good-Bad Rule, that the likelihood of this sort of attack is high. It’s also possible—perhaps even likely—that the emotions will be so intense that they will drive out any thought of probability: This is so horrible! I have to protect my kids! As for Head, it has no reason to step in and adjust Gut’s conclusion because it has been given no information that would allow it to rationally assess the risk.

Or rather, almost no information. As these sorts of television shows often do, a few statistics appeared on-screen briefly as the show faded to commercial breaks. Cooper didn’t read them aloud and they were very easy to miss. Viewers who did happen to see them, however, read this, once: “Of an estimated 115 ‘stereotypical kidnappings’ of children per year . . .” 40 percent are killed, 60 percent are recovered, 4 percent are not found.

Why these numbers add up to more than 100 percent wasn’t explained. Neither is the strange term “stereotypical kidnapping.” Even if this had been cleared up, however, it would have made little difference to what the audience got out of the show. These numbers are far too incomplete to get a real sense of the probabilities involved. And whatever the statistics presented, they were up against a litany of graphic, horrifying stories about children stolen and murdered. Toss a handful of statistical fragments into that emotional storm and they’ll be blown away like so much dust.

So what are the real numbers? In the 1980s, when one of the first waves of what has become a recurring panic over child abductions swept across the United States, there were no accurate data. Officials, activists, and reporters repeatedly said 50,000 or 75,000 children were stolen from their parents’ arms each year, but no one knew where those figures came from. Like the 50,000 pedophiles said to be prowling the Internet today, they seem to have been someone’s guess that was believed and repeated as fact until its origins were lost. Finally, with fears for the safety of children rising, Congress asked a federal agency to do proper research and produce reports on the number of missing kids. The first such report—known by the acronym NISMART (National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children)—covered cases in 1988. The second looked at 1999.

That second report found that an estimated 797,500 people under the age of 18 went missing for any reason. The study then broke that number down and showed the largest category by far was runaways. Another large portion involved more than 200,000 cases of “family abductions”—which typically meant a divorced parent keeping a child longer than legally permitted. There were also 58,200 “non-family abductions.” That may sound like strangers stealing children, but it’s not. It is in fact a very broad category that can include, for example, a seventeen-year-old girl whose ex-boyfriend won’t let her get out of his parked car.

In order to get a number that matches the sort of pedophile-in-the-shadow attacks that terrify parents, NISMART created a category called “stereotypical kidnappings”: A stranger or slight acquaintance takes or detains a child overnight, transports the child more than fifty miles, holds the child for ransom or with the intention of keeping him or her, or kills the child. NISMART estimated that in one year the total number of stereotypical kidnappings in the United States is 115. If that number is adjusted to include only children younger than 14 when they were kidnapped—kids like Ben Ownby and Shawn Hornbeck—it is 90.

To look at these statistics rationally, we have to remember that there are roughly 70 million American children. With just 115 cases of kids under eighteen being stolen by strangers, the risk to any one American minor is about 0.00016 percent, or 1 in 608,696. For kids fourteen and under, the numbers are only slightly different. There are roughly 59 million Americans aged fourteen and under, so the risk is 0.00015 percent. That’s 1 in 655,555.

To put that in perspective, consider the swimming pool. In 2003, the total number of American children fourteen and younger who drowned in a swimming pool was 285. Thus the chance of a child drowning in a swimming pool is 1 in 245,614—or more than 2.5 times greater than the chance of a child being abducted by a stranger. Also in 2003, 2,408 children fourteen and younger were killed in car crashes. That makes the probability of such a death 1 in 29,070. Thus, a child is twenty-six times more likely to die in a car crash than to be abducted by a stranger.

The numbers vary from country to country, but everywhere the likelihood of a child being snatched by a stranger is almost indescribably tiny. In the United Kingdom, a Home Office report states, “There were 59 cases involving a stranger successfully abducting a child or children, resulting in 68 victims.” With 11.4 million children under sixteen, that works out to a risk of 1 in 167,647. (Note that the British and American numbers are based on different definitions and calculation methods; they aren’t directly comparable and we shouldn’t make much of the differences between them.)

In Canada, Marlene Dalley of the RCMP’s National Missing Children Services carefully combed police data banks for the years 2000 and 2001 and discovered that the total number of cases in which a child was abducted by a “stranger”—using a definition that included “neighbor” or “friend of the father”—was five. As for abductions by true strangers, there was precisely one in two years. There are roughly 2.9 million children aged fourteen or younger in Canada. Thus the annual risk to one of those children is 1 in 5.8 million.

As to how these terrible cases end, the statistics flashed briefly by CNN were almost accurate. According to NISMART’s rounded numbers (hence they don’t quite add up to 100 percent), 57 percent of children abducted by strangers in a stereotypical kidnapping were returned alive, while 40 percent were killed. Four percent were not located. One critical fact not mentioned in the show is that nine out of ten stranger abductions are resolved within twenty-four hours.

Having a child abducted by a stranger and returned later is awful, but the ultimate nightmare is having a child stolen by a stranger and murdered—or having a child simply vanish from the face of the earth. According to NISMART, that nightmare scenario happens to about fifty teens and children a year in the United States. That’s fifty out of 70 million Americans under eighteen. Thus the annual risk of a teen or child being abducted by a stranger and killed or not returned is 0.00007 percent, or one in 1.4 million.

All these numbers boil down to something quite simple. First, the overwhelming majority of minors are not abducted. Second, the overwhelming majority of minors who are abducted are not taken by strangers. Third, the overwhelming majority of minors abducted by strangers are not taken in circumstances resembling the stereotypical kidnapping that so terrifies parents. Fourth, the number of stereotypical kidnappings is so small that the chance of that happening to a child is almost indescribably tiny. And finally, in the incredibly unlikely event that a child is snatched by a lurking pedophile, there is a good chance the child will survive and return home in less than a day.

This is not what Anderson Cooper told his audience. In effect, it is the opposite of what Cooper told them. There was no mention of the key facts, but the show did present case after case of children snatched by strangers under the most frightening circumstances. And in almost every case on the show, the child was held for months or years, or vanished forever.

The problem here is not Anderson Cooper. The total reversal of reality portrayed on “Taken: Children Lost and Found” is actually typical of how news media cover child abductions. A child not abducted is not news. And parental abductions are generally ignored unless there’s a strange twist, such as a particularly violent ending. But pedophiles snatching children are always a big story. Uwe Kolbig, a forty-two-year-old German with a history of sexually abusing children, made the news around the world when he kidnapped, raped, and murdered a nine-year-old boy in February 2007. “Monster and His Prey,” read an Australian headline. What made the crime particularly sensational was videotape taken by a security camera on a Leipzig tram that showed Kolbig chatting and joking with the little boy. Still pictures from the video appeared alongside every newspaper article, and Kolbig’s grin was shown on national TV broadcasts in the United States, Canada, Ireland, Britain, and Europe.

It doesn’t take a particularly sophisticated knowledge of psychology to understand how people who saw the Kolbig story were affected. They felt horror and anger—emotions Gut would use to conclude that this is a serious danger. Rationally, of course, a single crime in Germany says absolutely nothing about the safety of children in other countries and continents—or in Germany, for that matter—but that rational conclusion is likely to be blown away in the storm of emotions whipped up by such horrific images.

It’s understandable, then, that stranger abductions have been the source of some of the biggest media frenzies in recent years. When Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman disappeared in August 2002, the British media talked about little else until the girls’ killer, Ian Huntley, was arrested three weeks later. In that short time, the ten national newspapers published 598 articles on the case. An even bigger storm followed the June 2002 abduction of Elizabeth Smart from her parent’s upper-middle-class Utah home. Day after day for weeks, and then months, television shows like CNN’s Larry King Live talked about the case from every conceivable angle. With concern for abductions high, the media gave greater prominence to reports that even vaguely resembled the Smart case, which inevitably created the appearance of a rise in such incidents—a classic feedback loop. On Fox News, Bill O’Reilly declared 2002 “a summer of hell for America’s kids.” The kidnappings edged out the looming invasion of Iraq as the fourth-most-followed story of 2002, according to the Pew Research Center’s surveys, with four out of five Americans saying they followed “very closely” (49 percent) or “fairly closely” (30 percent). In May 2007, the disappearance of three-year-old Madeleine McCann, who was with her vacationing British parents in Portugal, resulted in massive media coverage not only in the United Kingdom but all across the Western world—a snapshot of the little girl made the cover of the May 28 edition of People magazine.

Entertainment media are not limited to actual incidents, of course, and that freedom has allowed books, TV, and movies to make stranger abductions a dramatic staple in works ranging from tawdry thrillers to high art. The best-selling novel The Lovely Bones opens with a girl telling the reader she was murdered on December 6, 1973, “before kids of all races and genders started appearing on milk cartons . . . when people believed things like that didn’t happen.”

Researchers have found—to no one’s surprise—that crime makes up a large and growing portion of the stories told by the news media. The numbers vary depending on the country, but most surveys show crime makes up about 10 to 30 percent of newspaper content, with quality newspapers at the low end of that range and tabloids at the top. National television news tends to carry more crime, and local TV more still. A survey of local television news in the United States by the Center for Media and Public Affairs found one story in five involved crime, making it by far the most popular subject.

Another consistent finding in the research is that the media focus heavily on individual acts and say little about broader contexts and issues. Reporters tell us about the little old lady held up at gunpoint. They don’t tell us how many little old ladies are held up at gunpoint, whether more or fewer are being held up than in the past, who is holding them up and why, or what policies might protect little old ladies. So we should be careful with our terms. The media actually pay very little attention to “crime.” It is “crimes” they can’t get enough of.

This has enormous consequences, one of which is a bias in favor of bad news that runs even deeper than the media’s usual bias in favor of bad news. Rising crime means more crimes are committed. It’s easy to reflect that— simply run more stories of people assaulted and murdered. But falling crime means fewer crimes are being committed, a trend that cannot be captured by stories of individual crimes because a crime that is not committed is not a story. And so simply because the media focus heavily on crimes while ignoring crime, rising crime will always get more far attention than falling crime.

To see how profound this bias is, imagine that a government agency releases a report on violence against intimate partners that reveals domestic assault has soared by nearly two-thirds over the past decade and is now at a record high. And now try to imagine the media completely ignoring this report. No news stories. No angry opinion columns. No feature stories examining the frightening trend. Of course, that would never happen. And yet, in December 2006, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics released a report that showed domestic assaults in the United States had declined by nearly two-thirds in the previous decade and were now at record lows. This astonishingly good news went almost completely unreported.

An even more dramatic example occurred in Toronto, in December 2005. The day after Christmas, with bargain-seeking shoppers crowding the streets, rival gang members crossed paths. Guns flashed, bullets raced, and a beautiful fifteen-year-old girl named Jane Creba was killed. The murder would have been a shock under any circumstances, but gang-related murders committed with handguns had been surging for months, and Canada was in the midst of a federal election. Inevitably—and not unreasonably— guns, gangs, and murder dominated public debate. Politicians pounded podiums and newspaper columnists raged. But the wave of gang killings had actually peaked prior to this awful crime and, with the election over and the gunfire lessening, the issue quickly and quietly faded. Still, the violence kept ebbing. By the end of 2006, gun murders had declined 46 percent. But this went almost unmentioned in the media. There were a few stories, of course, but they referred to the decline in passing, sometimes burying it in stories about other police issues, as if it were a statistical quirk of the sort that only policy wonks would care about. And so a surge in crime that inspired a deluge of emotional stories and an impassioned national debate declined and disappeared virtually unnoticed.

The media’s skewed picture of crime also extends to which crimes get ink and airtime. Murder is always the favorite. Some studies find it accounts for as much as half of all crime reporting in some media. The Center for Media and Public Affairs’ study of local TV news in the United States found 29 percent of all crime stories were about murders, with “non-fatal shootings” coming in a distant second at 7 percent. This pattern has been found in study after study, in many countries, for decades. Even in 1950s-era Britain—when the homicide rate was vanishingly small—“homicide was by far the most common type of crime reported” in newspapers, wrote criminologist Robert Reiner.

Violence that isn’t as dramatic as murder gets less attention. Still less is given to property crime. The result is a very clear pattern in reporting. The more heinous the crime, the more attention the media give it. Of course any crime may still be reported if a politician is making an issue of it or if the victims are old people, children, or pets. Similarly, the involvement of royalty or celebrities—as either victim or culprit—will draw reporters. But generally, nonviolent crimes lose to violent, and less bloody violence loses to more bloody. Hence, in the media, murder is king.

This may seem like a perfectly reasonable way of reporting crime, because it means the more serious a crime is, the more likely it will be reported, and it’s the more serious crimes people need to hear about. This is indisputably true. And it wouldn’t be such a problem if the media balanced these stories of crimes with a lot of good analysis of crime that provided the broad picture, but they don’t. So the media tell stories of one atrocity after another—a pedophile abducts and kills a boy, a disgruntled employee kills five—that eventually come together to create an image of crime that bears little resemblance to reality.

Think of crime as an Egyptian pyramid. Most of it is made up of incidents involving no violence, with only a little chunk on top being violent crime. Within that little chunk, there were 417,122 robberies, which is 3.6 percent of all crime. There were 93,934 rapes, or 0.8 percent of all crime. And murder, with 16,692 cases, accounted for just 0.14 percent of all recorded offenses in the United States. In the pyramid of crime, murder is only the tip of the point on top.

So the media image of crime is upside down. The crimes that are by far the most common are ignored, while the rarest crimes get by far the most attention. Gallup polls consistently find that about 20 percent of Americans say they “frequently” or “occasionally” worry about getting murdered despite the fact that only 0.0056 percent of Americans actually are murdered annually. The average American is three times as likely to be killed in a car crash. And bear in mind that this is in the country with by far the highest homicide rate in the Western world.

The habit of reporting the rare routinely and the routine rarely can be seen even within the category of murders. The media do not report every murder—even in a country like Australia, which had just 294 homicides in 2004-05—nor do they give equal attention to the murders they do report. “There’s an upside-down logic of press coverage in homicide where the nature of the news is to cover the man-bites-dog story,” Jill Leovy, a crime reporter with the Los Angeles Times, told NPR News. “And what you end up doing is covering the statistical fringe of homicide. You cover the very unlikely cases that don’t represent what’s really happening in Los Angeles County.” In practice, that means that if a poor, young black or Hispanic man murders a poor, young black or Hispanic man—a common scenario in Los Angeles—the newspaper is likely to give it only a tiny mention, or none at all. But if a poor, young black or Hispanic man kills a rich, old white woman—a very rare event—there’s a good chance that story will not only be reported, it will land on the front page.

The misrepresentation of crime victims is universal. “The most common victims of violence according to official crime statistics and victim surveys are poor, young black males,” notes Robert Reiner. “However, they figure in news reporting predominantly as perpetrators.” The media pay far more attention to incidents in which the victims are children, women, and old people, a tendency that is particularly misleading in the case of the elderly because they are by far the least likely to be victims of crime. Statistics Canada’s surveys have found that Canadians aged fifteen to twenty-four are twenty times more likely to be victims of any sort of crime than those sixtyfive and older. Even fifty-five- to sixty-four-year-olds were four times more likely to be victims of crime than senior citizens. In the United States, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that Americans aged fifty-five to sixty-four were five times more likely to be victims of a violent crime than seniors, while teens aged sixteen to nineteen were twenty-two times more likely to suffer violence. These figures are essential to understanding the risk, and yet I have never seen any of these statistics in news stories.

If the news media turn the reality of crime upside down, the entertainment media turn it upside down and shake it till coins drop from its pockets. “In most years, around 20 percent of all films are crime movies, and around half of all films have significant crime content,” writes Reiner. Of course not all crimes are the stuff of entertainment. Aside from daring jewel heists perpetrated by dashing thieves, property crime scarcely exists in fictional worlds. Murder is the alpha and omega of the fiction writer’s imagination, and it always has been. The authors of Prime Time: How TV Portrays American Culture conducted a content analysis of American television in the 1950s and found there were seven murders shown for every one hundred characters, which resulted in a homicide rate roughly 1,400 times higher than the actual homicide rate at the time. And these are not the boring murders of reality, which typically involve a poor, young man impulsively lashing out at another poor, young man without the slightest “malice aforethought.” No, these murders are the products of the creative genius of writers. Prime-time television is an endless Darwinian contest to create novel scenarios of human life abused and extinguished, with each killing a little more exotic, explicit, and divorced from reality. A decade ago, it would have been satirical to imagine a show about a killer who kills killers, but the remorseless logic of televisual homicide actually made it inevitable that such a thing would come to pass. It’s called Dexter, and it premiered to critical acclaim in 2006.

Ordinarily, we speak of news and entertainment as the two separate categories that make up the media. But in the case of crime, there is the third category of true crime, in which the cases are real but the ethos of quality journalism does not apply. Some true crime is unabashedly about amusing the audience, like Cops, the long-running television show that started in the United States but has spawned copies in many other countries. Nominally, it gives us insight into what a beat cop sees. In reality, it exists in order to deliver the thrilling sight of shirtless young men—always shirtless, for reasons no one has been able to explain—chased, taken down, and handcuffed. It is little more than a gentler, televised version of gladiatorial games.

The other stream of true crime takes itself much more seriously. In bookstores, it consists of biographies of serial killers and gangsters written by low-rent Mickey Spillanes. On television, it takes the form of Court TV and shows like The O’Reilly Factor, Nancy Grace, and America’s Most Wanted. The attitude that energizes the genre is summed up in the titles of the three books written by John Walsh, the host of America’s Most Wanted: Tears of Rage, No Mercy, and Public Enemies. Walsh, like Nancy Grace, is the victim of a horrific crime—in his case, the 1981 abduction and murder of his six-year-old son, Adam. Following his son’s murder, Walsh became an activist and promoted the idea, so widespread in the 1980s, that child abductions were epidemic. “Fifty thousand children disappear annually and are abducted by strangers for reasons of foul play,” he told Congress in the 1980s. “This country is littered with mutilated, decapitated, raped, and strangled children.” Walsh was instrumental in getting major federal legislation passed in 1982 and 1984. In 2006, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the disappearance of Walsh’s son, President Bush signed the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, which set up a national sex-offender registry. In the universe of “true crime,” virtually all crime is abduction, rape, or murder, all criminals are sociopathic beasts, and all children are in danger. Sad and horrible tales are the stock in trade. Accurate statistics are rarely or never mentioned.

With the media relentlessly misrepresenting the reality of crime, it is not surprising to find that people have some funny ideas about the issue. Julian Roberts, a criminologist at Oxford University, reviewed many of the studies on public perceptions and found that—in country after country— most people think “violent crime accounts for approximately half of all crime recorded by the police.” Research in Ohio, Roberts noted, found that only one person in five could provide an estimate of the violent crime rate that was anywhere near accurate, and “one-third of the respondents provided an estimate of the violent crime rate that was at least six times higher than the actual rate.”

The authors of crime surveys often sound a little bemused when they write about this. “Despite the number of crimes estimated by the [British Crime Survey] falling in recent years,” notes the 2005-06 BCS, “63 percent of people thought that crime in the country as a whole had increased.” This is a startling contrast with reality: Between 1995 and 2005, the British Crime Survey recorded a 44 percent decline in crime.

Still, in all the surveys there is a minority that has a rough grasp of the facts. And many people’s views do change in tandem with major rises or falls in crime. During the great crime drop of the 1990s, for example, Gallup found the percentage of Americans who said crime was declining went from 4 percent in 1993 to 43 percent in 2001. Media analysis of crime— there is a little—probably had a hand in that. But so did what people saw with their own eyes and heard from their friends and neighbors. Personal experience is a major influence, and we must not forget the innate desire we have to conform to the opinions of those around us. It’s easy to forget this when discussing the bedazzling power of the media, but it’s always true.

The relative influence of the media and what we recognize in our own lives can be seen in a curious fact about crime surveys. When researchers ask people if crime is increasing or decreasing in the nation, they get one answer. When they ask if it’s increasing or decreasing in your area, they get quite a different answer—almost always a more positive answer. In the British Crime Survey that found 63 percent who said crime was rising in Britain, 42 percent said it was rising in their local area. The annual Gallup poll on crime in the United States finds the same gap year after year, always with opinions about local crime being rosier than the national situation. In 2000, when 47 percent said crime was rising in the United States, only 26 percent of Americans said the same of their own area. In part, this gap is the result of the fact that when people judge the local situation, they have more resources to rely on. They have their own experience and that of their family, and they have what they hear in conversations. But in judging what’s happening across the nation, they have to rely on what the media tell them, and what the media tell them is that murder and mayhem are rampant.

The big question is whether the excessively grim and frightening image of crime that so many people have courtesy of the media translates into fear of crime. Sociologists have wrestled with this for decades. For the most part, they have proved there is an important correlation: The more you read and watch, the more you fear. That’s what psychology would predict. A steady diet of vivid, violent images allows Gut—using the Example Rule—to conclude the danger is high. And crime stories are drenched with powerful, awful emotions that will—thanks to the Good-Bad Rule—strengthen Gut’s sense that this is a serious threat.

But social science can be tricky stuff. The simple fact that people who read and watch more tend to fear more does not prove that reading and watching cause fear. It could be that being fearful causes people to read and watch more. So far, no one’s really been able to untangle this and show what causes what. Most experts have come to the sensible conclusion that it goes both ways: If you read and watch more, you fear more; and if you fear more, you read and watch more. “They reinforce each other,” in the words of Aaron Doyle, a sociologist at Carleton University.

This is actually more disturbing than a model in which the media simply scare the bejeezus out of people. If people who fear crime turn to the media, they will get more images and feelings that amplify their fears. Those amplified fears would, in turn, lead them to read and watch more. This has the potential to create a spiral of anxiety. And the effect of fear-saturated media may not be limited to our feelings about crime. Recall the experiment conducted by psychologists Amos Tversky and Eric Johnson in which they asked Stanford University students to read a tragic story of a death caused by leukemia, fire, or murder and then asked them to rate a list of twelve risks. In that experiment, reading the tragic story had the unsurprising effect of raising people’s perceptions of the danger posed by the cause of death in the story, but Tversky and Johnson also discovered that reading the tragic story caused people to raise their estimates for all risks, not only the one portrayed in the story. The fire story caused an overall increase in perceived risk of 14 percent. The leukemia story raised it by 73 percent. And the murder story drove it up 144 percent.

We live in an environment saturated with media offering stories of abduction, rape, and murder, of cruelty and innocence savaged, of loss and lingering sorrow. Head may understand that these stories—some fictional, some from far away, few from the communities I live and work in—tell me little about the risks faced by me and my family. But that’s not what Gut thinks when it watches television.

Humans have been telling each other stories about crime since Cain slew Abel, and for good reason. “We are social mammals whose brains are highly specialized for thinking about others,” wrote Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, in the Los Angeles Times. “Understanding what others are up to— what they know and want, what they are doing and planning—has been so crucial to the survival of our species that our brains have developed an obsession with all things human. We think about people and their intentions; talk about them; look for and remember them.” It’s not a coincidence that one of the most popular magazines in the world is called People.

Nor is it a coincidence that People’s endless stories about celebrities are interspersed with stories about crimes. Celebrities and murders go together not because movie stars are especially likely to kill or be killed but because our interest in celebrity tattle and bloody crimes are both manifestations of the same human instinct to observe people and think about why they do what they do. Crimes are particularly intriguing for us because, from the perspective of survival, they’re especially important. Living in little bands of thirty wandering the plains of Africa, our ancestors depended on cooperation to stay alive. Cooperation required rules, so understanding how and why people broke rules was crucial to survival. It was also vital to instill the message that rule-breakers are identified and held responsible for their transgressions, which is why stories about crime routinely come to that audience-pleasing conclusion.

The instinct to gossip about crime is a powerful thing. In the same interview in which Los Angeles Times crime reporter Jill Leovy complained about the excessive coverage given to wildly unusual murders, she described how she attended an immersion project with an inner-city homicide unit. “They had around seventy murders that year, just running on homicides all the time.” At the time, Scott Peterson—a wealthy, handsome, young white California man—was being tried for the murder of his pregnant wife, Laci. The Peterson trial was a frenzy, dominating cable news and talk shows. There were books about it and endless articles in newspapers and magazines. It was precisely the sort of binge coverage of an extremely unusual case that Leovy loathes. “And in the morning in the [homicide] unit,” she recalled, “we would drink coffee and talk about what was new with the Laci Peterson case. And then move on to dozens of other homicides. It was a little bit surreal.”

What’s particularly intriguing about our interest in crime stories is how most such stories are obviously lacking in any objective importance, and how little that matters to those who follow them. When Madeleine McCann vanished in Portugal, countless commentators tried to extract some meaning from the tragedy, but in reality the tragedy said little or nothing about parenting, safety, or anything else that might be relevant to the tens of millions of people who followed the story all across the Western world. It was pure drama. The shocking nature of the crime gave the story its initial prominence, but then it became an established narrative sustained by a steady stream of relatively trivial information and speculation. Month after month, people followed it, and the cast of the drama became as familiar as that of the characters in a soap opera—which is essentially what the crime had become.

As with all stories of loss, emotions are essential to crime stories, but the emotions crime stirs are often more potent and of a different quality. That’s because they conjure not only sorrow, but anger. If a little boy in a German city falls in front of a tram and is killed, it is a tragedy and any feeling person will experience a tinge of sorrow on hearing of it. The newspapers in that city may briefly mention the death, but that is the only notice it will receive and the family will grieve alone. But if that same little boy gets on the tram, meets a pedophile, and is raped and murdered, it is not merely a tragedy. It is an outrage, and it may become news all over the world.

It is anger that distinguishes our feelings about crime. The burning sense that someone who hurts someone else must be punished and order restored is, remember, hardwired by evolution. It doesn’t matter if the offender will be a danger in the future or not. He must be punished and the scales balanced. It’s not about safety. It’s about justice.

Justice and safety are two separate issues. Looking at the video of the German pedophile luring a boy to his death, it is perfectly logical to say that this criminal must be caught and severely punished—while also acknowledging that this incident tells us nothing about the safety of the average child in Germany or elsewhere. But the unconscious mind isn’t so fine-tuned. Gut only knows it is experiencing the intensely negative feelings of sorrow and anger, and when it runs those feelings through the Good-Bad Rule, it concludes that the risk of an attack like this is high, or that this threat is so awful that probability is irrelevant. In either case, Gut sounds the alarm. In this way, the line between justice and safety is erased and the feelings we have about justice dominate our conclusions about safety.

This effect was demonstrated by Joseph Arvai and Robyn Wilson, researchers at Ohio State University, in an unlikely experiment. Participants were told that they were in charge of a state park that had a fund of $100,000 set aside to deal with unexpected problems. Now, they were told, a problem has come up. Bearing in mind that any money spent on this problem won’t be available for future contingencies, how much of the fund should be spent?

One group was told the problem in question was deer overpopulation. Deer were eating so much they were destroying plant life. Worse, they were a menace on the roads, causing collisions with visitors’ cars that damaged the cars and, occasionally, the people inside. On a ten-point scale, the estimated risk posed by deer to human safety is four, the risk to property five, and the risk to environmental health four. So how much of the $100,000 would they spend to deal with this? A second group was told the problem was crime—specifically, theft from cars, vandalism that damages property and plant life, and purse snatchings that sometimes caused minor injuries to the victims. In this case, the risk posed to human safety was rated to be three, the risk to property four, and the risk to environmental health four. Finally, a third group was told both problems—deer overpopulation and crime—had come up. They were also told the precise risk assessments above, which showed the crime problem was a little less serious than the deer problem.

The researchers expected—and they confirmed in questions during the experiment—that deer overpopulation is not something that has a lot of emotional meaning for people. But crime is another matter. Vandalism and property crime may be not be rape and murder, but they do press emotional buttons. This meant there were two forms of information available in this experiment, emotions and numbers. Ordinarily, we might expect emotion to have the edge, but the participants—ordinary people from the town of Eugene, Oregon—were hardly in circumstances that encouraged them to follow their feelings. They were sitting in a quiet room, taking part in scientific research that involved imagining themselves to be bureaucrats managing a budget. If any environment could steer people to the numbers, this was it.

Participants answered individually and the results were averaged. The group that dealt with deer overpopulation said they would spend $41,828. The group that handled the crime problem said they would spend $43,469. This made sense. Both groups had nothing to compare their judgments to, so they both chose a number that provided a good chunk of cash but left more than that for future problems.

Still, in this version of the experiment the numbers for the two problems weren’t all that different. What if the numbers for the crime problem were very small and the deer numbers very big? Would that be enough to overcome the influence of crime’s emotional edge? Arvai and Wilson did the whole experiment again with different people, but this time the three numerical ratings for the deer problem were nine, ten, and ten. Crime, however, was rated a mere three, four, and four. The message told by the numbers was unmistakable: The deer overpopulation was practically a crisis, while the crime was annoying but not all that serious.

Once again, the groups that evaluated the two problems separately chose to spend roughly the same amounts of money. But the group that dealt with both problems did things a little differently than the first time around: They essentially provided equal amounts of money to the deer and crime problems. That’s quite an amazing result. The numbers for the deer problem were 2.5 to 3 times higher than for the crime problem, and yet people still gave the two problems equal funding.

This result is a textbook example of Head and Gut having a conversation and coming up with an answer that doesn’t quite make sense. It starts with the phrase “deer overpopulation.” People hear it and they feel nothing. Gut shrugs. “It’s up to you,” Gut says to Head. Head looks at the numbers, thinks about it, and comes to a rational conclusion. But then people hear “crime” and “purse snatching” and “vandalism.” They see some young punk breaking into parked cars or knocking old ladies to the ground. They feel something and it’s not pleasant. This time, Gut doesn’t shrug. Using the Good-Bad Rule, Gut concludes the risk is high. Forget Bambi, Gut says, deal with this. But Head intervenes. The numbers show deer overpopulation is a far more serious problem, so Head takes Gut’s conclusion and adjusts it. But, as usual, the adjustment is not enough to bring the conclusion in line with what strict logic says it should be and equal amounts of money are spent on problems the numbers say are very unequal.

The media are often accused of “man bites dog” coverage, always seeking the novel and bizarre, and there’s much to that charge, of course. Humans are wired to notice the unusual and reporters are human. Sensation and sales also play a role. But the scale of emotion is a more critical factor in the media’s distorted portrait of crime. On the evening news recently, I saw video from a security camera that showed a 101-year-old woman being punched and having her purse stolen. I felt a wave of disgust and anger, as anyone would, but it is doubtful this broadcast was a calculated attempt to make the audience feel disgust and anger. Instead, the people who put the news together felt the same disgust and anger as everyone else and those feelings convinced them this was important. If the victim had been a young man, neither the reporters nor the audience would have reacted as strongly—which is why the robbery of young men rarely makes the news but attacks on centenarians do.

We feel more in response to violent crime than property crime. We feel more in response to murder than a punch in the nose. We feel more in response to the murder of a little girl than a young man. And truth be told, we feel more for victims we can personally relate to than those on the far side of racial and class lines. The media’s image of crime may turn reality upside down, but it is a very accurate reflection of our feelings.

As hard as it may be to imagine today, crime has not always been a staple of high-level democratic politics, even in the United States. In 1964, Republican Barry Goldwater was the first candidate to make crime and punishment part of a campaign for the presidency. In 1968, Richard Nixon made it central to his successful run for the White House, and the prominence of crime in electoral campaigns—at all levels—grew steadily in the decades that followed.

In 1988, crime played a central role in getting George H.W. Bush elected president. In fact, one crime did it: In 1986, Willie Horton, a Massachusetts convict serving life but out of prison on a brief furlough, broke into a home, tied up a man, and raped his wife. The governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis, supported the revocation of furloughs for lifers, but it made no difference when, in 1988, he was the Democratic nominee for the presidency. Republican spinmeister Roger Ailes (now president of Fox News) designed an ad showing a revolving door at the entrance of a Massachusetts prison, suggesting the Horton case was typical. The fact that Horton was black also helped. An ad appeared showing Horton’s glowering mug shot. It was denounced as racist, and the Bush campaign claimed it had nothing to do with it, but the damage was done, and a single crime, skilfully manipulated, had made a major contribution to deciding who would hold the most powerful office on earth.

That much of the story is infamous. Less well known is that it was not a Republican who first spotted the political value of Willie Horton’s crime and used it against Dukakis. It was Dukakis’s rival for the Democratic nomination, a senator from Tennessee by the name of Al Gore. No party or ideology has a monopoly on the use of crime as a political weapon.

A key moment in Bill Clinton’s bid for the presidency was his decision to break off his campaign and return to Arkansas and his role of governor in order to personally preside over the execution of a man so mentally retarded that after he ate what he was told would be his last meal, he asked guards to set aside a slice of pecan pie “for later.” After the execution, Clinton observed that “I can be nicked on a lot but nobody can say I’m soft on crime.” He was right, and as president he stuck to a tough line, signing into law a long list of punitive bills and presiding over such spectacular growth in the prison population that the United States passed Russia as the nation with the world’s highest incarceration rate. He may have regretted it, though. Mandatory minimum sentences are “unconscionable” and “we really need an examination of our entire prison policy,” Clinton told a reporter from Rolling Stone magazine—two weeks before he left office.

The basic technique of the politics of crime is little different than that used by security companies selling home alarms or pharmaceutical companies peddling cholesterol pills: Raise fear in the public, or amplify existing fears, then offer to protect the public against that which they fear. Naturally, the crime-fighting policies offered must be attuned to the primal feelings involved. Intervention in the lives of troubled children and families may be a proven method of reducing crime years later—when the children become teenagers—but it neither delivers results now nor satisfies the craving for retribution. Better to go with the old standards: more cops and tougher sentences.

Perhaps not surprisingly, University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt discovered that American police officers tend to be disproportionately hired in years when there is a campaign for the mayor’s office or governor’s mansion. And tougher sentences became such a fixture of American politicking in the 1980s and 1990s that the prison population soared from 400,000 in 1980 to 2.1 million by 2000.

The latest flavor in American crime politics is the sex offender, a special breed of criminal said to—as Alberto Gonzales put it—“lie in wait, studying, planning to ensnare and violate the innocent.” Bravely denouncing the evil lurking in the shadows, politicians promise to intervene and defend all that is good and pure—to “protect our children,” as they inevitably put it. This genre of political marketing was elegantly summed up in an Internet ad produced for New York senator Caesar Trunzo: Newspaper headlines flash one after the other—“Accused of Making Girl His Sex Slave, Perv Just Can’t Stop: Judge”—until bold letters appear, asking “Who’s Protecting Your Children?” As we’ve seen, the vast majority of abductions are committed by parents and other relatives, not strangers, and the same is true of all forms of sexual abuse. A massive Department of Justice study of offenders serving time for sex offenses against children found “88 percent had a prior relationship with their victims.” The numbers are similar in other countries. But politicians focus on the 12 percent, not the 88 percent, because winning the votes of parents requires a threat “out there” that the politician can promise to fend off.

Press conferences in which politicians are flanked by grieving parents are a standard feature in this brand of political marketing. And legislation named for children who died under circumstances that are both exceptionally awful and exceptionally rare—something that would have been considered unspeakably distasteful in another era—has become routine. One of the latest to sweep the United States is Jessica’s Law, named after Jessica Lunsford, a nine-year-old girl whose abduction and murder in 2005 by convicted sex offender John Couey was national news. The first Jessica’s Law was passed in Florida in 2005, but because it was then the toughest in the country—it mandated an automatic minimum of twenty-five years in prison for first-time sex offenders—it set a new standard and spread rapidly. The thinking behind Jessica’s Law is that any sex offender—a term that covers everything from violent pedophiles to an eighteen-year-old who has consensual sex with his fifteen-year-old girlfriend—is an irredeemable creature whose crimes will inevitably escalate to raping and murdering children if he isn’t taken out of circulation. This belief is popular but wrong: Many studies, including those of the U.S. Department of Justice, show sex offenders are actually less likely to commit another crime after release than other sorts of criminals. John Couey is hardly typical of sex offenders.

Numbers are another important part of political rhetoric. We have already seen the “50,000 predators on the Internet” statistic. A similar figure puts the number of children solicited for sex at one in five. “If you’re a parent and your child is using the Internet, it is very likely that your child has been solicited for activity of a sexual manner. That’s a startling piece of information for parents,” said Republican senator Judd Gregg, the chairman of a congressional subcommittee. But notice what’s missing: Who is doing this soliciting? And what does “soliciting” mean? Those who repeat this statistic routinely omit this key information, leaving people to fill in the blanks with scary images of children in chat rooms with middle-aged pedophiles.

The source of this number is a survey conducted by University of New Hampshire researchers, and what it actually found is considerably less frightening than that unadorned number. First, the number is actually falling. When the survey was first conducted in 2000, it came up with the one-in-fivefigure. But when it was repeated in 2006, it had declined to a little less than one in seven. More important, the survey, which covered ten- to seventeen-year-olds, found that 81 percent of all solicitations involved teens fourteen and older. In fact, “no ten-year-olds and only three percent of eleven-year-olds were solicited.” It’s impossible to know the actual ages of those doing the soliciting, but the definition used by the researchers included any sexually themed communication—a lewd remark would do— from an adult, or an unwanted sexual communication from a fellow teenager. Fourteen percent of solicitations even came from “offline acquaintances, mostly peers.” Solicited teens were also asked to rate how they felt after the incident: Two-thirds said it didn’t bother them.

The researchers attempted to separate the more serious incidents by creating the category of “aggressive solicitation,” which involved at least an invitation to meet or to communicate by telephone or mail. Only 4 percent of teens said that had happened to them—and remember that teenagers, not balding perverts, may be behind these incidents as well. As for actual luring—the stuff of parental nightmares—the two versions of the survey uncovered a total of two cases in which youths met with someone who solicited them online and were sexually assaulted. That’s two out of 3,001 interviews. Clearly, these surveys show online safety is a serious issue, but they are not nearly as frightening as hearing a politician say “one in five” children has been “solicited.”

Having warned of a threat, politicians must also come up with new ways to deal with it. In one month in 2006, the Louisiana state legislature passed fourteen laws targeting sex offenders (an output one state senator justified on the grounds that “every time you turn on the news, some kid is getting abducted, raped, and murdered”). But after giving first offenders an automatic twenty-five-year minimum sentence; after passing laws that allow for offenders who have served their sentence to be imprisoned indefinitely if they are deemed dangerous; after ordering released offenders to register and making their names, faces, addresses, and places of employment available on the Internet; after barring offenders from many forms of work; after banning them from living within 1,000 feet of schools, parks, and so many other places that they are often rendered homeless and driven out of town; after requiring released offenders to wear satellite tracking devices for the rest of their lives—after all that, what’s left? It’s a dilemma. The latest rage is for measures dealing with Internet luring, but those opportunities won’t last long and anyone aspiring to high office had better have something more to offer. In the 2006 gubernatorial race in Georgia, one candidate—the lieutenant governor—called for a crackdown on Internet luring. That put his opponent—the governor—in a bind. He couldn’t simply second the proposal. So the following day, the governor announced that if he were reelected he would authorize juries to sentence child molesters to death.

Few of these policies are inspired by criminological research, and even fewer actually contribute to public safety. Sex-offender registries, for example, may be wildly popular, but there’s simply no reliable evidence that they work. When a task force convened by Canada’s federal government reviewed all available evidence in 2000, it concluded a registry “would not significantly improve” public safety, and the money spent on a registry would do more good elsewhere. The government went ahead anyway, and the minister in charge privately apologized to the civil servants handling the file. “It’s politics,” he told them.

The politicization of crime, and the “get tough” spirit that goes along with it, is far more advanced in the United States than elsewhere, but as British sociologist David Garland and others have shown, it is showing up elsewhere in the Western world. Many of the new American crime policies— three-strikes laws, mandatory minimum sentences, supermax prisons, sex offender registries—have been introduced or discussed everywhere from Australia to the Netherlands. In the French presidential election of 2007, the Socialist candidate tried to diminish the appeal of Nicolas Sarkozy’s tough talk on law and order by promising to build boot camps for young punks. In Canada, American tough-on-crime policies and language—“zero tolerance,” “truth in sentencing,” “adult time for adult crime”—are popping up in the media and political platforms with increasing frequency, while the reform agenda of the current Conservative government reads like an American campaign brochure from the 1990s. In the British election of 2005, Conservative leader Michael Howard pushed the fear of crime so fiercely that the Association of Chief Police Officers took the unprecedented step of rebuking him for misleading the public about the level of crime. Tony Blair’s Labour government followed the American lead in creating a sex-offender registry and, in 2007, toyed with making the information in it available to the public, as it is in the United States; they even planned to name the legislation “Sarah’s Law” in honor of a murdered girl.

“Violent crime is accelerating at an alarming pace,” concluded a 2006 report entitled A Gathering Storm from the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF). PERF bills itself as a Washington, D.C., think tank, but with a board composed entirely of big-city police chiefs it is effectively the chiefs’ Washington lobby. “In 2005, there were 30,607 more violent crimes committed compared to 2004. This is the largest single-year increase for violent crime in fourteen years.” That may sound frightening, but the truth is the increase in 2004 was—by PERF’s own numbers—only 2.3 percent over the previous year. The reason it was “the largest single-year increase” in fourteen years is simply that violent crime had fallen or been flat for fourteen years. “If left unchecked,” the report continues, “violent crime may once again reach the heights of the early 1990s, which at their peak in 1991 left more than 24,500 dead and thousands more injured.” Thus, a small increase in violent crime following the longest, most sustained drop in crime in modern history means we absolutely must act now or tens of thousands will die. And since the inadequate funding of police departments is one of the key reasons that crime is soaring, according to the chiefs, it is essential that police budgets be increased. Incidentally, A Gathering Storm was funded by Motorola—manufacturers of radios and many other products purchased by police departments when budgets permit.

American police are certainly not unique in making use of crime. Julian Fantino, chief of police in Toronto between 2000 and 2005, and currently commissioner of the Ontario Provincial Police, is notorious for deploying rhetorical truncheons in support of his calls for longer sentences and tougher prisons. “The criminal justice system is broken. It does not work. We have the victims to prove it.” As Toronto’s police chief, that was Fantino’s mantra, repeated at every opportunity. When critics responded that crime was not out of control, that it was in fact dropping, Fantino was dismissive. “For all those people talking about crime [being] down,” he said in November 2003, “well, it may be down in the numbers, but violent crime, it’s been up, it’s been going up for years.” Actually, violent crime had been falling for years, but that wasn’t helpful to a police chief who wanted laws changed.

Agencies are another source of hype. Whether inside or outside government, agencies very often have a direct interest in seeing the profile of their particular issue raised, whether it is a sincere commitment to advancing a cause or simply a pitch for bigger budgets. The U.S. Justice Department, for example, often quotes the statistics on Internet sexual solicitation of minors mentioned earlier. So does the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (a private nonprofit group cofounded by America’s Most Wanted host John Walsh and created by an act of the U.S. Congress). But these organizations don’t say that the research does not mean what people naturally assume it means—that one in five children on the Internet have been contacted by pedophiles. In a February 2007 press release, UNICEF, the United Nations’ child welfare agency, went one step further: “One in five children who use computer chat rooms has been approached over the Internet by a pedophile,” the agency stated.

For prison guards, job security comes from rising crime and tougher laws—or at least the perception of it, which is enough to get those tougher laws. In California, the guards’ union is a legendary political machine. In the 1980s, it provided most of the funding to create the new victims’ rights organizations that became key players in the push for longer sentences. The union funded the victorious “yes” side when the state’s ferocious three-strikes law—the one that has locked away petty thieves for life—was put to a statewide vote in 1994, and it funded the victorious “no” side when there was a vote to narrow the law modestly a decade later. California’s prisons have been at double maximum capacity for years, even though the state built new prisons at a feverish pace. For guards, overcrowding means overtime, and in California, overtime typically means $37 an hour. According to Daniel Macallair of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco, a liberal NGO in San Francisco that tracks the union’s activities, “it is not uncommon for California prison guards to earn over $100,000 a year, including their overtime.”

California’s prison guards are also generous to politicians. One beneficiary was Gray Davis, the Democratic governor of California. In 2002, Davis responded to a grave fiscal crisis by cutting budgets in education, health care, and many other areas. At the same time, he agreed to a new contract giving prison guards a 37.7 percent increase in pay and more vacation. The governor stoutly denied that he was influenced in any way by the $3 million he received in campaign contributions from the guards’ union.

Bob Stuber, the “family safety expert” interviewed on Anderson Cooper’s show, is a former California police officer whose main line of work is presenting what his Web site calls “the Safe Escape show—a live multimedia program that empowers children and parents to make split-second, lifesaving decisions when suddenly confronted with unexpected danger.” A video disc—Safe Escape: 50 Ways to Prevent Abduction—is also available for $25, plus $4.99 shipping and handling.

Stuber is all over television. He has appeared on The O’Reilly Factor, America’s Most Wanted and the Today show. He has been on Oprah. And as a consultant for ABC, he helped produce a series of Primetime Live specials about child abduction, rape, and school shootings. “The possibility of a school shooting has become a serious concern at schools across the United States,” correspondent Chris Cuomo says to open Primetime’s November 10, 2005, show. “The issue of safety’s a big issue,” the principal of a high school in Shawnee, Oklahoma, tells the reporter. “I mean, it’s one of the primary issues of our school and every school that I know of.” The school has an armed police officer on duty at all times, and it conducts regular lockdown drills. So Primetime put that security to the test, with the help of Bob Stuber.

“The school staff and students were asked to behave just as they would if there were an armed intruder in the school,” Cuomo tells viewers as teens rush through the halls during a lockdown drill. It all goes well and everyone’s satisfied. They then prepare to do the drill a second time, except the students aren’t told that Stuber and an assistant will play the part of killers stalking the halls. “You’re dead!” Stuber shouts at bewildered teens. “You’re dead!”

The program then shifted to Stuber explaining what teens can do to save themselves from armed maniacs. Never go in a room without windows, he said. Pour liquid soap on the floor. “You get to do what nobody else ever gets to do in this situation,” Stuber tells the kids. “You get to do it again.” So the kids do the lockdown once more, they follow Stuber’s advice, and everyone feels America’s kids are safer than before.

Are they really? In the 1997-98 school year, thirty-four students were killed in the United States. In 2004-05—the latest year for which data are available—there were twenty-two homicides. Each homicide represents a tragedy, but these numbers should be kept firmly in perspective. For one thing, vastly more young people are killed outside school. In 1997-98, for every one young person killed in a school, fifty-three were killed elsewhere. Six years later, for every one killing inside, there were seventy-five outside. The enormous size of America’s school population must also be considered. In 1997-98, there were about 52 million kids in school, and with a number that large it is inevitable that even the most fantastically rare danger will strike somewhere. The simple fact is, the average American student had a 0.00006 percent chance of being murdered at school in 1997-98. That’s 1 in 1,529,412. And the risk has shrunk since then.

These numbers come from an annual report called Indicators of School Crime and Safety, which Congress demanded after the 1997 “Jonesboro massacre” first brought the issue of school shootings to national prominence. Indicators of School Crime and Safety also tracks what it calls “serious violent crime”—meaning rape, sexual assault, robbery, and assault with a weapon. In 1994, the rate of such crimes in schools was 13 per 1,000 students. That number is a bit misleading, of course, because it is the average across all American schools, and there are big differences between poor, inner-city schools and those in wealthy suburbs or rural regions. Regardless, that rate didn’t last. It fell steadily through the 1990s and by 2004 it was 4 per 1,000 students—less than one-third the level of a decade earlier. In 1993, 12 percent of kids told surveyors they had carried a weapon of some kind onto school property within the last thirty days; a decade later, that had fallen to 6 percent.

Of course this isn’t people’s sense of reality—thanks mainly to the fact that on April 20, 1999, two heavily armed teenagers walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. They murdered one teacher and twelve students, wounded twenty-four, and stunned hundreds of millions of people around the world. The Columbine massacre got massive news coverage. The Pew Research Center found that almost seven out of ten Americans said they followed the event “very closely,” making it by far the biggest story of 1999 and the third-biggest story of the entire decade. The biggest story the previous year was the Jonesboro massacre.

These back-to-back horrors created a feedback loop of monstrous proportions. The media turned even trivial school safety incidents into national and international news, usually accompanied with the comments of “security experts” who talked as if civil war had broken out inside every school. “Zero tolerance” policies—ordering students suspended or expelled for even the slightest violation of antiviolence rules—were expanded and fiercely enforced. The term “lockdown” moved from prison jargon to standard English as it became common to conduct drills in which students imagined armed maniacs in the halls. Money shifted from books and maintenance to metal detectors, cameras, and guards.

For parents, it was a frightening time. The media and the people around them were all but unanimous that the threat was serious, and Gut—following the Example Rule and the Good-Bad Rule—emphatically agreed. Head would have struggled to correct that feeling under any circumstances, but with the media failing to provide the statistics that put the risk in perspective, it had little reason to intervene.

The result of this one-sided mental debate showed in opinion polls. Shortly after the Jonesboro massacre, an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that 71 percent of Americans said it was likely or very likely that a school shooting would happen in their community, while a USA Today poll taken following the Columbine massacre got almost the same result. One month after Columbine, a Gallup poll found that 52 percent of parents feared for their children’s safety at school; five months later, that number was almost unchanged at 47 percent.

As hideous as the Columbine massacre was, it didn’t change the fact that most schools, and most students in them, were perfectly safe—a fact that politicians could have hammered home but did not. Instead, there were endless speeches blaming bad parenting, violent movies, or Goth music for leading youth astray. In part, that’s because of a calculation every political adviser makes in crises like these: The politician who says the event is tragic but doesn’t change the fact that we remain safe will be hit by his opponents with the accusation that he does not understand how serious the situation is, or worse, that he does not care. It’s a huge political risk, with no reward for those who take it. Few do. And so politicians do not struggle to quell the “unreasoning fear” Roosevelt warned against. They embrace and amplify it.

The furor after Columbine faded eventually, but in the fall of 2006, the whole terrible scenario—from tragedy to panic—was revisited. On September 13, a former student entered Dawson College in Montreal with a rifle. One student was killed, nineteen injured. On September 27, a fifty-three-year-old man entered a high school in Colorado, took six girls hostage and killed one. Two days later, a ninth grader in Wisconsin shot his principal to death. And on October 2, a thirty-two-year-old man entered a primary school in Pennsylvania and shot to death five girls. “This week’s school shootings in Amish country, in which five children died, are just the latest in a seemingly never-ending string of spectacular mass murders to hit the headlines of the United States,” a breathless correspondent reported in Britain’s The Independent.

The feedback loop cranked up, and once again it looked as if American schools were under siege. The Bush administration responded by convening a high-profile conference to discuss school safety on October 10, which may have been an effective political move but only added to the sense of crisis. Schools across the United States reviewed emergency response plans, barred their doors, and ran lockdown drills.

On December 4, the latest version of the government’s report on school crime and safety was released. It was no different than all the earlier reports. Kids are far safer inside school walls than outside, it showed. Violence was 50 percent lower than a decade earlier, and the rate of serious violent crime was down by more than two-thirds. The report also showed yet again that a student’s risk of being murdered in school was de minimis—so tiny it was effectively zero. This report, like those that preceded it, went virtually unreported.

In the 2006 version of Gallup’s annual survey of American opinions about crime, “fear for school-aged children’s physical safety at school” was found to be the top crime concern. One in five Americans said they “frequently” worry that their school-aged children will be physically harmed at school. Another one in five said they worry “occasionally.”

When we succumb to wildly improbable fears, there are consequences. Lock all the doors and treat every visitor as a potential homicidal maniac and a school’s connections to the community are cut, a tangible loss because, as research shows, schools function best when their community connections are strong. Spend money on metal detectors, guards, and consultants who tell kids how to flee gunmen, and that money can’t be spent on books, teachers, and everything else kids really do need.

There are less obvious costs as well. In August 2006—a month before school shootings returned to the headlines and the whole panic cranked up again—the American Psychological Association adopted a resolution calling for schools to modify “zero tolerance” discipline because research showed this approach “can actually increase bad behavior and also lead to higher drop-out rates.” In March 2007, the American Civil Liberties Union issued a report that described the police presence in New York City’s public schools as “massive and aggressive.” Every morning, the report noted, students line up and wait to go through metal detectors. “It used to take me an extra hour and a half to wait in line for the scans, so I would have to leave my home really early in the morning and then wait forever on the sidewalk outside of school,” says an eighteen-year-old student. “The scans make you feel like an animal, like less of a person. You even start to become suspicious of yourself because the officers treat you like a criminal.”

The better-safe-than-sorry attitude—driven as it is by unreasoning fear—can even result in a reduction of the very thing it values above all else. On October 20, 2006, in the midst of the nationwide panic over school shootings, an eighteen-year-old was shot and critically injured a block away from a middle school in Asbury Park, New Jersey. It was clear from the beginning that the shooting had nothing to do with the school, and yet city officials ordered five public schools closed for two days. “Our schools are not equipped with metal detectors,” an official told the New York Times. “If we kept them open, we risk having another Columbine.” One councilman spotted the flaw in this thinking. “I think it would be safer for the kids to be in school,” he said. He was indisputably right.

Whether the phantom fear is school shooters or strangers lurking in bushes, the damage is all too real. Kidscape, a child safety NGO, found in a 1993 survey that British parents’ greatest fear was the abduction of their children by strangers. A poll by the NOP research firm in October 2004 found that three-quarters of British parents believe the risks of children playing outside are growing, and two-thirds say they are anxious whenever their children leave the house. One-third of children never go out alone. Inevitably, more children spend time doing nothing—almost half of British children, according to the survey, spent three hours or more sitting and staring at a television or computer. They are being raised like “battery chickens, ” the director of one child-welfare agency said.

We can only speculate about the consequences of raising children this way, but many experts are alarmed. In 2007, a group of 270 child psychologists and therapists from the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and Australia insisted in an open letter to the British newspaper the Daily Telegraph that “outdoor, unstructured, loosely supervised play” was essential to child development and its loss—due in part to “parental anxiety about ‘stranger danger’ ”—may be behind “an explosion in children’s diagnosable mental health problems.”

Admittedly, this is largely speculation, but it is still a more substantial concern than stranger abductions and other popular fears. And with boys and girls continuing to be taught that every stranger is a threat, with entire generations being told that danger lurks around every corner, it’s only a matter of time before we have more evidence about what this is doing to the children who become men and women, and to the societies they form.

Of course, this is the opposite of what most people believe, and not without reason. Most people know that crime started rising rapidly in the 1960s, got worse in the 1970s, and peaked in the 1980s. In the mid-1990s, crime trends in most countries either flattened or dropped substantially (even dramatically, in Canada and the United States), but there is still more crime now than in the 1950s. In the United States, the homicide rate was 5.6 per 100,000 population in 2005, compared to 4.1 in 1955. In England and Wales, the rate was 1.4 in 2005, more than double the 0.63 of 1955.

Here’s a story that might have made headlines in 1278 if there had been newspapers in thirteenth-century London: “Symonet Spinelli, Agnes his mistress and Geoffrey Bereman were together in Geoffrey’s house when a quarrel broke out among them; Symonet left the house and returned later the same day with Richard Russel his Servant to the house of Geoffrey le Gorger, where he found Geoffrey; a quarrel arose and Richard and Symonet killed Geoffrey.” Historian James Buchanan Given unearthed this story while sifting through the records of London’s “eyre court”—records that are so meticulous Given was able to calculate London’s homicide rate in 1278. It was 15 per 100,000 population. That is almost eleven times higher than the current rate.

Since Given completed his study, many other historians have done similar work in England and other Western European countries, and the results are always the same. In the late Middle Ages, there “may have been about 20 homicides per 100,000 population,” writes Manuel Eisner, a criminologist at the University of Cambridge. That’s fourteen times higher than the current homicide rate in England, and close to four times higher than the homicide rate in the United States, even though the modern American tally is greatly assisted by an abundance of cheap firepower unavailable to murderous medievals.

If this were true only of late medieval Western Europe, it wouldn’t be terribly relevant to today. But historians and criminologists have been digging in archives all across Western Europe, and they have discovered a startling pattern: The extreme homicide rates of the Middle Ages dropped slowly but steadily as the decades and centuries passed until they bottomed out in the early twentieth century. They wobbled up and down until the 1960s, climbed modestly until the 1980s or 1990s, then drifted down again. And so, despite the crime rises in recent decades, the homicide rates today are among the lowest in eight centuries.

They may even be among the lowest ever. As Lawrence Keeley demonstrates in War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, archeologists and anthropologists are rapidly accumulating evidence that levels of violence among ancient humans and isolated tribes in the modern world were, and are, terrifyingly high. For decades, the Kung San of the Kalahari Desert were considered gentle by visiting Europeans. A book about them was even entitled The Harmless People. But when researchers took a closer look, writes Keeley, they discovered that the homicide rate was “20 to 80 times that of major industrial nations during the 1950s and 1960s.” When an isolated band of fifteen Copper Eskimo families was first contacted early in the twentieth century, “every adult male had been involved in a homicide. ” In the late nineteenth century, the Yaghan, an isolated tribe of nomads living at the southern tip of South America, was estimated to have a homicide rate ten times higher than that of the United States.

Some researchers have said it’s misleading to call these sorts of killings “homicides” because some of the violence is more akin to warfare than domestic crime. Taking that argument at face value, Keeley cites the example of the Gebusi, a tribe in New Guinea. “Calculations show that the United States military would have had to kill nearly the whole population of South Vietnam during its nine-year involvement there, in addition to its internal homicide rate, to equal the homicide rate of the Gebusi.”

And it’s not just disorganized violence that has declined. In recent decades, even war has been on the wane. “War between countries is much less likely than ever and civil war is less likely than at any time since 1960,” Monty Marshall of George Mason University told the New York Times in 2005. A major study released later that year by the Human Security Centre at the University of British Columbia came to the same conclusion. “Over the past dozen years, the global security climate has changed in dramatic, positive, but largely unheralded ways,” the report states. “Civil wars, genocides and international crises have all declined sharply. International wars, now only a small minority of conflicts, have been in steady decline for a much longer period, as have military coups and the average number of people killed per conflict.” Since the early 1990s alone, the report found, there was a 40 percent decline in all forms of armed conflict. Most people think the opposite is true, Andrew Mack, the director of the Human Security Centre, told me. That’s because “whenever a war starts or there’s an act of gross political terrorism or whatever, it gets lots of coverage [in the news] if there’s lots of blood. When wars quietly come to an end, they sort of peter out. If it does get reported at all, it will be on page 16 of the New York Times in one paragraph. And so the impression people come away with is that we have a constant increase in the number of wars and they don’t understand that in fact a lot more wars have come to an end than have started.”

Crime is way down. War is declining. And that’s far from the end of the good news. “Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets of frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution—all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history,” writes Steven Pinker. “But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light.”