This allows for more funding for the police department in addition to creating an image that presents their membership as an elite. As a result, the police release information relating to serious croems to the media which in turn instills in fear felt by citizens.
The General Social Survey Program (GSS) conducted in 1993 involved telephone interviews of approximately ten-thousand adult Canadians. Twenty-five percent of those surveyed had been victimized by crime over the preceding year, the same proportion as in 1988. Furthermore, a majority of these crimes were not reported to the police, because they were felt not to be serious enough to warrant an arrest (McCormick, 1995: 146). Considering the study surveyed more than 10,000 citizens and found that their likelihood of victimization had remained unchanged from 1988-1993, it affirmed that fact that whoever thought crime had increased must simply be wrong, victims of distorted information conveyed by media.
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The concern about crime is up, yet based on citizen's own reports of victimization, the experts can find no empirical justification for it, leaving citizens feeling that crime has increased without any real basis (McCormick, 1995: 145). No consideration is given to the idea that there may be other good reasons for citizens to think that crime has increased: that citizens could be more aware of crime, citizens could be concerned that the criminal justice system is not dealing adequately with crime. According to the official rate of crime, it reveals that reporting to the police has been on an increase since 1995. Rather than attributing these numbers to an increase in crime, they are explained by the researchers as resulting from a simple increase in reporting and not to any real increase in crime itself, a conclusion which is defensible (Best, 1999: 145). .
The perception that youth crime is escalating in our society and that the law is too soft on young offenders is created by many such articles, commentaries, opinion and editorial pieces conveyed by the media.