The surge of criticism that hit the BBC after it emerged that Nick Ross was to leave Crimewatch is testament to the presenter’s widely respected status as one of those few journalists who is trusted up and down the country to deliver thought-provoking and valued public service broadcasting.

Ross, it turns out, is keeping himself more than busy as a conference moderator, and with continued freelance journalism work on television and radio. Yet Ross, these days, is also in demand as a commentator, public speaker and adviser on crime reduction and security – a legacy of his long-serving stint on Crimewatch. “There is an unwritten law that says that the media and the opposition will always tell you that things are getting worse and the government of whatever hue will always tell you things are getting better,” he says laughing. “This is a remarkable law of crime statistics and both should be roundly discounted!”

Ross has coined the term ‘crime science’ to explain his belief that we need a new evidence-based focus on crime reduction. Believing that there needs to be a substantial shift of emphasis from conventional reliance on the criminal justice system, Ross was pivotal in setting up the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science at University College London, where he was chairman of the board. Crime science is a new approach which investigates patterns in crime so as to find new ways to disrupt crime patterns. It holds that crime is not just a series of isolated cases and explores ways of reducing opportunity and temptation, as well as increasing the likelihood of detection.

“‘Crime science’ is my phrase really because very little criminology tries to reduce crime or look at it as a practical issue,” he says. “What crime science tries to do is argue that science has worked so effectively in so many other areas – and though the police are using it a bit in amassing evidence for prosecutions – we aren’t using the same techniques in understanding why crime happens and what causes it to rise and fall.” He sees a surprising parallel.

“Look at medicine. Right up until the middle of the 19th century, physicians used to believe that disease was caused by an imbalance of the four humours. I think we’re still in something of that state about crime. How many scientists are actually working on the issues of crime? Absurdly few, given what a big issue it is.”

So is this a failure of the police? “Well, the police are trapped behind public opinion, chasing horses while we leave so many stable doors unbolted.” So what’s really going on with crime? Who should we believe? “Well, that’s a much bigger question than it seems, because crime isn’t a single entity. Crime is thousands of different offences that fluctuate independently, and most never get reported to the police, including some very serious stuff like shootings,” he says. We also keep changing our definitions, he adds.

“New counting rules for the police can make crime seem to surge, but decriminalising something can make it seem to plunge – homosexuality, for example. It’s easy for politicians to cherry-pick the figures that suit their prejudices.” But, he adds, there are clear trends. 

“First, crime is much worse than the police figures show. But secondly, in contrast to what most people believe, many things are much better than they were. Mass crime, the sort which used to affect and worry people most, has gone down very substantially from its peak in 1995. Car crime, for example, is down over 55 per cent and domestic burglary about the same. With these things, you can match police statistics, large scale surveys and insurance claims and see if they all point in the same direction. On many forms of crime, it is harder to be sure.

Take sexual offences, such as rape. Because the reporting levels are so low, and are so dependent on how much victims trust the police and procedures, I think it is genuinely impossible to say.”

Turning to murder rates, Ross says that this is one of those areas where you can have reasonable confidence about the veracity of the data, though even here there are “huge and surprising gaps in the long-term records”. Nonetheless, he says: “Homicide has plainly gone up. If you exclude Northern Ireland, it has drifted up more or less since the Second World War – but it was a drift, not a surge. It’s now about 800 a year in England and Wales, up from 650, 10 years ago. This fluctuates a bit – events like terrorism or Harold Shipman badly distort the figures – but there did appear to be an underlying drift upwards in violence, especially in Scotland, which has now levelled off.”

Why? “Opportunity and temptation,” he replies quickly. “I think nearly all of it is to do with opportunity and temptation. My view, and this is what really frustrates me about politicians, is that the assumptions are almost pre-biblical in a way – that all this is to do with some strange quantum of good and evil in society, and intuitively you suppose this fluctuates by whether or not there is discipline in schools or single mums – a whole bunch of theories. I don’t discount these theories – these factors may have an effect – but on the whole, human beings are pretty much the same from one generation to another.

What transforms people are the circumstances in which they find themselves. How we behave when nobody is watching, how we behave when having no interest in sticking by the rules, how we behave when the temptation is huge and the opportunity is gaping by us.” He cites how horse-stealing has become extinct (“loss of temptation”) and shoplifting has rocketed (“loss of shop centres”).

Ross returns to his theme of comparing crime to health and how we have gone about tackling diseases over the years. “There isn’t a single thing which is going to make people healthy, so you’ve got to look at each disease separately,” he says. “If you want to solve safe-cracking or stop people breaking into gas meters – actually we have – this is very different to tackling cash in transit robberies, which we haven’t, or stopping identity theft. Sweeping gestures won’t cut crime. Each type and each locale has to be analysed separately – just like tackling an outbreak of disease.”

Ross believes politicians are beginning to see the bigger picture. “Government does have some interest in this analytical way of thinking – but party politics drives even the cleverest people back to sterile debates on law and order.

That said, he is keen to stress that people shouldn’t get too downhearted. “I don’t want to be too dismissive because there is a huge amount of good work that’s being done,” he says. “It just tends not to be stuff which gets the publicity.” So don’t have nightmares, do sleep well. Nice line. Who authored it again?