Nick Ross on 40 years of Crimewatch – and whether it could return to primetime TV

Critics accused us of encouraging snitching and we ourselves worried we’d be promoting a fear of crime. (Hence the ad lib that somehow became my catchphrase, "Don’t have nightmares, do sleep well.")

No one had tried a programme whose success relied on the public calling in; and for the first 20 minutes on air, not a single phone lit up. Finally, one did… and Crimewatch went on to be one of the most successful factual series in history.

But, as a presenter, at least as significant for me was discovering that almost everything I thought I knew about crime was wrong. The biggest, most shocking realisation came in 1995, when crime began to fall. Oh yes. Crime did start falling - and it’s still doing so.

Car crime and burglaries are down about 80 per cent since the 1990s and homicide is down 40 per cent from its peak. Don’t believe it? Well, you’re not alone.

But see for yourself. Look up offence trends from the Office for National Statistics and read the Crime Survey for England & Wales (or the equivalents in Scotland and Northern Ireland), or indeed listen to any competent statistician.

And with a general election looming, don’t listen to the politicians. They, like journalists, cherry-pick the data. As I once did, they assume the solution to crime lies in harsher penalties or reducing poverty. Yet crime rates here and across the world don’t correlate with the prison sentences or welfare budgets.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t have a compassionate society, and certainly not that offenders should simply be let off. I can’t think of a single major case on Crimewatch where a substantial prison sentence wasn’t warranted by the crime.

But while for the first 10 years it seemed to us self-evident that catching crooks was the best way to stop them, that changed in the 1990s with the end of the post-war crime wave.

When my colleague Jill Dando was murdered in 1999, the Crimewatch team and I, together with Jill’s family and friends, raised money for a new school of research.

The Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science at University College London is now the largest of its kind and has spawned similar institutes around the world. It houses one of Britain’s best forensic science departments and boasts the world’s only professor of future crimes, who scans the horizon for new crime opportunities.

What they’ve discovered upset our conventional views; changing people is hard and often impinges on human rights, whereas changing circumstances is more straightforward.

Taking away shop counters in the 1960s and '70s caused shoplifting to surge; putting decent locks and trackers in cars caused vehicle thefts to plunge. Designing housing estates without dark corners has cut antisocial behaviour, and putting smoke bombs in cash boxes has almost eliminated cash-in-transit robberies.

So, Crimewatch led to much more than any of us could have envisaged. Could it make a comeback now? After all, Crimewatch Live survives in daytime.

But to be effective, an appeal show needs a huge audience, and TV has become too fragmented for the original to work today. More important is to get policymakers to stop spouting clichés and to understand that the surest way to cut offending is to cut the temptations and opportunities that encourage and allow people to commit offences.

If they can’t grasp this, and with police having virtually vanished from our streets, the three-decade trend of falling crime may be coming to an end.

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