It should not be surprising that of the almost 30 news stories occupying the pages of this newspaper’s first publication in a month, two of the five stories on the front page dealt directly with the murder of a young person in Madison. In fact, the title of one of these articles uses the same word, “slain,” as is used to describe “Sweeney Todd” on that very same front page, a musical that “can truly boast its successful use of excessive blood flow, homicide and even cannibalism.” I say I am unsurprised at this occurrence because these two pieces of news are especially emotionally disturbing, and emotionally disturbing equals enticing, and enticing equals front-page material. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a newspaper placing articles dealing with violent crime on their front pages. As time has proved, these types of stories are sure-fire winners with readers, and in an era in which newspapers are struggling to stay afloat, are more necessary than ever. However, there are some undesirable results.
What kind of undesirable results? As Daniel Gardner notes in his book on the subject of risk assessment, “The Science of Fear,” articles about crime — especially violent crime — appeal to a more primitive and emotional aspect of our mind, which coincidentally makes them easier to remember, and thus easier to recall. And, according to almost every psychologist, if it is easier to recall an event, our brain equates that with an event occurring more often. So, newspapers publish a lot of these stories because they are appealing to us, and because they are especially appealing to us, we read and remember them, and the spiral continues downward until we have formed a completely warped view of the actual safety of the world around us.
Enter the campaign to fill the seat vacated by Eli Judge of the 8th Aldermanic District. If there is one common denominator among the candidates’ platforms, it is quite clearly “campus safety.” In fact, Bryon Eagon, who I take to probably be the most qualified of the candidates and likely the frontrunner for the open seat, seems to be entrusting his entire campaign to this single issue. Not coincidentally, recent entrant Mark Woulf seems to be heading in a very similar direction. Yet, the fundamental question that is being completely ignored in the framing of this issue is whether our campus and community are actually dangerous.
So here come the statistics to answer that question. According to the 2008-09 University of Wisconsin Campus Safety Guide’s statistics on campus crime, which deals with crimes committed against UW students both on and off campus, in 2007 there were zero cases of murder or negligent manslaughter reported (just as the two years before it). There were 13 cases of forcible sex offenses, 11 cases of robbery and 24 cases of aggravated assault. There are approximately 40,000 students, which means the percent risk any of the above crimes poses for a given individual in a calendar year is astonishingly low (.06 percent chance of being a victim of aggravated assault, the most common of the types of crime listed). Or as professional risk assessors would classify it — essentially zero. Now, though the probability of being burglarized may be slightly greater than being struck by lightning or the earth being destroyed by a meteor in 2012, it certainly does not justify it being a make-or-break issue in an election at this time, especially considering the steps taken already to protect students’ safety.
Don’t feel bad; this phenomenon of the systematic misjudgment of risk is certainly not one unique to Madison but is a microcosm of what also has a tendency to occur at the national and global level. As Gardner also notes, following Sept. 11 the American public looked on in approval as our federal government focused solely on spending obscene amounts of money to, at least at first, track down, kill and protect us from “the existential threat” of terrorists. There is no storyline more persuasive to our emotional assessment of risk, and our resulting fear guided our approval of action. Meanwhile, the year Bush was re-elected to the presidency seemingly for his ability to protect our existence, a report was released by the Institute of Medicine — of the National Academies of Science — that discovered that lack of health insurance, “causes 18,000 unnecessary deaths every year in the United States.” That death toll equates to almost six Sept. 11’s. Yet, the public would have thrown Bush out of office had he chose to ignore the terrorist threat to focus on reforming health insurance, which actually posed a much greater threat to our safety. This is a much broader example of the same mechanism that seems to be occurring at the local level. We are allowing the emotional, often irrational aspect of our mind to cloud our better assessment of true risk.
The facts and information at hand inform us that we are actually very safe. In fact, we live in one of the safest places and times of human history to date. So, let’s please make this election, as well as future ones from local up to national, less about misplaced and misguided fears for our safety and more about a broad examination of the needs of our community.
Alec Slocum ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in philosophy and legal studies.
