SPEAK TO STRANGERS, AVOID DRUNKS AND STAY ALIVE

If you want to avoid being murdered, here's the best advice: stay away from
your home at the weekend, or at least between 6pm and 6am; speak only to
strangers; and avoid men in their 20s, especially if you can smell alcohol
on their breath.

Those are the conclusions you may draw from a report on homicide in2001
Year Book Australia, released yesterday by the Bureau of Statistics.

A study of crime patterns over the past 100 years suggests that while most
crimes rose or fell in frequency and public interest, and police numbers
improved from 148 per 100,000 population in 1900 to 227 per 100,000 in
1999, murder remained consistent.

"Looking across many nations, from a policy point of view things like
expanding the number of police, giving them better technology, setting
longer prison sentences, imposing or abolishing the death penalty have had
no effect on the homicide rate, which has remained fairly constant in most
countries," Dr Adam Graycar, director of the Australian Institute of
Criminology, writes.

In Australia, the murder rate stayed between 1.5 and 2 per 100,000 people
for most of the past century. It hit a low of 0.8 in 1941, and a high of
2.4 in 1988, though Dr Graycar does not attempt to explain why the late
'80s made people so homicidal.

He suggests that the Australian way of taking life follows a predictable
pattern, year after year. Murder is most likely to happen between 6pm and
6am, on Friday, Saturday or Sunday, in a home rather than in a street or
workplace; eight out of 10 murders are between people who know each other;
women are more likely to be killed in a domestic altercation while men tend
to meet their doom in alcohol-related arguments; two-thirds of the victims
are male and are likely to be single while female victims are likely to be
married; and 87 per cent of murderers are male (median age 27). You have
been warned.

Dr Graycar notes that early in the 20th century, the crime which most
preoccupied law enforcers was "drunkenness" - it was the subject of 40 per
cent of all convictions in magistrates' courts. The Commonwealth Year Book
for 1908 said: "It seems fairly clear that the present plan of bringing
offenders before magistrates, and subjecting them to the penalty of
imprisonment or fine, has little deterrent effect, as the same offenders
are constantly reappearing before the courts. Further, the casting of an
inebriate into prison, and placing him in his weakened mental state in the
company of professional malefactors, doubtless trends to swell the ranks of
criminals and certainly tends to lower his self-respect ..."

Drunkenness has been decriminalised, but there may be parallels in the way
law enforcement deals with the consumption of other drugs. Dr Graycar
reports that in 1999, "of those charged with violent crime ... 70 per cent
tested positive to any drug, 58 per cent positive to cannabis, 18 per cent
to opiates and 12 per cent to amphetamines. The figures were higher for
those charged with property offences. Of these detainees, 86 per cent
tested positive to any drug, 6 per cent positive to cannabis, 43 per cent
tested positive to opiates, and 13 per cent to amphetamines."