1. Going Down

Crime has been falling for decades in Britain - a fact many people simply don't believe, and instead are convinced it's on the rise.

Former BBC News Home Editor Mark Easton describes it as the story that got away - a good news story he rarely got to tell.

Over the past thirty years, both violent crime and property crime have fallen by some 80 per cent in England and Wales - a fact also seen in other part of the UK and across Europe. At the peak there were around 20 million incidents of crime a year - today, the figure is closer to 4 million. This includes crimes not captured in official police stats - crimes which have gone unreported by the public, or not recorded by the police - but instead captured by the National Crime Survey.

But why are people so sceptical?

In The Great Crime Mystery, Mark Easton explores the gap between perception and reality, unearthing clues as to why our perception is at odds with the statistics, why politicians are reluctant to tell voters that crime is down, and why it is we have an innate bias to believe in the worst and hold a rose-tinted view of the past.

Importantly, as the fall in crime begins to slow, Mark says it's vital that we come to terms with crime coming down in order to understand what happened - and what we need to continue doing - to ensure it doesn't rise again.