Chapter 1. Crime in America unit 1. Giving the summary of the text Text 1

Task 1. Answer the questions:

1. What do you know about crime in America?

2. What are serial killers?

3. Why are people so afraid of serial killers?

Task 2. Read the text to get the main idea paying special attention to the underlined parts of the text (key words and word combinations)

Remember serial killers? A few years ago, these twisted creatures haunted not just the American imagination but, it seemed, America's real streets and parks: an official of the Justice Department was widely reported as saying that 4,000 of America's annual 24,000-or-so murders were attributable to serial killers.

America loves its myths — and that was pretty much what the "wave of serial killings" turned out to be: 4,000 people are not victims of serial murderers; 4,000 murders remain unsolved each year. According to cool-headed academic research, maybe 50 people a year are victims of serial murder­ers; the figure has been stable for 20 years.

Serial murderers obviously form a bizarre and special category of criminals. Peo­ple might well believe extraordinary things about them. But about crime in general, surely ordinary folk have a better understanding — don't they? Well, consider two widely-held beliefs:

"America has experienced a crime wave in the past 20 years." No. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, violent crime fell in the first half of the 1980s, rose in the second half, and has been falling in the 1990s. Over the past two decades, it has fallen slightly. Non-violent property crimes (theft, larceny and burglary) have followed similar patterns. So has murder, its peak was in 1980.

"America is more criminal than other countries." Again, no. According to an International Crime Survey, carried out by the Ministry of Justice in the Netherlands, America is not obviously more criminal than anywhere else. You are more likely to be burgled in Australia or New Zealand. You are more likely to be robbed with violence in Spain; you are more likely to be robbed without violence in Spain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. You are more likely to be raped or indecently assaulted in Canada, Australia or western Germany. And so on.

American misconceptions raise two questions. First, why are Americans so afraid of crime? (As according to Gallup polls, they are: in recent years Americans have put crime either first or second in their list of problems facing the country; in Britain, crime limps along between second and sixth in people's priorities.) Second why should Americans be so punitive in their attitude to criminals? (As they also seem to be: when asked by the International Crime Survey what should happen to a young burglar who has committed more than one offence, 53% of Americans reckoned he should go to prison, compared with 37% of English and Welsh, 22% of Italians, and 13% of Germans and French.)

One possible explanation is that Ameri­cans are irrational in their attitudes to crime. But that cannot be right: crime im­poses huge costs on the country and has helped turn parts of American inner cities into nightmares of violence. Given that, it is hardly surprising that Americans should fear the spread of crime. But it remains sur­prising that American public attitudes should be so different from those in other countries which also have dangerous inner cities. No, there seems to be something else feeding Americans' fear and loathing of criminals. More probably, two things: the violence of American crime, and its irrationality. And it is with these that America's real crime-policy problems begin.