Don't fear the writer

You have nothing to fear except fear itself.

At least that's what we are led to believe in Harrow.

As the borough's police are so keen to remind us we rank highly amongst the safest places in London (we used to be number one but a few enterprising crooks soon put a stop to that). Obviously this is safety in terms of police crime figures, not the number of people injured in falling piano accidents or subjected to octopus attacks, I'm not sure who keeps the figures for that sort of thing.

But what do you do if your job is tackling crime and there's not a lot of it about (at least not the kind that will get you in trouble with bean counters in Whitehall)? Simple - you go after fear.

Fear of crime is actually a tangible target for modern police and regularly appears on their lists of priorities which need addressing in the borough. I'm not sure exactly how you measure this, I assume with surveys which ask questions such as:

Do you think crime in Harrow is:

a) Less scary than a kitten sneezing.
b) Scarier than the 1960s Batman but less scary than the Dark Knight.
c) Scarier than having to deliver a speech to the Oxford student union while only wearing y-fronts but less scary than waking up married to Amy Winehouse.
d) Scarier than finding out Noel's House Party is returning to our screens?

Whatever the case one of the worse offenders police big wigs (and subsequently big helmets) have identified as causing said fear of crime to rise is us, the humble press.

The problem is real crime, when it happens, is terrifying, but it is also compellingly interesting. This is a basic fact of human nature, and feel free to deny your place in the gene pool, but your average member of the public (and I include myself in this) wants to know what has happened if vans full of cops in lab coats turn up in their street and start turning the place into a spider's web of police tape.

Our job is to tell people what has happened and present the facts in a non-alarmist way. Unfortunately the facts themselves often are alarming, and that's where we can come under fire.

Imagine a chap dressed as a samurai starts racing around the streets of Harrow turning shoppers into sushi with a sword. Now, this is unpleasant, and you may find yourself thinking twice before nipping out to Marks & Spencer for a couple of weeks, but if you picked up the Harrow Observer and our front page story was 'Happy rabbits frolick on the Hill', with no mention of the rampant swordsman, you would wonder what on earth we were playing at calling ourselves a newspaper.

In the end unfortunately it's not the news which is scary, it's crime which people are afraid of, and there really is no way of changing that (if you did achieve this you would end up with a very bizarre world). That said, you should always try to keep in perspective that for every poor victim who makes it onto the front page there are millions of people out there who will never suffer at the hands of criminals. Remember, don't have nightmares.