"What is wrong with people, it’s not safe anywhere nowadays."

"Sad how Australia has changed over the last decade or so."

"It's happening too much these days, no one is safe."

These comments were pulled from a recent 9News Facebook post and they illustrate some familiar fears among news consumers.

Crime is getting worse. Australia used to be safer. Murder rates are up.

But the numbers show that's simply not true. Crime peaked in Australia – as with much of the western world - in the 1980s, and has been trending downwards for decades.

"We're now at the lowest level of property crime… motor vehicle theft, break and enter, robbery, stealing from cars, stealing from people, all those robbery and theft offences are lower than they've been in 30 years, they're remarkable declines," NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research Director Don Weatherburn told 9news.com.au.

"For the last 20 years there's also been a halving of the homicide rate.

"This is not peculiar to New South Wales, this is true of the country as a whole. The precise drops vary a little bit from state to state but pretty much every state and territory has experienced this amazing drop in crime."

Director of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research Don Weatherburn. (Supplied)

According to figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the murder rate in the year 2000 was 1.6 per 100,000 people. By 2017, it had halved to 0.8 per 100,0000.

In that time, robbery dropped by 58.8 percent and break and enter dropped by 59.7 percent.

Since 2008, there has also been a drop in the rate of assaults.

"The trouble is, of course, public opinion hasn’t kept pace with that," Dr Weatherburn said.

"It takes a long time for public opinion to catch up with the facts, partly because shock jocks keep banging on about crime even when it's falling."

WHY HAS CRIME FALLEN?

Professor Janet Ransley, Director of the Griffith Criminology Institute at Griffith University, said there were a number of reasons crime had largely been on the decline since the turn of the century.

An improving economy and a heroin drought in the early 2000s which drove addicts into treatment programs have had an impact, but another key factor is that there are now simply fewer young men.

"We know that the biggest group in society in terms of offending is young males from about 14 or so through to about 25, they drive most property crime but also most violent crime, apart from domestic violence," she told 9news.com.au.

"With the baby boomers, there was a bulge of them in the 60s, 70s, 80s when they were at that age group, and they’ve aged out, so the offending goes down."

Professor Janet Ransley, Director of Griffith Criminology Institute. (Supplied)

Today, she said, young men typically stay home more and drink less so there are fewer opportunities for male-on-male aggression to spill over into violence.

Certain crimes including drug use, domestic violence, sexual assault and child sexual assault have not followed the dramatic downward trend – but this does not necessarily mean offending is increasing.

"One of the problems of domestic violence, was not only victims not reporting it but police not taking it seriously; not recording it and not responding to it,” Professor Ransley said.

"Now we see both victims coming forward and police responding more aggressively and both of those are good things.

"I don't want to say we don't still have crime problems, we have some very hard and difficult crime problems."

For example, reported incidences of sexual assault increased 59.7 percent between 2000 and 2017 and the child sexual assault that gets reported is widely considered to be merely the tip of the iceberg.

Fraud offences, including cyber-crime, are on the rise but the data is not comprehensive. While the Australian Bureau of Statistics runs an annual survey on internet fraud, Professor Ransley explained credit card fraud is usually reported to the bank rather than police, and victims of romance scams often feel too humiliated to come forward.

"Crime as a total has gone down but what we're seeing is some communities now have concentrations of crime," she said.

"It's that concentration we should be addressing rather than making everyone fearful."

"Crime as a total has gone down but what we're seeing is some communities now have concentrations of crime. It's that concentration we should be addressing."

But politicians continue to promise more officers on the beat in their election campaigns, Professor Ransley said, rather than focusing on what those officers actually do.

"At election time we very often, in Australia in particular, see law and order debates become very prominent with both sides trying to outbid each other with how tough they're going to be, how many new police they’re going to appoint," she said.

"If they have a crackdown on drugs they’ll arrest more people and it will look as though drug use is going up - it’s not, policing activity is going up, court activity is going up but drug use stays pretty much the same whatever we do."

'TOUGH-ON-CRIME' POLITICIANS

Law and order dominated much of the debate ahead of the recent Victorian state election, after a series of incidents involving young men of African descent were detailed in media reports early this year.

In January, then Home Affairs minister Peter Dutton told Sydney radio station 2GB that Victorians were "scared to go out to restaurants" because of "African gang violence".

Despite Victorian police chief commissioner Graham Ashton insisting that any suggestion Melbourne was not a safe city was "complete and utter garbage", then Liberal leader Matthew Guy ran a tough-on-crime campaign claiming youth gangs were "out of control" and pledging an overhaul of legislation.

Professor Ransley believes the rhetoric was "completely negative".

"It wasn't an African crime wave. There was a very, very small amount of offences being committed by a small number of people from a certain ethnic background. But beating it up in the campaign like that doesn’t help. It doesn’t solve the problem, it doesn’t make people any safer."

Speaking at the Liberal party election campaign launch in October, Mr Guy went hard on the topic, claiming Victoria had a "law and order crisis".

"Sadly, under Daniel Andrews, Victoria has won the unenviable title as the state with the country’s highest rate of crime," he said.

In a FactCheck conducted for The Conversation, Dr Weatherburn found the statement was incorrect.

But he was still surprised when the fearmongering tactics didn't work, and the Labor government - which had been accused of being soft on crime – was returned to power in a landslide.

Matthew Guy ran a tough-on-crime campaign. It didn't work. (9News)

"We were all quite surprised because the opposition was saying that crime in Victoria was worse than any other part of the country which was demonstrably untrue and trying to scare people," Dr Weatherburn said.

"For the first time in ages, no one seems to buy that.

"My guess is the message is slowly sinking in … after 18 years of falling crime rates.

"Terrible crime still happens but I think people just simply are so familiar with politicians trying to drum up law and order as an issue."

Dr Weatherburn also conducted a FactCheck on comments made by Pauline Hanson in 2016.

Ms Hanson told news.com.au she had spoken to "a lot of Australians who don’t believe they are safe on the streets anymore… We've had bombings and stabbings, it is happening. You see murders every night on our TV. The situation is growing worse and I know in Sydney and Melbourne the police won’t go into certain suburbs."

Dr Weatherburn found Ms Hanson's statement to be "wrong on the most recent official data".

Pauline Hanson believes crime is getting worse. (AAP)

SO WHY DO WE BELIEVE IT?

Radio talkback host, journalist and author Richard Glover has a disconcerting explanation in his new book, The Land Before Avocado .

"People would always rather believe that things are getting worse, even when they are getting so dramatically better," he writes.

Years of talkback radio have taught him "it's very easy to appeal to people’s sense of being aggrieved".

Journalist and author Richard Glover. (Marco del Grande)

"They're trying to sound empathetic, they're trying to sound as if they understand people's pain," he told 9news.com.au.

"And of course life is tough … but to say it's uniquely tough for this generation of Australians is ridiculous.

"It is really important to keep on reminding ourselves about these things, so we don’t indulge.

"You end up with politicians demanding more police officers, demanding more prisons be built, responding to this level of anxiety.

"At the same time as acknowledging how terrible these things are for the individuals concerned it is also really important to statistically understand the likelihood of them."

Having a police officer parked at the end of your street may make you feel safe, but it's also unrealistic, and would be a waste of resources.

"Instinctively we all want police to be driving up our streets and keeping us safe but for 90 percent of the community that’s a complete waste of resources because there’s no problem," Professor Ransley said.

"What makes sense is for those resources to be concentrated in areas where we know there are problems.

"But there's the police risk and outcry if they do that – every time they vote to shut down a police station or move resources from one suburb to another - because people in that area feel that they're being disadvantaged and it’s completely illogical because they're being disadvantaged because they don't have a problem."

"Instinctively we all want police to be driving up our streets and keeping us safe but for 90 percent of the community that’s a complete waste of resources because there’s no problem." (AAP)

So why are we fearful when most people aren't going to be victimised by violent crime in their lifetimes?

"It's definitely some influence from media, some influence from government and their law and order campaigns but we don’t really understand it," Professor Ransley said.

"The 24-hr reporting cycle makes it seem like there’s constantly violence in the news, whereas in the past the slowness to get stories into print might have meant that they weren’t being talked about all the time."

But perhaps self-preservation is also simply part of our evolutionary psychology.

"The tribe where everyone sits around and says, 'Everything is fine, it will all be fine, let's all just rest, let’s all relax', is the tribe that gets eaten by the lion," Glover said.