ABSTRACT
A concept so fluid and imprecise as ‘anti-social behaviour’ cannot be measured over time in the way that ‘crime’ – for all the well-known flaws in official records – does provide some long-term series and comparisons. There is no satisfactory answer to the question ‘are people behaving worse?’ because there is no baseline apart from the perennial vision of a past, within the lifetime of older members of the community, when things were different and people had more respect for one another. People are often annoyed by rude and inconsiderate behaviour as they go about in public or drive their cars (Phillips and Smith 2003) but there is no means of comparison with past experiences of incivility.
