A month ago, Scotland’s Justice Secretary, Kenny MacAskill, was trumpeting the recorded crime figures, which had fallen to their lowest level since 1980 and giving the credit to his government for making Scotland “safer and stronger”, thanks to the “record numbers of police officers tackling crime and serving our communities”.

Probe the figures and a rather different picture emerges. Inconveniently for the SNP, the fall relates to a period before most of the new police recruits had arrived on the beat, and a 2% drop in recorded crime looks less impressive when set beside a 5% fall in England and Wales. In fact, recorded crime figures have been falling on both sides of the border for many years and under governments of all hues. Besides, “recorded crime” does not include many minor offences such as speeding fines and, of course, most crime is never reported.

Survey data released yesterday fill in some of the gaps. Detailed interviews with 16,000 adults suggest that more than 60% of crimes go unreported. Count them in and the crime rate has apparently risen by 4%, though changes in the sample size and methodology complicate comparisons. The risk of being a victim of crime in Scotland last year was about one in five, lower than in England and Wales. Conversely, Scots are still more likely to fall victim to violent crime. However, that does not mean the average Scot is more likely to be attacked because the incidence rate shows that crimes of violence are more concentrated among fewer victims.

Who are they? Though older people, especially women, have a disproportionate fear of crime, it is young men from disadvantaged communities who are most vulnerable to attack. And it is far more likely in Scotland than England that these attacks will feature the same devastating combination of alcohol (and/or drugs) and knives: booze and blades. The most telling statistic in this survey is that 58% of victims of violent crime say the offender was “under the influence”. And drugs are a feature of one in four of such offences.

This is going to intensify the argument about the wisdom of the Scottish Government’s policy of replacing shorter prison terms with community-based sentences. Blatantly contradictory responses to questions about crime and punishment suggest that many Scots remain to be convinced of the rightness and efficacy of non-custodial disposals. While 84% thought community sentences were a good idea for minor crimes, only a quarter thought this would cut re-offending and barely half

said prison should be only for perpetrators of serious crime.

Some things do not change. Though Scots feel marginally safer about our own communities, most of us are more likely to worry about crime than suffer

from it. The fact that four times as many people think they will be the victim of credit card theft than actually happens may encourage a healthy vigilance. It is more worrying that Scots exaggerate the risk of being mugged by a factor of 15 and of having their homes broken into by a factor of 10. And there is something profoundly worrying about a society where the equivalent of 50,000 people think they will be sexually assaulted in the coming year.

The Scottish Government strove to put an optimistic gloss on yesterday’s figures. The sad truth is that, though most of us worry too much about crime, drink-fuelled violence continues to stain Scottish society and, until we work out how to deter people from carrying knives and drinking themselves stupid, these figures are unlikely to change.