RIOTERS IN FRANCE HAVE TORCHED thousands of cars, injured scores of police, burned and shattered dozens of buildings, and killed at least one person. Not knowing what to make of it all, Americans may be forgiven if they file this away as an event that has nothing to do with normal life in France in particular and Europe in general. After all, U.S. media coverage routinely portrays Western Europe as a much more civil place than America. But that stereotype is badly out of date. Granted, riots like these are unusual, but they are taking place amidst rising crime that has left many European countries more uncivil than we often think, much more dangerous than in the past, and in important ways more crime-ridden than the United States. Europeans are now saddled with a crime problem that has been building for years and isn't disappearing anytime soon--alongside their high unemployment, slower growth, and social strains that were evident long before the recent round of rioting.

European crime rates have been converging with U.S. rates for years and have now overtaken them in several categories. This is partly the result of the decline in U.S. crime rates since the start of the 1990s, a decline that has taken rates below the levels that once kept Dirty Harry busy at home and gave America a violent reputation abroad. But the real story is relentlessly rising crime in Europe. Any serious report has to say from the start that the headline crime of homicide remains

An impressive rise in theft, robbery, and burglary began in several European countries in the late 1950s and accelerated in the 1970s and 1980s. By the late 1980s and the early 1990s, the rates at which English, Swedes, French, Italians, Spaniards, and Dutch reported being victims of nonviolent crimes was in the same neighborhood as American rates. These crimes, and violent ones as well, kept climbing into the 1990s. By the end of that decade, when the United States was finally getting a handle on its problem and U.S. rates were heading downward, European crime stabilized at its new, high rates. Some countries, like Britain and Denmark, have since managed to nudge several categories of crime downward through expanded and improved police efforts. But the crimes they proved best at containing were often not violent crimes. Worse, violent crime continued to rise sharply into the early 2000s in France, Spain, and the Netherlands.

The latest figures, scattered from 2000 to 2005, suggest that more assaults are committed per capita in England than in America, while Swedes, Norwegians, and Dutch experience roughly the same assault rates as Americans. Robberies (which involve force or the threat of force) are as common in England and the Netherlands as in the United States. Theft rates have surged ahead of the United States in Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, and Norway. Separately, auto thefts are now a European specialty, with Scandinavians, Brits, French, and Italians worse off than Americans. And the U.S. burglary rate is now lower than those in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and Britain.