There are three kinds of lies ? lies, damned lies and statistics, according to the statement most often attributed to the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli.

Nowhere is the aphorism more true than when one is discussing crime statistics. They can mean all things to all people and can fail to take account of the severity of a particular crime.

That helps to explain why, in response to the news that the US State Department had said that crime was increasing in Bermuda, two Government Ministers gave quite different responses.

Home Affairs and Public Safety Minister Randy Horton, while disturbed by the tone of the report on the US State Department's website, said: "I regret the fact that Bermuda's unacceptably high crime rates warrant inclusion in the travel advisory. We as a community must work together to eradicate this problem."

Tourism Minister Renee Webb said: "I'm not surprised, based on the way the media, in particular , reports crime. Has there been a significant increase (in crime)? No. Is the reporting making Bermuda sound like a crime-ridden place? Yes. I don't think Bermuda deserves it. Violent crime is on the decrease, but the way it's reported ..."

If one Government Minister says Bermuda's crime rate is unacceptably high while the other says it's going down and is, apparently, acceptable, how can anyone agree on the problem?

And statistics only go so far in dealing with the issue.

As the State Department report noted, Bermuda is an essentially a safe place, but it is a fact that violent crime (contrary to Ms Webb's statement) increased in 2003 compared to 2002.

However, it is also a fact that violent crimes in 2003 were lower than they were in 2001 and 2000. In fact, violent crime in 2002 fell to its lowest level in nine years.

Generally speaking, reported crimes have been trending down for most of the last decade.

In late 1993 and 1994, when there was a dramatic surge in crime in Bermuda. There were nine murders in 14 months in that time ? more than there were in a five-year spell in the 1980s, and far more than there were in 2003, when there were two cases of murder or manslaughter.

That latter figure extrapolates to 2.9 murders per 100,000 people in Bermuda. By comparison, Gary, Indiana, the US "murder capital" in 2001, had 79.4 murders per 100,000 people, Compton California had 48 and New Orleans had 44.

New York City, whose crime-fighting approach had drawn wide praise, had 8.1 murders per 100,000 people, 113th on the list.

Bermuda would rank about 240th out of 318 on a list of American metropolitan areas, alongside Virginia Beach.

It's fair to say that many, although by no means all, of Bermuda's visitors come from far more dangerous places, at least based on the murder rate.

So Ms Webb is right. Bermuda is safer than many other places. And there is also a grain of truth in the notion that the media contributes to the perception that Bermuda is more dangerous than it is, in part because a murder or an attempted murder in Bermuda remains much bigger news than it would be in Gary, Indiana, where the media was reporting on a murder or more every week in 2001.

For all of those reasons, Mr. Horton should be able to make a good case to the US State Department to tone down its crime description.

And yet, many members of the community would say they feel less safe today than they did ten years ago.

In part, that's because the nature of crime has changed in recent years. A tourist is stabbed on Front Street. Gang rivalries break out into violence on city streets and restaurant parking lots and end in deaths by stabbing. A man is shot in cold blood while getting into a car outside a bar in Dockyard. Teenagers are pulled off bikes and mugged.

Inevitably, those incidents make people feel insecure, and rightly so.

Blaming the media won't solve the problem. Continuing to crack down on crime, putting more Police on the streets and continuing to eliminate the root causes of crime will.

And that's where Ms Webb should be focusing her attention.