Crime is up, massively, reporting isn't better. Hearing about the worse crimes happens a little more often, but its not like 25 years ago you didn't hear about murders on the other side of the country from papers, we've always had papers to get effective news, we just get it from tv rather than a paper(most of us now).
But people are reporting less crimes as theres simply less and less point. People don't want the hassel of being a witness to a group of chavs beating someone up as they are putting themselves in danger when the outcome is likely, smeg all. Even if the chavs get off, they still want revenge so theres no upside anymore, like putting someone away for an appropriate amount of time.
Either way, changing the laws is pointless, we have a problem prosecuting because of the quality and numbers of people working vs number of cases they have to cover. Its simply an overloaded system, a reworked law system would still be overloaded, the problem is in government targets, specifically reducing sentences so they won't be forced to build more prisons. Unfortunately, the more people get away with crimes, the more crimes they do.
SO say a guy stabs someone, should get 5 years, but gets out in 1, then commits another 5 crimes in that remaining 4 years he should have been in jail, thats 4 more cases that need to get sorted, thats lots of police hours, lawyer hours, paperwork hours, then the actual case, court costs of everyone involved. By not building new jails the cost of repeatedly putting the same guys on trial time and time again is much worse than the cost of keeping them in jail.
Its all a complete joke, government mess that they can't fix because they won't. Like every other service in this country, its on a long downward spiral that has no chance of being fixed while the government continue as is.