The notion of moral panics is used by criminologists to explain public anxiety about, and official reaction to, increases in the reported rate of specific offenses. To describe an expression of public and official anxiety as a moral panic suggests that the scale of this response is disproportionately greater than the scale of the problem. In attributing official and public concern about mugging during the early 1970's in Great Britain as a "moral panic," Hall et al made two basic errors. First, their analysis of official statistics to show that the crime problem was not "dramatically worse" confuses rates of change with increments of change, thus producing a misleading portrait. In fact, the evidence supports the opposite conclusion. Second, the lack of any criteria of proportionality allows no distinction to be drawn between a "sober, realistic appraisal" of a problem and a "moral panic." The difficulties posed by the absence of such criteria are explored in relation to the problem of racial attacks. 4 figures and 15 references