Nu-Lab Al-Beeb Slogan:
Tough on the reporting of crime
I always enjoy the bit about "police recorded crime". If they don't record it, there's no crime. And we wonder why the stock reply from the Cop Shop these days is "it's a private matter" or "nothing to do with us" or "don't have anyone available".
Perhaps what some bright spark somewhere *should* be measuring is the rate of increase of requests the police DON'T react to?
It might explain why it's only the really nasty stuff that's growing; can't be ignored so easily?
David Copperfield over at Coppersblog identified the police "reporting" sham for what it was some years ago at both his blog and the excellent "Wasting Police Time"; a collection of blog articles which I first read that got me into reading blogs. I recommend that anyone here, and more importantly pravda-BBC, read this book.
Its a shame he buggered off to Canada, but who could blame him?
We constantly read of city centres fleetingly policed during the hours of drunkenness. That'll be plenty of crimes the police don't know about because they're not out there.
Detection rates are also poor. Herts police have just published (some of) theirs.
"As the BBC has been headlining all day, police recorded crime is down 9% over the year."
I had a tooth-grindingly vexing conversation with my bien-pensant Grauniadista sister-in-law a couple of years back, in which she took the standard Leftie line that crime's no worse than it ever was ...just the perception of crime, mumble, mumble... reported crime figures actually falling etc, etc.
When her daughter's boyfriend was beaten up, her daughter threatened with rape, and her son subsequently attacked twice by gangs, she didn't bother reporting any of it to the police. This was no doubt due to her conventional liberal hatred of the latter --- and I'm sure she would still trumpet the fall in recorded crime without connecting it to her own personal experience.
Even amongst those who don't share her ideological aversions, many have grown sick of the police, as they know that reporting crime is often next to useless. Anyone who has had to deal repeatedly with the police (as I have) knows that the decline in reported crime means simply that PEOPLE DON'T BOTHER REPORTING IT ANYMORE. If that is good news, then it's only from the point of view of lazy coppers, bent Chief Constables, treacherous politicians and criminals.
People are not reporting crimes because nothing gets done.
Good article.
To those dwindling minority of indoctrinated morons who swallow what the McLabour regime are saying, and who say "oh of course these figures are true and crime IS down because the figures are coming from the Police and not the government".
Yeah, just WHO is instructing the Police what to say!, oh thats right, its McLabour!!!!!!.
2 Burglaries, mugged twice , four push bikes, one motorbike , car broken into four times and endless petty vandalism. I left London with my family and throughout that period every day I heard the same song .."Crime is going down"
You speak for many .Brilliant post
My perception that crime is rising has been reinforced by one neighbour being burgled in the middle of the night (when they were in bed) and another having his front door smashed in on a Saturday afternoon. All this within the space of a week in a quiet residential road in a reasonably peaceful Midlands town.
My other half was a good CID officer some 25 years ago and left the service because of the Graduate Entrant scheme which he correctly forecasted, would ruin the police service. He wasn't wrong either. He had a young graduate assigned to CID who reported to him. During the full year of this secondment, he never managed to detect a single crime unless it was done for him. The Detective Superintendent, to whom my husband reported, was equally dismayed, and made the tongue-in-cheek comment, "Never mind, he writes a good report!"
Eventually our graduate was promoted way above his skill level, mollycoddled all the way until he was eventually made Deputy Chief Constable of my other half's force and then Chief Constable of a County Force where he was an unmitigated disaster. Thrown out? - of course not. They knighted him and gave him and gave him the Queen's Police Medal instead.
Removing these administrative half-wits and bringing back coppers who were admired because of their detection skills and tenacity, would do a lot to restore failing moral.
Of course. Two independent methods of counting crime BOTH say it's fallen in the last year.
So, obviously, the only reason that can have happened is that it's a huge Labour conspiracy!
Your post is a great example of deluded self-serving twaddle.
Chris Keating-
I've posted the following on your blog-
You are of course quite entitled to believe what you like about crime. And you may be right.
My point is that the official stats don't tell us anything very useful, because we simply can't trust them.
The BCS was never intended to bear the weight now placed on it by ministers- it was originally a secondary source to give a broader perspective on the recorded crime stats; it was not meant to be used as the primary source, which is the way the Home Office now presents it.
As for the recorded crime stats, not only has the HO changed the counting rules twice in a decade, but there's plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest the police are gaming their reports (see some of the comments under my blog).
And remember also that the HO keeps its own scorecard on this - unlike many other stats, ministers have refused to hand this area over to the somewhat more independent ONS. Which stinks.
Meanwhile, despite living in one of the supposedly safest areas of Britain, my personal experience tells me crime is certainly not going away (one spectacular attempted burglary while I was actually in the house last summer, a son beaten up just down the road a couple of years ago, etc etc)
So what do you believe? Dubious numbers from self-serving politicos, or the evidence of your own eyes?
PAul H-
"I had a tooth-grindingly vexing conversation with my bien-pensant Grauniadista sister-in-law a couple of years back, in which she took the standard Leftie line that crime's no worse than it ever was ...just the perception of crime, mumble, mumble... reported crime figures actually falling etc, etc."
Hmm.... sound a little like some of my own relatives - least said, soonest mended.
On the face of it, unreported crime should still appear in the BCS. But in practice, people who can't afford the time to report crime to the police are not going to fill in some huge government opinion poll either.
Have you ever taken part in the BCS? No, me neither.
Do you know anyone who's ever taken part? No, me neither.
Hmmm.
I am surprised (and to be honest, a little disappointed as your arguments are normally well put together - no matter if I happen to frequently disagree!) that you've gone for the "the average figures are bad, but look coor some things are even worse than than the average!" without also mentioning that if some crimes have gone up by more than the average figures show, then also others have turned out much better than the average.
After all, that's what average means 
Only picking out figures that are worse than the average doesn't really give a fair overall picture does it?
I think you are also a little too dismissive of the changes to the figures and the impact they have. For example, the change in definition of what counts as rape or similar a few years ago made for a big increase in the recorded crime stats, but that was purely because things were being counted that were being excluded before.
The two reliable official measures we are all supposed to trust over our own experiences disagree with each other by more than 600%
And Emily Thornberry MP claims almost every child in her constituancy has been mugged. Thats a 9% decrease on the previous year i suppose.
Mark-
"I am surprised (and to be honest, a little disappointed as your arguments are normally well put together - no matter if I happen to frequently disagree!) that you've gone for the "the average figures are bad, but look coor some things are even worse than than the average!" without also mentioning that if some crimes have gone up by more than the average figures show, then also others have turned out much better than the average.
After all, that's what average means."
Quite right Mark - there are other crimes that have gone down, in particular various property crimes.
But what I've selected are the crimes of violence against the person - the crimes we worry about most.
The big picture in the crime stats seems to be that crimes like theft have gone down but crimes of violence have gone up. Here's how the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee (Labour chaired so not rabidly anti-government like the Major and Tyler) summed it up last year:
"In the case of both vehicle crime and burglary, improvements in security — far more than any government action — have probably been a significant contributor to overall falls...
Excluding successes on burglary and vehicle theft, there has been a more mixed picture in tackling overall crime, particularly given the increase in resources available to the police. For example, between 2002–03 and 2005–06 violent crime as measured by the police recorded crime statistics showed a 21% increase..."
See this blog for more detail: http://
burningourmoney.blogspot....efficiency.html
"On the face of it, unreported crime should still appear in the BCS. But in practice, people who can't afford the time to report crime to the police are not going to fill in some huge government opinion poll either.
Have you ever taken part in the BCS? No, me neither."
The BCS isn't an opinion poll. It is a survey of people's actual experience of crime.
The participants don't fill in a form. They are interviewed and taken through a series of questions. The interviewer fills in the questionnaire.
It is not surprising that you haven't been selected to take part in the survey. Only about 0.1% of the population are selected each year.
Great post. Was going to comment, but instead used your piece as the basis for one of my own. Linked.
http://wolfhowling.blogspot.com/...war-on-
law.html
Also worth mentioning that:
- The recorded crime figures show violent crime as being much lower than the actual rate, since many are not reported. We know this because they are gang-on-gang incidents, and hospital records show many more incidents of knife wounds than are accounted for in the recorded crime figures;
- The BCS under-represents ethnic minorities, who are over-represented as victims (and perpetrators) of violent crime, and specifically excludes minors against whom most of these crimes take place.
The BCS has problems, but what exactly is your alternative? Your assumption it gives the wrong impression seems to be based on nothing more than a perverse wish that it gives the wrong impression. It doubtless misses out many crimes and gets many things wrong, but the important thing is that it has asked the same questions for 25 years - so is a good comparator.
One of those questions is whether people think crime is falling (a) locally and (b) nationally. Locally - where people have experience - they say it is falling. Nationally, they say it is rising. It seems we have an almost psychotic national wish to believe that crime is rising.
Tom absolutely wins. While I understand there are other factors that could explain most falls in BCS data, I've never heard a convincing explanation other than media-fuelled panic for why on aggregate, people believe that crime in their area is OK but that crime in areas that they don't know is out of control...
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