Sky News is reporting that official Home Office figures say violent crime is up 22%. But apparently it is all because it was being underreported before - so the Home Secretary tells us. That's all right then. Ergo, it must be falling! What was it Disraeli said about statistics?
We want to hear all about your dinner date with Dolly Draper, Iain.
ReplyDelete"Crime is down".
ReplyDeleteWhat do you think of Jon Craig's suggestion to make William Hague Shadow Chancellor and David Davis Shadow Foreign Secretary?
ReplyDeleteFor what it is worth I think this would go down a treat at Tory grass root level and with voters at large.
Those two could do enormous damge to team Brown.
So violent crime was being under reported before?
ReplyDeleteYet we are told constantly that the British Crime Survey is robust and gives an accurate picture of offences around the country.
How nice that this is announced at the same time as Leicestershire's chief constable confirms police are unable to visit 40% of crime victims because of a "fog of administration".
But never mind, we must all talk about George Osborne and Nat Rothschild because the Dear Leader does not want issues that matter to people being put under scrutiny.
The statistics keep going up..Is that over a 100% increase year on year since they were elected?
ReplyDeleteIt must be very very close!
But whilst people are scared to face up to the problems within our society caused by immigration then we will never get anywhere.
I don't know about, "you couldn't make it up", this government does on a daily basis.
ReplyDeleteSince when has the government's role been solely to supply Richard Little John with unlimited copy?
Yes the crime figures are the only thing growing at the moment other than the Dole Queues, Inflation and Taxes.
ReplyDeleteNo more Boom & Bust
I`ll take it that si just for England and Wales as figure out a month or so agao should crime is down in Scotland (to lowest levels in 25 years).
ReplyDeleteIt is not a true increase in violent crime.
ReplyDeleteThe apparent 22% increase is due to a recategorisation of crimes which have already been reported.
Apparently, some police forces had been wrongly assigning incidences of violent crime to a lower category. They have now reassessed the cases for the past year and have put many of them into the higher category. Hence the overall increase of 22%. But that is relative to the uncorrected figure for the previous year.
If they now carry out the same exercise for the previous year then they are again likely to recategorise a large number, in which case the increase in violent crimes is likely to be close to zero.
For New Labour and the BBC, the crime is down but ignore violent crime and Jaqui Smith scared to go out in the strrets of London, unemployement is down but ignore those millions shunted to benfit queue and certainly inflation down but ignore mortgage and other contributors.
ReplyDeleteJaqui Smith the Home Secretary deperately wants Osborne explanation. In any other country the BBC would have been privatised and Brown would have been held to account.
No, don't be ridiculous, it's the FEAR of crime that's gone up.
ReplyDeleteIn Nu Liebours world, everything is rosy. These figures CANNOT be right.
Tony Sharp said...
ReplyDelete"So violent crime was being under reported before?
Yet we are told constantly that the British Crime Survey is robust and gives an accurate picture of offences around the country."
The report is not about the British Crime Survey. It is about police forces wrongly interpreting the definition of 'violent crime' and assigning some marginal cases to a lower category.
Spin, spin, spin. It never stops under Brown/Blair and co, does it?
ReplyDeleteSo, in other words, as we've always known, we can't believe any of this government's statistics and we should all reach our own conclusions on the basis of our own experience.
Can anyone suggest a good the supplier of stab and bullet proof vests? I bet the government all have theirs!
The current recession will of course lead to worsening crime statistics.
ReplyDeleteThe truth is that the Home Office have been fiddling the books again - or encouraging others to do so. When they came to power in 1997 they had a manifesto promise to clean up what they said was a Conservative policy of undercounting crime. Recorded crime shot up as they reclassified many offences as recordable. This took Ministers by surprise! Que moral panic and attacks on the police 'for failing'.
ReplyDeleteThe last 10 years have then seen change after change to the system to push things out of the crimne figures again so the Home Secretary can claim that things are improving.The Home Office Guidance on recording crime now occupies a complex huge manual. Sometimes there are pages and pages of advice on how to record just one particular crime.
Then there are the bigger 'strategy changes' to reduce the figures. Take fraud for example.
In the past if you received a fraudulent cheque or credit card payment or your identity was stolen to make a purchase using your credit card, you could report it to police who would 'crime' it.
Two years ago the Home Office introduced a new 'national fraud strategy' to 'better focus effort'.
If you are now a fraud victim and try to call the police they will tell you that they dont deal with this anymore and you should report it to the bank. The bank will then collate all these reports. If they see a pattern or think it serious enough they will report it to a national fraud centre. Of course, that process all costs time and money for the banks, so guess what? In most cases they dont bother and even if they do the counting rules have all changed. In the past if your card was stolen and used 5 times it counted as one theft and 5 frauds. Not any more. It's now one theft and one fraud no matter how many times it's used.
Reported fraud has fallen and the policy is hailed as a success!! The Home Office's official statistics bulletin glosses over all this b y just talking about changes to the system and 'old figures not being compatible with the new'.
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs08/hosb0708.pdf
but the key factor is the Table on Page 126. The industry losses to Plastic Card Fraud went up last year by 25% in one year. Since 2000 it has risen from £317m to £535.2m (up 69%).... but the figures for recorded fraud will have gone down.
The biggest fraud in all this is the Government. These figures are now as dodgy as the National Accounts. This year they have been caught out again on violent crime and will be frantically shifting blame to the hapless forces trying to wade through a bureaucracic nightmare. But of course help is at hand there too. The HO have promised to cut that administrative burden too....just like they promised in 2000, 2001, 2002, ..............
Anon 11:23
ReplyDeleteThis is Through the Looking Glass stuff. Apparently words mean whatever the speaker chooses them to mean.
'Marginal'? What does that mean?
'Some'? What does that mean?
Let's get some hard facts on the table, eh?
The trouble is that this Home Office and Minister cannot or will not recognise facts.
"The current recession will of course lead to worsening crime statistics"
ReplyDeleteI have seen the Home Office pedalling that line but strangely a few years ago they were saying crime had risen because people were so much better off that there was more to steal.
Another day another spin...........
Does that figure include the Labour Party thratenin to kill journalists?
ReplyDeletehttp://tinyurl.com/5u2puh
Who cares?
ReplyDeleteWho actually listens any more?
So what about bankers not reporting their loses then!
ReplyDeleteGreat! Problem solved!
Labour!
Talk about hear no evil.
Hi Iain,
ReplyDeleteNice lunch with Dolly? You made the ES -
http://waugh.standard.co.uk/2008/10/the-draper-and.html
How much crime was reported in too low a category when there were no crime reduction targets. Probably zero. So we can assume that the 22% underreporting is a relatively recent phenomenon.
ReplyDeletePlease read this
ReplyDeleteThe funniest thing they said on BBC News was that - 'people's experience of violent crime has remained stable!' Either you have not experienced it, and you can therefore have no view on it, or you have experienced it, and you would certainly not describe it as 'stable'!
ReplyDeleteThe fragrant Home Sec has just been on The World at One to explain herself. As usual, the explanation is superficially plausible (thanks, Alistair!); but it then breaks down, as every piece of info from this discredited bunch of liars must. It asks us to believe what they are NOW saying, that is, to accept the integrity of a system and of people in which no person with half a brain cell could place any confidence.
ReplyDeleteWhere is the Tory attack? On this and every other topic of substance?
I hardly think Iain is one to criticise anybody about massaging statistics to suit themselves.
ReplyDeleteReprehensible though the Home Office is for such fiddling, I can't help but think "Pot Kettle & Black" when I read his post.
Anon 10:33
ReplyDeleteIf Hague is to be made Shadow Chancellor, make Hunky Dunky Shadow Foreign Sec (or the other way round, whatever). Osborne as Cameron's right hand man would probably be a bloody great success as Party Chairman, and it would get him out of the way of the BBC gobshites.
Personally I would like to see that enormous non-nonsense beast Ken Clarke brought into the Shadow Cabinet, but I suppose the Euro-drivel loons sadly rules that out.
Now some Labour prominent supporters want the semantics of 'violent crimes' to be narrowed down to such incidences as chopping the victims' hands and legs off or putting the hapless victim in a pair of concrete boots to survey the bottom of Thames.
ReplyDeleteFor me and my neighbourhood old age pensioners, threatening with a kife to hand over the weekly pension money on the way back from the post office is good enough for classification as violent crime.
If Labour had its way, our streets which had seen at least 6 muggings, 4 knife wounds within the last 40 days will be classified as perfectly safe!
Less crime under labour? Their ministers won't go walkabout in their own constituencies without a stab vest and a police escort.
ReplyDeleteTheir should be an independant body in charge of all government statistics. And not one staffed by the usual mates of the government quangocrats.
Surely, this should go some way to doing away with the ridiculous notion of allowing elected Mayors and council leaders some say in local policing - I've even heard it touted that they should be allowed to pick which senior officer should be made their local borough commander.
ReplyDeleteHere in Newham, the local elected Labour Mayor tried a nifty little get around to ensure he had his own private police force; he established a parks constabulary (who only have the power to enforce council bye-laws in local parks) and dressed them up in police uniforms. He had them out and about on the streets of Newham making arrests for all sorts of crimes (including blackmail and immigration offences!) - all this has been covered widely by Private Eye.
But there are a couple of points that should be noted here: first, some Labour councillors called out these wannabe bobbies to break up a public meeting because local residents were asking awkward questions.
Second, I was taken aback by the way the Met police were not prepared to jump in and put a stop to what was going on - if you or I dressed up in a police uniform and went out patrolling the streets making arrests by way of our any-persons powers, we'd be banged up for impersonating a copper. But Newham's parks constabulary got away with it because the Met management are unwilling to be seen criticising an elected official. How much worse would this be if senior officers of the Met could be promoted on the say of a Mayor or a council leader?
Looks like Brown's runaway train is leaving the station again. Hold on to your hats.
ReplyDeleteBBC Politics
Police miscount serious violence
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Nu Labour corruption again.
ReplyDeleteWere the Parks polce ever allowed ro arrest any councillors or their family members? Thought not.
Wrongly counting offences is just one tactic used to keep the numbers down.
ReplyDeleteLast year my son was seriously assaulted at the Leeds Festival. Police spoke to him while the Paramedics were trying to fix his broken nose but given his injuries he didnt get their numbers.
When he hadn't heard anything he contacted West Yorks Police. He was told that the incidnet had never been reported or crimed. He complained and was advised to just go to his local station and report it again. He did this. They were excellent, took a detailed statement and photos of his injuries and sent them to Leeds. They also gave him information on making a criminal injury claim and put him in touch with victim support.
When he put in a claim it was initially rejected. He was told that West Yorkshire Police still denied that he had ever reported the crime. Luckily our local police had a copy file and details of the West Yorks officers who were informed of the incident and to whom the evidence was sent.
But it was clear that it was never crimed and West Yorkshire did absolutely nothing to investigate a very serious Section 18 assault.
This practice is called "cuffing" crime. It has gone on for years but it helps Home Secretaries get re-elected so everyone is happy.