Crime Statistics: Fact or Fiction?

Crime statistics for England and Wales show an 8% drop on police figures and a 5% reduction in the ‘official’ crime survey figures (source guardian.co.uk). That has to be good news - doesn’t it? We’re winning the ‘war’ against crime – aren’t we? How do we compare with the remainder of Europe?

As any previous visitors here will know; I’m one of those who is often sceptical about ‘official’ crime statistics (see example post) but I’m not alone with my views. Several others continually question the validity of our crime figures. In recent years, the Thin Blue Line Blog  has probably done more than most in its attempt to; comprehensively unravel all the ‘spin’ and book cooking disguising the true figures.

Crime statistics attempt to provide statistical measures of the crime in societies. Given that crime is usually secretive by nature, measurements of it are likely to be inaccurate…(wikipedia.org)

To be fair, our ‘official’ statistics in England & Wales are supplemented by the results of the crime survey; a process that since 1982, provides additional figures (designed) to supplement the actual number of crimes recorded by the police. The idea behind the survey is to provide a more ’balanced’ picture of crime trends (see crimesurvey.co.uk) by courting personal opinion and perception.

The overall picture, based upon both sets of data shows that; despite the downward trends, Britain still remains among the more violent countries in western Europe. Still a sad fact but thankfully, the statistical decline is more rapid here than anywhere else in Europe. So it appears that, mostly due to our media perhaps, we still have a tendency to inflate the true picture?

Statisticians say the crime rate has halved since it peaked in 1995 and appears to be at its lowest level for more than 30 years…(guardian.co.uk)

So if crime is actually falling, all we now have to do is reduce the fear of crime, whether or not that fear is based upon fact or fiction i.e. real or perceived. It’s something our police forces (and the government) have been trying to do for some time.

The fear of crime refers to the fear of being a victim of crime as opposed to the actual probability of being a victim of crime. The fear of crime is said to have been in Western culture for “time immemorial”…(wikipedia.org)

It’s an important factor that was also raised by Ally Fogg writing in The Guardian when he said; Crime is falling. Now lets reduce fear of crime - a nobel thought but is it one that’s actually viable? The Twitter notification informing the world about his article prompted me to reply in my usual cynical manner. 

Easy to ‘cook’ the books but mind engineering far more difficult (@DaveHasney)

Despite covering most, if not all the social, economic and scientifically derived factors leading to our ‘fear’ of crime in his article, Ally Fogg actually alluded to the fact that it is never easy to make significant in roads into this problem. Moving towards his summing up he said; “Psychology has taught us how cognitive biases skew our perceptions of risk.”

Crime (and anti social behaviour) are undoubtedly an important issue for all our communities; it’s one of the main reasons why we now have  Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships (CDRP). Groups that were established by the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 to co-ordinate action on crime and disorder. But more than ten years on since their inception, we still have that ‘fear’ in our communities.

The next natural question to ask is, are they actually achieving what they set out to do? If so, it’s not that apparent. It’s probably the reason why so many similar questions are raised (but usually only partly answered), by sociologists, criminologists, politicians and journalists ad infinitum.

The prevailing mood is always that the world is going to hell in a handcart, and woe betide any political candidate who suggests otherwise…(Ally Fogg)

The majority of these ‘crimes’ (perceived or real), may well be ’low level quality of life issues’ however; they still serve to continually blight many of our neighbourhoods. In addition, they still ruin people’s lives and probably more important now than in the past, they also have a substantial financial impact upon the public and private sector purse. Hundreds of thousands of pounds in lost revenue and (arguably) wasted expenditure trying to combat them, are continually flushed down the public service drains of our society each year.

The total cost of violence and crime to the UK economy is estimated at £124bn per annum. To put that in perspective, a further 50% reduction in crime would cover the cost of every hospital built-in the country over the past 13 years…(guardian.co.uk)

These financial figures are even more worrying (and annoying) when you consider; we’re continually trying to rectify problems caused by a relatively small minority in our society. Financial impacts aside but with self-preservation of party political popularity no doubt to the fore; it’s hardly surprising that successive Governments have not only set targets for reducing crimes such as burglary, robbery and car theft, but for some time now, they have also aimed to reduce the fear of crime.

Now I’m not one of those who is easily swayed in his opinion or beliefs; especially not when it comes to the emotive type of media headlines so favoured by our tabloid journalists. I can also read between the lines of often politically biased broadsheet  journals. As it would appear many commentators to Fogg’s article were prone to mention. Ergo, I’m not one of those who’s perception is as a consequence of our media.

I fully understand all the ‘tricks’ of the trade utilised by police forces and politicians to artificially illustrate the realities of crime. I live in probably the ’safest’ area of England & Wales (according to crime statistics) but I still continually see, hear about and take note of many of the criminal and/or anti-social realities impacting upon our society. I also have a pretty good handle on how police resources are deployed to deal with many of those issues.

I know that perception and reality are often at odds with each other however; despite a still relatively small number of ‘crimes’ per capita, crime actually rose almost year on year between 1950 and in 2004/05 (civitas.org.uk). Strange how after an almost tenfold increase in that time (see graph), we’re suddenly expected to believe crime is decreasing year on year. It’s also hardly any wonder that, irrespective of numerous ’satisfaction’ surveys, the word on the street (rightly or wrongly) is, “our police are failing us!”

Despite all the contrived spin designed to mitigate against the general (but hopefully mostly unfounded) perceptions about our police, the public rarely see police officers these days, let alone experience any personal interaction with them. When they do, it appears that with far too much regularity, their experience often leaves a sour taste. I’ve said it in the past , perhaps the police are the engineers of their own demise?

When communities are continually ‘sold’ high expectations about the capabilities of their police, and those massively reduced resources can’t physically match up to that expectation, is it any wonder we’re unintentionally generating negative perceptions about policing capability?  And what they [the police] are doing about crime.

There are those who will argue that policing is more of a scientific and intelligence lead process today, it’s not just about visibility and response times. It is a combination of proactive and reactive methodology. I agree but I also worry that; far too often it appears the ‘proactive’ aspects are little more than short-term operations for PR opportunities and the ‘reactive’ part, well that is often late or (sometimes rightly) not delivered at all.

Add a widely held negative perception of policing, to a predominant (unfounded?) belief we live in a society of high crime levels and you have a recipe for a pressure cooker of public angst. But policing and crime, or indeed the fear of crime, are only the window on the actual problems. It is far too simplistic to lay all the blame at the front door of your local Police Station (always assuming you can actually find one).

As I’ve pointed out before, with regular monotony; political spin, PR hype and ‘cooking’ of records will never realise the actual results we’re continually striving to achieve.

If we compare ourselves with other countries or with our own history, the crime rate is high… Rather than making it seem that people are in the grip of irrational fears and implying that these fears are whipped up by the tabloids, the Home Office could more usefully direct its energy at reducing crime and recognising the objective seriousness of the situation…(civitas.org.uk)

To find the real answers to the problems resulting from crime, we need to examine the very foundations of our society. Wealth (or lack of it), parenting skills, quality of education, health and wellbeing and yes policing, along with the remainder of the Criminal Justice System, all have a part to play in crime reduction. Their actions/inactions all have an impact upon the stability of our social framework.

There is no quick fix available and certainly no immediate personal kudos to be gained here for any senior police officers, Police & Crime Commissioner or politician. That’s a fact they would all do well to remember. We need to invest more time, effort and public cash, into the root causes of crime. Always assuming we really want to see some tangible results. Or, could ”reducing the fear of crime” be just another example of political spin?

Whatever your perceptions of crime, the closing lines of Crime Watch which went something like - “Please remember, violent crime is actually much rarer than a lot of what we show, please do not have nightmares, sleep tight” – are relevent here!

Related articles

• Crime is falling. Now let’s reduce fear of crime | Ally Fogg (guardian.co.uk)
• Is UK Crime Falling? (britishvlogger.wordpress.com)
• Crime Figures Lack Validity – Reclassifying ‘Crimes’! (brianrobertssociology.wordpress.com)
• Media Impact on Crime and Fear (kdizaei.wordpress.com)
• Pom-poms ‘help reduce fear of crime’ (bbc.co.uk)

Do we need a Different Kind of Justice?

So, you come home after a hard day at work to find your home has been broken into. Someone has rifled through your private life and some of your personal possessions are missing; how do you feel and what do you need to happen to gain some closure from the incident and move on?

Feelings of shock, despair, upset and anger are all natural emotions for any victim of crime, perhaps even more so with burglary than some other crimes. Often there are myriad questions racing around your head. Why me? Why would anyone do it? Will the police catch the offender? Will the courts prosecute them? Will they lock the offender up and throw away the key to protect others? One question that doesn’t appear very often in a victims head is, why did he/she do it? If that question does present itself, how many victims really care about the true answer to it?

Yesterday morning I listened to A Different Kind Of Justice on BBC Radio 4. In the programme, dialogue expert Karl James was exploring the relatively new ideas behind the so-called Restorative Justice process.

In November 2008, Margaret interrupted a burglary in her own home. As she came through the backdoor, the burglar left through the front. He had taken a laptop full of photos commemorating her daughter Jessica’s 18th birthday. Eight months later her daughter was killed in a tragic car accident. The theft of the laptop meant her parents were deprived of any recent family photos of their daughter. For Margaret, the burglary and her daughter’s death became entwined, increasing her sense of anger and impotence. But, inspired by the memory of her daughter, Margaret agreed to meet the offender in a restorative justice conference in Preston Prison…(bbc.co.uk)

Always having been something of a sceptic, it was interesting to listen to both sides’ perspective on what happened and the long-term consequences of their meeting. A lifetime of seeing the same ‘customers’ over and over again as a police officer tends to taint your viewpoint a little. I even had one ‘regular’ who’s sole aim of his criminality was to be incarcerated at Christmas. He said it was his favourite time of the year even though he was locked away, at least he had friends, good food and TV, all the stuff he didn’t get at home. 

That said, I was never one of those us and them coppers. Yes I wanted to catch the ‘bad guys’ and protect the public but for me, my raison d’être was always more about trying to understand an offender and what drove them, as opposed to the simple punitive consequences after the crime. My grandmother who was active independent and looking forward to her birthday telegram from HM Queen was burgled in her 99th year. Her death occurred whilst I was still relatively young but I will always believe that the offender(s) were instrumental in her demise in some way. The emotional trauma being the catalyst for her giving up on life?

It didn’t make me angry, it made me want to understand why people do what they do after all, there must be a reason, mustn’t there? People aren’t born bad, are they?

The role of the police has never been to dish-out the punishment and neither should it be. The punishment aspect of dealing with any criminal belongs to society and is vested in our courts, the prisons and the remainder of the criminal justice system (CJS). The sad fact of that is that our CJS appears to be failing us today and on so many levels.

Criminal justice system ‘failing’: Reoffending rates after a prison sentence are at an “unacceptably high level” and the failure of the criminal justice system to stop prisoners reoffending should shock the public…(guardian.co.uk)

Lord Woolf, the lord chief justice’s said that “crowded prisons cannot break the cycle of crime” and he’s probably right. Prison is only part of the rehabilitation process, despite the recent call by Paul Kernaghan, chief constable of Hampshire (amongst others), for judges to send more offenders to prison for the protection of the public. Filling our penal establishments with crooks goes some way towards appeasing the angst of society however; failure to do much that is ‘constructive’ with our resident prison population serves little or no purpose for any prospects of social improvement.

If we move away from our predominant “lock ‘em up” mentality than it falls upon the so-called community based punishments which are handled mainly by our probation services. This week the justice secretary, Chris Grayling, outlined plans for the ‘wholesale outsourcing of the probation service’ to private companies and voluntary sector organisations (see here), hoping that they would “take over the rehabilitation of the majority of offenders” by 2015.

The Probation Chiefs Association has significant concerns that this, combined with the pace with which the government intends to implement these reforms, could end up compromising public safety…(Sarah Billiald – Probation Chiefs Association)

Quiet obviously the PCA weren’t happy, their jobs will be (partly) at risk but a letter to The Guardian from Jon Spencer, Senior lecturer in criminal justice, School of Law, University of Manchester confirmed they’re not alone (see here) he wrote; “This is nothing more than an act of vandalism based on ideology. These proposals are the work of vandals because they create another fracture in the social contract between citizen and state.”

The plans that are condemned by many, not least the political opposition who branded them as “reckless” don’t even inspire confidence in their supporters; Grayling himself admits that privatisation plans won’t cut reoffending dramatically but he hopes they will produce ‘steady’ decline (see here). Commenting on the Probation verses Prison debacle in The Guardian recently Ian Birrell wrote;  Chris Grayling takes one step forward on probation, then one giant step back on jails (see here).

I would partly agree with the observation however; aren’t all politically developed ‘solutions’ to any given problem mostly designed to court public favour and popularity, as opposed to realistic prospects of tangible results?

Crime statistics (mostly manipulated) suggest that crime is in decline which is good. With rapidly reducing police resources trying to catch the criminals, perhaps we’ll have to be a little less sceptical about crime statistics, if only to gain some blinkered peace of mind. Thankfully more statistics also show us that even though our penal establishments have been full to capacity, the prison population is finally in decline.

According to the latest figures there are 83,632 people locked up in English and Welsh prisons. This is an obscenely large number that should shame the nation. It is almost double the number in jail when the last Conservative prime minister took office, and more per capita than any other country in western Europe…(guardian.co.uk)

Allegedly there is less crime, there are fewer offenders that need to be locked away and those that remain can be dealt with adequately in the community by our probation service… The one that is destined to be sold off to the highest private sector bidder… All good news isn’t it?

Not really, for a start our community based sanctions were never intended to be the sole punitive or  retributive measure meted out to an offender per se. Community service was supposed to be “a constructive penalty whereby the offender took on the burden of social responsibility towards others.”

In Forty Years of Community Service, John Harding – Chief Probation Officer for inner London 1993-2001, explains how the measure that once required offenders to carry out socially beneficial work, in addition to their punitive sentence, was subsequently turned into a form of punishment. Since inception in the 1970s the image of community service has been “ratcheted up by politicians to match penal populism.” The demands for tougher community penalties have been paralleled by the rebranding of community service to community punishment, then community payback.

Whether the foundation stones of community service, laid down over the past 40 years, will survive under fragmentation and privatisation is open to question…(John Harding)

Like the campaign which highlights the wastefulness of short-term prison sentences and promotes wider adoption of intensive community sentences, we’re all looking of ways to Make Justice Work? But don’t hold your breath waiting to see the rock busting chain-gangs along the highways of your daily commute. Even if that is the correct way to address the problem?

It is starting to look like the only chance of any realistic offender reduction is going to fall at the feet of victims and the Restorative Justice Process. Meetings between victims and the perpetrators of a crime are undergoing a huge expansion in the UK. New government legislation is being introduced to establish a best practice action plan for Restorative Justice, within the criminal justice system. Studies suggest the activity can reduce reoffending rates and help the victim come to terms with the crime.

Worryingly, the current austerity led reductions in publicly funded crime fighting resources are starting to dictate a DIY-CJS process. The question of how long it is before our frustrated society starts looking at having a go at the enforcement end of the process is also a worry!

Related articles

• 85% of overall victims ‘satisfied’ with Restorative Justice (itv.com)
• Restorative justice in domestic violence cases is justice denied (guardian.co.uk)
• ‘Why I must speak out to stop my rapist being freed’ (telegraph.co.uk)
• Restorative justice: live discussion (guardian.co.uk)
• Chris Grayling: Using same old probation services to cut reoffending is madness (telegraph.co.uk)
• Grayling admits probation privatisation will not cut reoffending dramatically (guardian.co.uk)
• ‘Rehabilitation revolution’ for prisoners after short jail terms (independent.co.uk)
• Firms ‘to take on probation work’ (bbc.co.uk)

Angling: Crimestoppers float new Crime Prevention initiative

Like any business area today, angling isn’t immune from the cut-throat requirements of supply demand and profit margins, all of which are compounded where any element of greed exists…

So, during difficult times of mass unemployment, austerity and reduced personal income all crime tends to increase, non more so than opportunist theft. Whilst some empathise with the misery of others, there will always be those happy to quickly seize upon any opportunity for some easy pickings.

These opportunities can and do turn previously honest people into criminals and as I’ve already said, even angling isn’t immune from these hard times. The impact of criminal behaviour upon angling should be the cause of real concern amongst all those who fish!

With this in mind, Crimestoppers the Fish Health Inspectorate (FHI) “working in partnership” (I hate that bloody term) have set up a new initiative, one that is designed to combat the main crime issues which are placing the enjoyment of angling under threat.

You can help to combat these crimes by taking more responsibility for your sport and providing information on illegal activity. With your help we can then target the right people: the ring leaders, the organisers, the individuals who stand to make the biggest profits – those with no care or interest in your sport or the welfare of the animals…(FHI)

The four key areas in question are:

• Smuggling fish from abroad
• Illegal fish movements between waters
• Fish theft and poaching
• Tackle theft

Fish smuggling & illegal movements: there are problems surrounding the illegal import and export of live fish, not least the health risks to our native stocks. It is why the system of authorisation and registration for farms and fisheries exists and they are required to be licensed.

Fish theft & poaching:

Tackle theft: it’s increasing at an alarming rate, as reports in the angling press and comments on internet angling forums attests. In spite of that, many anglers don’t give security a second thought.Some anglers store thousands of pounds worth of fishing tackle in flimsy garden sheds – only secured by a cheap padlock. In addition, people have been known to be followed home from matches only to find their gear has been stolen after the fact.

Thieves can easily break into poorly secured sheds and garages. Thieves and organised criminals with knowledge of angling dispose of stolen tackle through the internet and car boot sales, selling it at a fraction of its true value.

Remember; It’s always better to try to prevent crime and not to be a victim in the first place. This is why Crimestoppers have recently started their new crime prevention initiative for angling.