The government, not Chris Grayling, is misleading the public over violent crime

Kinglear

Anybody who thinks Britain is less crime-ridden now than before 1997 is deluded and not living in the UK. They are living in la-la land

JohnPage

I don't recall Scholar conceding it - didn't he insist that previous figures of Grayling's had wrongly ignored the rejigging?

Ian Walker

Kinglear: I think you'll find "living in Westminster" both amore accurate and curiously equivalent statement.

Vulture

Every week sees some Gothic horror story from the feral underclass - such as yesty's sentencing of a Neanderthal family for torturing a handicapped man to death for his benefits.

There is no earthly reason why we should pay to keep these animals in clover for the rest of their unnatural lives. On this the US & China are right and Europe has taken a disastrous turn. A sane society would restore capital punishment and one day it will. The only probelem is that it may be an Islamic society.

pp

Sorry, house of Commons figures aren't reliable:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2010/apr/27/conservatives-crime-figures-reality-check

Alan Douglas

Crime is seriously UP : you've got the whole New Labour scam in all its manifold glory to count, after all.

Alan Douglas

Willie de Peepul

Grayling's performance on 'Today' this morning wasn't as good as it should have been. He needs to sharpen up and hammer home the facts about under-recording and non-recording of crime, instead of quoting a few anecdotes which, horrific though they are, do not amount to statistics any more than the garbage being put out by the national crime survey.

George Eaton

Hi David, pleased to have the debate but case not proven I'm afraid. First, the changes in recording practice only applied to police recorded statistics, not to the British Crime Survey.

As the UK Statistics Authority pointed out in its rebuke to Grayling over his misuse of statistics, the BCS was "not affected by changes in reporting, police recording and local policing activity, and has been measuring crime in a consistent way since the survey began in 1981".

Second, with regards to the Commons study, this stripped out 24 per cent of the increase in violent crime to account for the new recording methods, allowing, as you say, the Conservatives to claim that violent crime has risen by 44 per cent since 1998.

But what the party failed to mention is that the 24 per cent figure accounts for only one year of the changes, even though the violent crime figures were artificially inflated for at least two to three years.

It's still Grayling who has the explaining to do here.

George

EyeSee

Can we please stop treating the BCS as a source of information; it isn't. As the name makes plain it is a survey. A survey of 0.06% of the population, selected by....? It rules out enormous areas of real crime as irrelevant and doesn't record crime, but the participants 'experience' of it. Had they been a victim, knew someone who was(heard of a crime, know the tooth fairy by name)? In essence then, it is just a guess at the very best.

luke

Wow - bold claims here, David.

What is the change in recording practice in teh British Crime Survey?

Dorothy Wilson

If crime is falling [as Johnson claimed on the Today programme] why are our prisons too full [as Huhne claimed on the Today programme]? Or am I missing something?

Noa

Chris Grayling made the classic mistake of being drawn into a battle on Labours terms.
The classic opposition argument that crime is out of control is difficult to argue when the stats appear to show otherwise.

It was necessary to convincingly demonstrate that Labour's solutions to crime, most notably their de-criminalisation and punishment policies had failed lamentably and how distinctive Conservative crime, police and justice reforms would address the hidden, as well as the obvious violent crime issues.

Unfortunately though, no such policies are on offer.

Naomi Muse

So it's fudge all round again.

Very confusing to everyone except in the aspect of not trusting what politicians say.

Harvey redgrave

Think you have confused BCS stats (a victimisation survey) with recorded crime stats. The change in recording practice you refer to only happened in relation to the latter. BCS crime trends on the other hand have been measured consistently since 1981 and have shown a steady fall since 1995. This has mirrored trends across a no. of countries and is not confined to the UK. The BCS has been recognised by UKSA as the most reliable measure of violent crime.

David Blackburn

Hi George,

Thanks for responding and keen to debate. Agreed that neither system is perfect, something I should have said in the original post, and it would preferable if the system was standardised. The British Crime Survey is just a survey, not a sufficient statistical record. Also, the BCS website devotes an entire chapter to how it has changed its methods since 1981, something that Sir Michael Scholar overlooked in his original rebuke of Grayling. Police records have their own shortcomings but it is very convenient for the UK Statistics Agency to overlook the fact that the government moved the goalposts after 2002.

The 2008 clarification on GBH is instructive because it did not sharpen the murky ill-definition between ‘affray’, ‘assault’ and ‘GBH’. The Commons report defined them as violent crimes – hence the ‘artificially’ inflated figures. It may be ridiculous to describe grabbing someone by the lapels in a bar as a violent crime, but until these figures are collected consistently and to a standard definition both sides of the argument can be equally disingenuous. In this specific instance, Grayling’s being pretty up front, certainly in comparison to the government and its agencies.

David

Liz Brown

Crime IS up - end of..........

westlondoner

It is incredibly frustrating that this debate is rumbling on. Almost every credible expert (not including politicians of any party) believes that the British Crime Survey is a more accurate measure of crime trends than the crime recorded by the police. For a start, it is much more comprehensive - the volume of crime that it discovers is much higher than in the recorded crime statistics - and it is also subject to much fewer methodological changes.

But this post highlights the extent to which misunderstanding persist around the statistics. The author confuses the two measures (it is recorded crime, not the BCS, which was affected by changes 2002-03, as George Eaton says) and while he subsequently acknowledges this (sort of) in the comments, the original post remains and for those people who don't read the comments (most people, I'd guess), this misinformation will continue to stand.

In most cases I would be very reluctant to advise leaving things to the experts, but in this case I think it is worth allowing the people who properly understand how crime statistics are constructed and reported to interpret them, and almost without exception they say that crime has fallen in recent years. Whether the Government deserves any credit for this is, of course, a completely separate question.

Marbury

There's no such thing as a "sufficient statistical record" of crime David, if by sufficient you entirely reliable. Crime is notoriously hard to measure, in any society. That's just a fact of life. But most criminologists and statisticians accept that the BCS is the best we've got to go on.

That's why Grayling got such a whacking on the Today programme this morning, and kept resorting to anecdote. The real test will be if and when Grayling gets to be Home Secretary and the BCS shows crime continuing to decline. I have a feeling he might suddenly discover its merits at that point.

Liz, I think that might just be the most vacuous comment I've ever read on this site - congratulations!

BenM

Update the article Mr Blackburn.

It has been pointed out to you that the changes you refer to were to the Police Recorded Stats and not the British Crime Survey.

The British Crime Survey will always be more authoratitive on trends in crime because its methodology has remained largely unchanged for three decades and because it picks up crimes the police numebrs cannot.

Fatbloke on tour

BenM

Not another Speccy journalist who doesn't understand stats.

As always the fish rots from the head down, what can you expect from a humble staffer if the editor doesn't understand employment figures and is dishonest / slanted when dealing with peak to trough GDP figures.

As always for the right wing mentalists who grow up believing they can do no wrong, when caught on the wrong side of the argument -- be economical with the truth.

Snowman

Those who believe that crime ain’t a problem should consult not quarterly or even annual stats of whatever source, but look at and compare any current data with crime levels going back decades. The differences for all types of crime are truly shocking.

Just one example for the one category of crime where the rate has been trending downwards in recent years – burglaries.

In the mid-60s, the number of burglaries ran at just over 30,000 pa. In recent years, the level has been around 800,000-900,000 cases per year, of which around half of that figure accounted for ‘successful’ burglaries. Over 30,000 individuals got hurt.

And another thing that irks: since capital punishment got removed from the statute books over 120 murderers released after they completed their tariff murdered again.

Verity’s quite right. Capital punishment saves lives.

westlondoner

Snowman. That doesn't prove that burglary is more common now than it was then. It could be, but it could also be that more people choose to report it to the police. In fact, the latter is likely because household insurance is now much more common than it was then, and normally requires a police report in order to claim. There are also different rules about recording crimes, there is evidence that police used not to record crimes if they thought that catching anybody was unlikely, or if they thought that the person reporting it might be making it up. In both cases, this is now very likely to be recorded. This is the problem with using recorded crime statistics to make comparisons over time – the levels of reporting and recording change for a variety of reasons, both good and bad. The British Crime Survey doesn’t go back to the 1960s, so is no use for this purpose.

Snowman

westlondoner @ 6.16:

Point taken, but do you truly believe that the gap 30K – 400K can be explained by definitional discrepancies or the rate of reporting? Hmmm. Am a member of a club burgled three times. On the third occasion, we didn’t bother to report it, and nobody would ensure us any more.

Am afraid, my blogging friend, the gap is more likely to do with the continuous and seemingly irrevocable removal of genuine punishment from the criminal justice system. A murderer serves on average just over nine years today, and the trending points south. This puts murder on a list of options for getting rid of someone one doesn’t like given life expectancy at 80.

Noa Zrk

Snowman @ 8:27pm

"..A murderer serves on average just over nine years today, and the trending points south. This puts murder on a list of options for getting rid of someone one doesn’t like given life expectancy at 80..."

The message is clear.

For his own safety, Brown, together with his nomenklatura, had better loose on 6th May.

Catesby

One set of figures that neither the Staggers nor Downing Street can easily manipulate or misrepresent is the admissions record at hospital accident and emergency departments.

The number of people arriving at A&E with knife wounds or their heads bashed-in is a surer guide to whether violent crime is or isn't on the up than perhaps anything else.

All the evidence I've seen points to more rather than fewer admissions of knife victims since 1997.

Charity

Crimes are increasing as the year passed. Just recently, the man who murdered Malcolm X at point blank range appears to have been paroled. He admitted to the murder of the Civil Rights Movement leader, but maintains to this day that the other two men arrested with him weren't his accomplices. Thomas Hagan was expected to be released on Wednesday, but due to the fact his agreements was completed early he was paroled Tuesday. He has served 45 years in prison and has attempted for parole 16 times before they approved this one. Really though how much is going to change. I'd bet not much. He received his master's degree in sociology, which is a great accomplishment for a prison inmate; and he has been on a work release program for years. He has had 2 days a week for a really long time to step out and work a normal job.