Regular readers will know that I regard all police crime figures as garbage. They are like an NHS league table or a BBC annual report, the work of self-obsessed officials who long ago crashed a luggage trolley through a wall in King’s Cross and never returned to reality. On their forehead is a tiny blemish called “my pension”.
Yesterday’s volume is an absolute cracker, magic mushrooms from start to finish. Mr Blunkett begins with a mind-bending “Crime up 7 per cent and down 3 per cent”. He puts assaults and robberies up, along with a rise in theft and property crime. A sensational touch is his decision to increase female rapes “by 27 per cent” and, a novel twist, male rapes by 17 per cent. Meanwhile, fear of crime is up or down, depending on your newspaper. Something called “overall crime” is emphatically down and has been for eight years. By the end of the story, Mr Blunkett emerges unscathed and the reader is confused and scared stiff.
These statistics are chaotic. They surely merit investigation by the National Audit Office or some statistical health-and-safety council. The police figures are published alongside a completely different set, the British Crime Survey, based on a public opinion poll. They bear no relation to each other, despite the Herculean efforts of the Home Office to make them. Mixing the two together enables Mr Blunkett to pick and choose the message he wants to convey: reassurance to some voters and terror to others and the Treasury. Since the police figures are the more lurid, they always dominate the coverage. They are the ultimate in target-driven, dumbed-down, genetically modified government.
Unpicking these statistics would hardly merit a click on the delete button did they not underpin billions of pounds of public spending. Collecting the figures distracts police from crime prevention. They encourage magistrates to imprison more citizens than any country in Europe. They thus generate ever more crime and recidivism. And they leave ordinary citizens frightened to go out of doors. Britain’s crime figures have become weapons of mass fear.
Let us take one alleged fact published yesterday. This claimed that police recorded crime in England and Wales rose last year by 7 per cent, to reach 5,899,450. This was a bare-faced lie. The real figure — absurd enough in equating a stolen bike with a serial killing — was a fall of 3 per cent. The difference is a change to a national recording system for police crime, giving most figures a roughly 10 per cent uplift. The “crime wave” is thus a statistical not a criminal phenomenon. Yet such is the fantasy world of central government that a change in statistical method is now “reality”, while real life is a mere footnote.
Take another case, the alleged increase last year in female rapes, by 27 per cent. As Mr Blunkett must have known, the figure looked appalling and sent the tabloids ballistic. In 2002, British males appear to have gone berserk. Yet no expert in sex crime believes a word of it. The figure is again the result of a change in reporting. Rape figures have long been vulnerable to the notorious “Stoke Newington” effect. This area of Hackney long enjoyed the lowest incidence of recorded rape in London. The reason was a sexist police station which told any woman who reported rape to go home and have a bath.
Rape advisory services still doubt if more than 10-20 per cent of rapes are recorded by the police. This means that any change in the inclination to report is likely to swamp any rise or fall in actual incidents. A long campaign to get more women to report rapes may (or may not) have led to a decrease in the crime, but the figures show them doubling under Labour and trebling over the 1990s. The Home Office admits that it does not know the impact of reporting changes. Vera Baird, QC, who chaired the recent inquiry on women and criminal justice, says that the figures “do not necessarily mean there is more rape going on”. But in that case, why does the Home Office put out alarmist statistics, knowing full well they will be plastered all over the press?
Drug offences are equally absurd. These rose last year “by 16 per cent to 141,116”. This means nothing. There must be a million drug offences committed every night in Britain’s city centres. The figure merely measures how often the police get out of their cars to make an arrest. Like drug seizures, these figures tell us nothing about drug use. They measure the opening and shutting of police car doors. The precision of that 141,116 figure has all the hollow tidiness of an authoritarian state.
Police officers record what the Home Office tells them to record. In the old days they listed what they thought constituted a recordable offence. The figures wavered back and forth, depending on the number of officers, the accessibility of police stations, the ownership of phones, the requirements of insurers and the quality of car locks. Car crime is now down not because thieves have disappeared but because locking systems have improved and it is easier to grab a mobile phone in the street than break a car window. Few young people now bother to insure mobiles or report their theft.
The police figures may be unreliable but their precision makes them beloved of Whitehall’s target culture. A police force may want more resources, so it ups its street crime figure by putting more police on the streets to discover it. Or a force may do the opposite. It may withdraw police from areas where they might encounter crime and direct them instead to hugely profitable traffic offences, whose fines revenue the police are allowed to keep.
The public wants, and is entitled to get, some general picture of the state of law and order in Britain as a whole. They get that from the British Crime Survey, an opinion poll of the public’s experience of crime divorced from police practice. This survey, also published yesterday and the source of much of the confusion, indicates a steady decline in crime over the 1990s. This is probably due to growing prosperity and better domestic security.
Little of this is believed by the public because they are fed the police figures. Three quarters of those surveyed believe that Britain is still in the grip of a crime wave. Fear of crime has always been regarded as more debilitating to society than actual crime. It leads people to stay in at night, to distrust strangers and to insist on driving their children to school. They turn away from antisocial behaviour in their neighbours and lose faith in a police service that has deserted them for the warmth of cars and offices. The fear infects the police, who dare not go on patrol except in pairs and with body armour.
Twice as many people who read tabloid newspapers as against broadsheets think crime has risen. Media coverage of crime statistics must have something to do with this, indicating both the power of the press and the Home Office’s alarmist manipulation of it. Yesterday’s tabloid headlines ignored the evidence of a falling crime rate with “Crimes of violence soar”, “Nation stalked by fear” and “British crime explosion”.
State scaremongering contributes to a grossly distorted view of the safety of Britain’s cities. That distortion makes vulnerable groups, and politicians, ever more fearful, intolerant and xenophobic, obsessed with jailing as many people as possible. Crime figures engender everything that is most illiberal and stupid about modern Britain. And they lie.
Is there any way out of this mess? Yes. The Home Office should continue to publish the British Crime Survey but it should stop demanding, adjusting, collating and disseminating “recorded crime” figures from police forces. Nor should it ever set police performance targets based on them. If local forces want to use crime records to boast their successes or boost their budgets, that is between them and their local authorities. Central government should have no part in it.
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