Archive for December, 2004
Are the figures of recorded crime any use?
Posted by Norman Dennis in Crime on 31/12/2004
Cultures and Crimes, Civitas’s new book on crime and the police, will be published early next week. Cultures and Crimes looks at crime and policing within the context of the cultures of four societies, England, France, Germany and the United States.
I am one of the authors, and in the case of this volume I have the unusual advantage of being able to answer the principal criticism before it is made. It will be that “everybody knows”, and everybody has known “for the past thirty or forty years”, that the figures of police recorded crime are no good, and that nothing can be said about crime on the basis of them.
The Government’s Fix and How to Fix it
Posted by David Conway in Health on 24/12/2004
Due to the recent enforced closure of the Merseyside-based firm that supplied the NHS with flu-vaccine and diamorphine, it is reported in today’s papers that the country’s hospitals face the prospect of running out of supplies of the painkiller in a mere matter of weeks.
This is no laughing matter, since diamorphine is used in the analgesic treatment of cancer patients and others with serious and terminal painful conditions.
When Sikhs Must Hide… Can this really be the Season to be Jolly?
Posted by David Conway in Race and Equality on 23/12/2004
Can this really be the season to be jolly, given with each passing day some new nail is driven into the coffin of England’s traditional liberties?
Today’s depressing news concerns Sikh playwright, Guperpreet Kaur Bhatti. Her dramatised depiction of rape and murder in a Sikh temple or Gurdawara so offended some of her co-religionists that their violent protests forced the Birmingham theatre in which her play had been showing to full houses to terminate its run early.
If the forced early closure of her play was not bad enough, today’s papers report its author as having been forced into hiding on the advice of the police after receiving death threats from those apparently still not yet mollified.
Police numbers for crime prevention
Posted by Norman Dennis in Crime on 22/12/2004
Mr Kaye has raised a key issue in pointing out that the number of crimes has increased out of all proportion to the increase in the number of police officers and the “police extended family”.
In the early 1990s there were 128,000 police officers year by year in England and Wales. The numbers declined somewhat in 1994-95, and then dropped sharply from 1997 to 2000, to 124,000.
The police services had regained their 1997 numbers of police officers by 2002.
None of this of course, discouraged the media from supporting the Home Office’s version of its successes. In December 2001, for example, the BBC headlined the exciting news that “UK police numbers leap”.
Numbers have increased again since, to 138,000. This is a record high, and therefore, of course, an improvement to be warmly applauded by everyone whose interest is in the primacy of crime prevention, the great leading principle of policing in this country from the first days of the Sir Robert Peel’s Metropolitan Police to the 1960s.
When he was Home Secretary, Mr Blunkett constantly referred to the “record numbers” of police officers and to “falling crime”.
But the proper context for assessement is the increase in police numbers since the 1960s as compared with the increase in crime numbers since the 1960s.
Crime surged upwards from the early 1960s to the mid-1990s, and on the streets the surge continued until the beginning of this century. Police numbers grew very slowly.
That is the meaningful context for assessing “record police numbers” and “falling crime”. In that context, the rise in police numbers is welcome but grossly insufficient for crime prevention, and the fall in crime numbers leaves crime levels far above those of even the high-crime decade of the 1980s.
On the streets, of course, where the police role is essential in crime prevention, the fall in robberies of personal property does not get us back even to the levels of 1997, the year in which Mr Straw became Home Secretary.
As Mr Kaye implies, it is as if at the battle of the Little Big Horn Custer had been joined by another hundred soldiers, and five hundred of the surrounding Sioux and Cheyenne had gone home. There is “a record number” in the Seventh Cavalry and “a fall in the enemies’ numbers”. That’s all right then.
Tough on marriage, tough on the causes of marriage–and crime goes through the roof
Posted by Norman Dennis in Crime, Family, Marriage and the Culture on 21/12/2004
I have been asked to add a bit to my last posted article. In it I said that crime had been brought down in the 1990s by people’s own precautions, instituted because they were very reasonably experiencing a growing fear of crime; but that crime on the streets, the control of which depended on the police, continued to grow for another ten years.
With the numbers of robberies doubling and redoubling, the country at last awoke from the stupor into which it had been lulled by our academic and media elites. For decades they had dismissed the rise of crime as what they loftily dismissed as “moral panic”. It was a double-barrelled sneer. Being “moral”, for them, was worse than being in a panic.
I’ve been asked specifically to give the facts about the Home Office under Mr Straw from 1997 to 2001, and under Mr Blunkett from 2001 to 2004. Robbery is a police-controlled crime, as distinct from crimes where the public can do something to protect itself without the police (locks, bolts, alarms, staying indoors).
Mr Straw and Mr Blunkett, as Home Secretaries, were in charge of the Metropolitan police, London’s police.
In the year that Mr Straw took over the Home Office there were 27,386 robberies of personal and business property in London.
By 2000 there were 35,709 robberies of personal property in London.
In 2001, the year Mr Straw was promoted to the Foreign Office, there were 47,559 .
No the wonder that Mr Blunkett said that Mr Straw left the Home Office in a mess.
In the first eleven months of 2004, the year of Mr Blunkett’s departure, with December’s figure of about 2,500 still to be added in, there have been 33,673 personal-property robberies in London–with December included, not fewer than 36,000 for the full year.
Thus Mr Blunkett has not succeeded in getting the figures back even to the 35,709 personal-property robberies of 2000. Mr Blunkett was all the further, of course, from getting back to the figure with which Mr Straw began, the 27,000 of 1997, which included business robberies as well.
Worse Than When They Started
Posted by David Green in Crime on 20/12/2004
Perhaps unwisely, David Blunkett , said that Jack Straw left the Home Office in a mess. The Government has placed great emphasis on its Public Service Agreement (PSA) targets. According to the Treasury, they ‘have become increasingly outcome-focused’, and are now supported by ‘rigorous performance information’. (Spending Review 2004.)
However, in two cases, performance has got worse: fewer offenders are being brought to justice and the number of robberies has gone up.
The baseline for robbery is police-recorded offences in 1999-2000: 68,782 crimes in the ten street crime initiative areas. The target is a reduction in those areas of 14% to 59,153 crimes. The Autumn Performance Report for 2003 honestly reports that, in 2002-03 the police recorded 83,661 robberies in the ten areas, an increase of 22%.
The Home Office Departmental Report 2004 does not give the total number of robberies, merely saying there was a 17% reduction from 2001-02 to 2002-03 and that further ‘substantial reductions’ had been made in 2003-04. The Autumn Performance Report 2004, however, shows that there were 76,776 robberies, an increase of 12% and still 30% adrift of the target.
In addition, there is evidence of a displacement effect from the ten street crime areas. Robberies increased 12% in those areas, but rose 20% in the whole country (from 84,277 to 101,095). (Crime in England and Wales 2003/04, Table 2.04.)