Deliberate confusion about the crime statistics?
Civitas, 11 March 2010
The row rumbles on over the misuse of crime statistics, in which everybody from the BBC, to the National Statistics watchdog, to the Prime Minister himself has joined in to castigate the Tory election machine, and to claim that there is no possibility of using police-recorded figures to compare the government’s record on police-recorded crimes of violence pre- and post-2002.
Without taking into account the published caveats, Tory election literature has reproduced the official Home Office figures on the vast growth of police-recorded cases of ‘violence against the person’ under Labour.
The crude figures do indeed show that there has been an increase from 251,000 1997 to the latest figure of 903,000.
The caveats–the 1997 figure is not comparable with the 2008/09 figure because there were two purely paper changes in the way violence against the person was recorded, one in 1998 and the other in 2002.
But who is then misusing the statistics, when they claim that, because of the changes in recording practices, it is not possible to say whether police-recorded violence against the person has increased or not?
It is perfectly simple to use the known percentage-effect of each of the recording changes in 1998 and 2002. The effect of deflating the ‘paper’ increase by those percentages is to show an adjusted police-recorded increase from 251,000 in 1997 to 337,000 in 2008/09.
The figure of 337,000 is far below the published Home Office figure of 904,000, used in Tory election literature. But the 2008/09 figure is still more than 86,000 higher than the 1997 figure.
To put this rise into the historical perspective of even quite recent times, the total of cases of police-recorded violence against the person did not reach 86,000 in any year until 1978.