The Home Office said …

norman dennis, 3 January 2005

The first reponse from the Home Office to Cultures and Crimes was that the risk of being a victim of crime is at its lowest since records began.
No! Records began in 1857.
If no notice had been taken of the book, that utterly reckless statement would have done the job nicely.
But notice is being taken of the book, and the Home Office has decided that it will have to be more circumspect. Its latest comments on the book are now the much safer, “Your chance of being a victim of crime is now at its lowest level since 1981”.
I don’t know if the population figures they use are those of 2001 and 1981 Censuses.
If the Home Office did their calculations on a more refined basis than that of the total population, then they can supply the correction, and show what difference it makes to the percentage (and more importantly, to the argument), directly onto this site.
On the basis of the Census population, the risk of being a victim of a BCS crime was almost precisely the same in 2003/04 as it was in 1981, 22.5 per cent–in fact the 2003/04 figure is fractionally lower than the figure for 1981.
Unfortunately for the Home Office spokespersons, the relevance of their comments in relation to Cultures and Crimes is almost zero. The book starts with the fact that crime in general has fallen from the enormously high levels of its 1995 peak–to the still enormously high levels of 1981 and today. From 1955 there had been a relentless rise in crime, so that by 1981 the first British Crime Survey estimated that there were 11 million crimes in the year. In 2003/04 the BCS estimate was that there were 11.7 million crimes in the year.
Crime fell from the mid-1990s in both the BCS and police-recorded statistics because householders and car manufacturers took more and more elaborate precautions to keep criminals at bay.
The subject of Cultures and Crimes is the category of crimes and disorder where the numbers went on rising until 2001/02: the offences the control of which was least within the power of people themselves, and where dependence on the police was greatest–on the streets.
Sorry! I thought that the Home Office had had the sense to realise that they’d been rumbled. But my wife’s just come in with this morning’s Daily Express. ‘A Home Office spokeswoman said: “Latest figures show the the risk of being a victim is at its lowest level since records began.”‘
The BCS figures, by the way, do not attempt to touch some of the most rapid areas of crime growth.
In spite of the fact that the reduction in the age of both victims and perpetrators is a phenomenon of many years’ standing, the BCS excludes all crimes committed against under-16s.
The BCS excludes all drug crimes.
But, hey! The crime figures look a lot better without them!