Mori’s Issues Index Poll for June shows crime is a serious concern for more people than any other issue. We recoil at the tragedy of savage murders and other violent crime and the everyday grind of burglaries, thefts and vandalism. Despite that, the problem is extremely difficult to get an empirical handle on. There are measurement issues – how many shopliftings take place for every one that the police actually record? There are also weighting issues – how many burglaries is a murder worth?
The only way of dealing with the first question is to compare recorded crime with British Crime Survey results and try to work out some ratios. The best way of answering the second question is to use assessments of the economic and social cost of crime to work out the social implications of violent attacks, burglaries and the range of other crimes. This might sound brutal, putting a price on people’s suffering, but it is absolutely essential to the task of truly understanding how crime differs over time and between different parts of the country. If you don’t weight the results then you effectively treat one murder as equal to one theft, an approach that is clearly absurd.
A few years ago the Home Office attempted to estimate the cost of crime. They came up with a national estimate and estimates of the average cost per incident of various crimes. At the TaxPayers’ Alliance we’ve used those estimates of the average cost per incident of various crimes to work out just how much recorded crime is costing ordinary Britons in order to produce our report The Cost of Crime (PDF). We haven’t scaled the estimates up to account for the difference between recorded and actual crime and we haven’t included some crimes such as fraud that the Home Office didn’t produce an estimate of average cost per incident for. We’ve erred on the side of caution at every stage to make absolutely clear that this result isn't based on alarmism or cherry-picking.
Despite that we still found an average cost of crime per person of £275. In the worst area, Nottinghamshire, the cost of crime is £390 per person. This is an incredible burden on ordinary people, particularly in urban areas. The victims of crime often bear an awful emotional burden and may miss time at work or have their property damaged and we all suffer from needing to spend more defending and insuring ourselves and our property.
Over the decades Westminster has shown that it can’t effectively manage the police. Now the police are spending far too much time chasing targets and satisfying the bureaucracy instead of deterring and confronting crime. We need direct local accountability, whether you want to elect police chiefs or send for the sheriff. Then we need detailed information, crime mapping, so that people can make the right use of their new ability to hold the constabulary to account.