Gavin Lockhart, Crime & Justice Research Director, Policy Exchange
The admission that the police forces have been failing to properly record serious violent crime for more than a decade comes on the same day that the Leicestershire chief constable (who is also responsible for neighbourhood policing) said that that four in ten victims of crime are not visited by a police officer. The public are deeply skeptical about crime figures and they have reason to be so: the latest research from Policy Exchange suggests that after a decade of New Labour initiatives less than 2% of crime results in a guilty conviction.
Sources of crime figures range from official statistics (the British Crime Survey and police recorded crime), to less public sources (criminal intelligence maintained by law enforcement agencies). Published statistics need to be interpreted with care: non-reporting and non-recording of incidents mean that recorded crime figures do not and cannot include all crimes committed. Changes in police recording practices – notably to the counting rules in 1998 and the introduction of the national crime recording standard in 2002 – have led to artificial shifts in violent crime statistics. And the Government sometimes uses minor variations from one year to another to present a misleading picture of an improving situation. Much data is collected at local police force level but collated and published centrally by the Home Office, leading to duplication of work and long delays. Detailed crime statistics are available only months after the end of the reporting period and so the latest figures may be years old. Sound policy cannot be developed on the basis of out-of date statistics and intelligence. Central government should collate and publish recorded crime figures much faster than it does now, ideally every quarter, so that emerging trends can be identified promptly.
Take gun and knife crime: figures released this morning show that the number of attempted murders in England and Wales involving a knife April and June this year were 28 per cent up on last year. But the ‘corrected’ figures still do not offer a complete picture of gun and knife crime because much of it – especially violence between criminals and offences by children under 16 – has historically been unreported. Organisations that could provide extra data to fill out the picture, such as the Ministry of Defense or hospital A&E departments, are often reluctant to do so.
