MattW

Labour announces smug figures

BBC NEWS | UK | Home Office says crime down by 9%

Crime in this neck of the woods is fairly low and I have not experienced any personally. So is this indicative of the trend?

PeteBrant

THe figures don;t lie, but they don't tell the whole story either.

Obviously this takes no account of demographics - Violence against the person has fallen by 8%, but within that figure, has violence in pubs and clubs gone down, and violence involving youths gone up?

I have no idea, all I am saying is that, yes, the crime figures can be relied upon, but they do not tell the whole story, they are simpyl headline figures.

Klaatu

Election year, anyone?

stilover

Crime is up.

People don't report it as much, as the Police show little interest.
The Police don't always give a crime a crime number, hence reported crime is down.

The amount of Chav's and immigrants commiting crime is up. The Govenrment can show anything they want to make themselves look good, yet we all know different.

MattW

9% is a rather large %age do you not agree?

lozgti

Violence in pubs and clubs?

Maybe a short ride in the police car to outside of town and dump the offenders? Might save some paperwork rather than haul them in.

David Lock

So when someone nicked £1500 from my credit card that was included in the figures was it?

The police didn't want to know. But perhaps that wasn't a real crime.

I just don't believe the figures. Spin. dl

PeteBrant

Um - If you reported it, yes, if you didn't, then no.

How?

All you can go on is the number of reported crimes, if that number drops, then it is not a massive leap of faith to assume crime is also down.

Anecdotal evidence is, as always, completely useless.

David Lock

Of course I reported it along with pretty close details of who had been using the card number.

The police did NOT want to get involved and told me to deal with the bank. I have no idea if the bank eventually feed info back to the police. dl

r32

Sadly it appears they have changed the way they measure this, most offenders, other than motorists are let off, and some minor crimes no longer count.

stilover

Snap.

A few years ago, someone got my Credit card details and I only knew about it once my statement came in. Reported it to Police, and Credit card company.
Credit card company phoned me up a couple days later asking for a crime number. Went to Police station and asked for the crime number.

No crime number. It had been classed as an Enquiry. WTF ???

No Crime commited, crime stats down

Martin2005

You need to be more honest with yourself, if the stats showed an increase in crime you'd be jumping up and down blaming the government, when the stats show the opposite you say the stats are wrong. Then you wonder why governments spin?

Why not be more honest and say 'whatever this government does or says, good or bad, I'm against it'?

If reported crime numbers are down, then they're down, unreported crime is just an unknown, so you or I have no idea whether it's up, down or the same.

girl-in-a-scoob

As has already been said .. not all crime is reported... nothing happens

And the way the figures are manipulated I mean recorded is different than was before

alcazar

iTrader: (2)

Ho ho, "changed the way they measure this", I'll just fekkin BET they have.

Same as they've changed, and are thinking of changing again, the way inflation is calculated. Same as Mrs Thatcher changed the way the unemployed were counted.

Every thing is spin.

How do you know a politician is lying? His lips are moving!

Alcazar

Brendan Hughes

From Wiki:
The British Crime Survey or BCS is a systematic victim study, currently carried out by BMRB Limited on behalf of the Home Office. The BCS seeks to measure the amount of crime in England and Wales by asking around 50,000 people aged 16 and over, living in private households, about the crimes they have experienced in the last year.
The value of the BCS is that it can provide a better reflection of the true level of crime than police statistics since it includes crimes that have not been reported to, or recorded by, the police. The BCS estimates that only around half of all crime it measures is captured on police recorded crimes largely because people do not bother to report crimes because they think the crime was too trivial or the police couldn't do much about it. The BCS also provides a better measure of trends over time since it has adopted a consistent methodology and is unaffected by changes in reporting or recording practices.
BUT
In 2007, it was reported that the BCS was underreporting crime by about 3 million incidents per year because it did not allow for a particular person to be victimized more than five times in a year. The error means that violent crime is actually at 4.4 million incidents per year, an 82% increase over the 2.4 million previously thought.