I don’t often base my postings on comments but this one in conjuction with yesterday news was asking for it. A comment on the famous ‘1984 Poster’ article left by lawyer Martin Pratt goaded us:
Oh, and street crime in London is down 30% from last year. Don’t see you rushing to post anything about that.
One reason for responding to Mr Pratt’s otherwise unremarkable comments is that he claims to have worked for the Crown Prosecution Service (the UK equivalent of Office of the District Attorney). I suppose that was to give him an air of authority or at least credibility when venting his frustration with Samizdata and the posting. It didn’t work then and certainly not after reading about a report that confirmed what everyone in Britain apart from former CPS lawyers has known for quite some time – the crime is rising and the massaged official statistics are plainly wrong!
The report, compiled by the think-tank Civitas and based on Home Office research, much of which is unpublished, discloses that the official total severely underestimates the real level of crime. The last survey showed about 13 million offences a year. The true level of crime is four times higher than official figures have previously shown with more than 60 million offences committed each year in Britain.
David Green, the author of the report, identifies the underlying problem:
…many, if not all, statistical reports are still being submitted to ministers for approval of their content and the timing of their release. In an open society, there is no justification for the involvement of party politicians in regulating public access to information. Inevitably they use their control of the flow of facts to gain advantage over their opponents.
The intriguing bit about it is the note at the end of the report: Civitas wishes to record its thanks to the Home Office for checking and confirming the accuracy of the comparisons between the BCS and recorded crime. This is because the head of the Home Office crime statistics unit, has seen the figures used by Civitas and has confirmed that they are accurate, saying that he is “content” with the report’s findings.
Watching them lie to us
The CPS only acts on files which are forwarded to them by the police; the police process is, therefore,a kind of lens through which CPS will see the world.
But a great many crimes are, in all probability, not reported to the police at all and, of the ones that are reported, only a given proportion end up as files on CPS desks.
By dint of this process, CPS lawyers are only getting a part of the picture.
Of course if we keep saying that crime is going up, then more people are afraid to go out at night, so the ones who do go out are more alone and easy to attack, and crime actually does go up.
I think (especially in view of our growing addiction to security cameras) we need a public debate not on improving the crime figures, not on calculating what the crime figures really are, but a debate on what figures we would be relatively satisfied with.
Zero crime is obviously unachievable, so what is a “reasonable” level of robbery and violence? It is silly and counterproductive to say no level of crime is acceptable – down that road lies a secret-police apparatus and a climate of terror (whether criminal-imposed or police-imposed).
But how can we say crime is rising or falling until we agree roughly what we expect as the unavoidable level of crime in a free society?
About six hundred people get murdered during the average year in Britain. Of course every one of those is a personal tragedy and a sad, terrible loss, but seriously – what is our target?
If we get that down to 300 murders a year, would that be worth spending 20 billion pounds? 10 billion pounds? How much, then?
And what is our upper limit? We should begin to be alarmed if more than a thousand people are murdered in a year in Britain, I think. Does anyone see my point? Most murders are within families still.
Getting below twenty murders in a year – would that be worth a camera in every room of every home and office, for example?
I think (especially in view of our growing addiction to security cameras) we need a public debate not on improving the crime figures, not on calculating what the crime figures really are, but a debate on what figures we would be relatively satisfied with.
Excuse me, but you can’t get a public debate about a problem that government is denying exists or is lying about the extent of it. The post is not about how to deal with rising crime but about how government is, yet again, covering its incompetence.
The report you cite is utterly irrelevant to any claim relating to changes in crime figures. It suggests, extremely plausibly, that the level of crime is understated, but it offers no suggestion that the level if understatement has changed with time, and so the decreases in crime levels over the past few years are presumably correct.
Mike Scott: I am sorry but you haven’t read the main body of the report then. Yes, it concludes that the crime figures are grossly understated but the point is in the explanation for it. It does not need to offer any suggetion that the level of undestatement has changed with time – it proves that several entire(!) categories of crime have been ignored/excluded in the definition of crime. Violent crime commmitted by under 16s, theft and shoplifting etc.
Secondly, it also points out that many people do not report crime and that it is an increasing occurrence. Insurance companies estimate that only 1 incident in 150 get reported. The way reality behaves does not pay attention to statistical methodology the Home Office uses. What the report points out that not only the statistical methodology is deeply flawed and that the data gathered is massaged for political ends, but that crime is increasing precisely in those cracks. Makes sense, if I were a Home Office official I also would want to exise exactly those areas where the crime is on the increase. And they have acknowledged the validity of the data on which the Civitas report is based, which means they are aware of the real increase in crime in the categories they are deliberately excluding.
Thirdly, crime being a politically sensitive area, each government redefines the defnition and statistical method given half the chance. You will find this has happened under the Labour government. Also, there are plenty of ‘statistically and mathematically’ valid ways to massage the figures and undermine the consistency of measurement without it amounting to a change in methodology.
I think you are being a little hard on Martin Pratt. (Granted, he doesn’t exactly shrink from controversy.) I read his original comment as having the message, “surveillance cameras are relatively unimportant compared to other bad things the government does.” It’s a defensible POV.
Oops, I meant to add a great big BUT to that but pressed the button too soon. It’s a defensible point of view, given that street cameras do offer some protection to innocent people against muggers. The trouble is that we must trust not only to the responsible instincts of the present generation of government ministers and civil servants (difficult enough) but to that of future generations as well. The next generation of rulers will have grown up with the possibility of enormous, secret power only an inch away.
David Carr’s point about the filtered view of the CPS is also spot-on.
Natalie: I think you have missed the point of Adriana’s article… Firstly any public debate about ‘crime’ is going to be futile if the figures used officially bear no relation to reality, and secondly, Martin Pratt took Samizdata to task for not reporting street crime was ‘down 30%’… and yet given the Civitas report (which was not contested by the Home Office) shows that these figures are meaningless. It seems to me that far from being harsh, Adriana was excessively polite to Pratt given that not only was he writing on the basis of worthless statistics, he was rather rude about it. It seems to me what Pratt did not like was that we do not accept the establishment orthodoxy and dare to point out it bares little relation to reality.
The state is not your friend.
People, people! Are we not allies here?
Of course governments lie [we all believe that in common at least, right?] and of course it is difficult to deal with a problem whose size [and changes in the size of] we are unsure/misinformed about.
But is that not eactly why it would help if we could discuss how much crime is not too much crime? In all realism, where would we like the crime figures to be? “Zero” is silly, so how much? Three hundred murders a year instead of six hundred, for example?
Cordially….
OK, I gotta start with a quick thesis statement, then derive some thoughts from that.
The occurrence of crime is based on the civic culture and moral framework of society, to include that of the perpetrators and the victims.
Once the crime has started, police intervention does not prevent the crime anymore. Nor does citizen intervention (haha, we get concealed weapons permits here in the States). The crime has already been committed. This is not addressed in any reports, and lends itslef to the thought that increased police and evidence-gathering (e.g. cameras Everywhere!) do not actually prevent crime, they are the link between crime and the justice system.
Mark, quite frankly it’s not up to us to choose the exact appropriate level of crime. It’s not up to anyone. Crime is inevitable, because it is based on the soceity itself. Installing zillions of cameras and deputizing 100% of the population just moves crime into the police force, where it can be more beaurocratically dealt with and overlooked… where heirarchy defeats accountability. So it’s how can we minimize crime without moving it into the police/government sector. This is a balance.
On a lighter note, I love the pic that accompanies this article.
Oh, I agree zillions of cameras would not help, or at least would deter only at a terrible cost. As I asked before, further down on this post, would a camera in every room of every house and office in the country be a price worth paying to bring the number of murders below, say, twenty a year?
I think we all agree not.
But we don’t have a choose an appropriate level of crime – just be willing to admit that fear of crime and improvement/worsening of crime figures only make sense in relation to some baseline, some expectation.
600 annual murders most years in Britain doesn’t sound too bad to me – sad and awful though each individual death is of course.
And I’ve yet to hear a person arguing for more surveillance and more policing say what level of crime they would realistically hope for. That‘s the point of my “do we want/hope to see fewer than 300 murders a year?” query.
Crime is a notoriously difficult area to measure and, due to its subjective components, is always open to bias and abuse.
Adriana’s example shows how easy it is for the Home Office to manipulate crime figures and have done so to the extent that they are now regarded by many people as meaningless.
But such manipulation comes at a price: the erosion of the credibility that the general public, not diehardened libertarian sceptics, place in the governemnt’s announcements.
Just a silver lining.