Tag Archives: british crime survey

Iain Roberts

Crime down again…and still we’re unclear why

By Iain Roberts | Thu 20th January 2011 - 12:29 pm

Crime was down again in the year to September 2010.

Recorded crime shows falls across the board, with the exception of sexual offences which are up slightly.   As ever, changes in recorded crime can be affected by changes in definitions, by the way the police do the recording or by the willingness of victims to come forward, but there are no major shift in any of those which would lead us to think it isn’t a real change.  (In some previous years there have been quite significant changes, some of which have made crime look higher than it really was).

The

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Iain Roberts

“Shocking 37% rape increase in London”…or is it?

By Iain Roberts | Fri 1st October 2010 - 8:11 am

Marie Claire (and where else would I go for my news) reports

Shocking 37% rape increase in London

As the article later explains, all may not quite be what it seems. The 37% increase is in reports of rapes in London over the last 12 months.

Is that terrible, or is it a good news story? From that statistic alone we just don’t know. It could be that there have been 37% more rapes in London over that time – that would be a shocking increase over any period, even more so in just one year.

But it could equally …

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Sara Bedford

Conservatives’ use of crime statistics ‘selective and mendacious’

By Sara Bedford | Wed 3rd February 2010 - 12:10 pm

This morning’s Today programme provided another of those ‘mustn’t miss’ moments, as presenter Evan Davis  took the Conservatives’ Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling to task over the party’s misleading use of crime statistics.

Last week Mark Easton, the BBC’s Home Affairs editor, had asked ‘Are the Tories being honest with their claims on violent crime’:

Last week, David Cameron told me that one reason he could justify the phrase “broken society” was because of “significant” increases in violent crime, notably gun and knife crime in Britain.  When I challenged him to produce the evidence, his party press office sent the BBC a list of statistics. It emerges that the only way the Conservative leader can back up his claims is to ignore the klaxon warning attached to the statistics following changes in the way police record violent incidents in England and Wales.

Tory Central Office e-mailed this claim to me: ‘Violent crime has increased from 615,985 offences in 1998-9 to 1,034,972 in 2008-9, an increase of 68 per cent’. The document cited, however, includes this massive caveat: ‘The National Crime Recording standard was introduced in April 2002. Figures before and after that date are not directly comparable’. And yet, that is exactly what Mr Cameron appears to do.

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