Police crime numbers up - BCS crime numbers down!

You only get the numbers that your data collection system is designed to deliver. And when making judgements about the figures, you have to bear in mind the context in which the data was collected. This extract is taken from an article published in The Guardian Oct 14th 2004.

“Michael Howard was complaining about the British Crime Survey. “The most reliable crime statistics, those recorded by the police – show that crime in England and Wales has risen by 850,000 in the past five years”, he claimed.

But police statistics bear little relation to the reality of crime trends. The BCS shows unequivocally that major types of crime have fallen dramatically since 1995; vehicle crime down by half; house burglary down by 47%; assault down by 43%; the list goes on.

Recorded crime has gone up because the police have changed the way they count crime. In 1998 the “counting rules” were changed. In 2002 a new national crime recording standard was introduced - they previously rejected victims’ reports of crime if they doubted them: under the new standard, these are taken at face value. Both changes inflated the numbers police looked at as recorded crime.

But statisticians have always known that only a proportion of crimes get reported to the police, and only a proportion of these find their way into police records. The BCS trend is simple, and quite different from the police numbers: people’s personal experience of crime rose from 1981 to 1995 and then fell back again to near 1981 levels. Violent crime involving firearms is rare but rising; e-crime is surging. But the headline trend for crimes that affect everyone’s daily lives is downward.