I fear your first question may display too much faith in official statistics: http://coppersblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/lies-about-crime.html

From a practical perspective, I think security on public transport has certainly been beefed up but that is no good if the crime just takes place somewhere else instead outside of the BTP’s remit. Whatever his original pledge, Boris should concentrate on the bigger picture: crime in London, not just crime on the underground.

The Copperfield piece is, unsurprisingly, completely useless.

1) the cases he’s talking about where people are charged with violent crimes but prosecuted for non-violent crimes are still reported as violent crimes in the police crime statistics

2) the British Crime Survey, which isn’t affected by police reports, also shows violent crime as falling

3) the only crimes he identifies that have changed reporting category are minor public order offences committed by drunks that are being recorded as D&D. These are not knife crimes, robberies, or anything of that sort…

4) politicians’ spin on early release numbers has absolutely naff all to do with official crime stats

Home Office statistics are famously unfit for purpose. I don’t think anyone really knows whether crime is going up or down.

Just got back from the press conference. There was a 30 minute limit to the whole thing. Back in the old days of that awfully unaccountable Ken Livingstone administration, everyone would get to ask as many questions as they had and they were held weekly. Now they will be cut back to once a month and Dave got to ask just one of these.

Surely it’s obvious that it’s easier to spin minor crimes than major ones? It’s not like murders are in any danger of being unreported to the police or the police failing to take action, and presumably this applies to other violent crimes, with due allowance (not everyone subject to GBH is going to want the police involved, for instance). Minor crimes (like my wing mirror being knocked off the other year) are likely not to be reported or, if reported, not investigated, and it’s at this end that you need large pinches of salt.

Boris sort of acknowledges this in his repeated mantra of the ‘fear of crime’, which appears to afflict people living where there isn’t a crime problem. Lambeth and Newham, which between them have nearly 25% of the murders in London, overwhelmingly backed Livingstone, according to that useful red/blue map that came out the other day.

@ BH – I’m sure you’ll be happy to explain how the fact that regional population data is updated based on a 10-yearly census, and therefore doesn’t capture rapid changes in population dynamics, means that “nobody really knows whether crime is going up or down”…?

Sorry John B, you’ve lost me there. What are you trying to say?

It’s quite simple John B. Crime rate = number of crimes divided by population. If the population of a town goes up by 5%, the number of crimes will, all other things being equal, rise by 5% as well, but if the official statistics don’t report the population change, everyone will wrongly think there’s a crime wave.

This is not to mention the much more interesting issue of changing national demographics. The vast majority of crime is committed by young males. If the average age of the population changes, such that there are fewer young males, crime rates will almost inevitably fall.

P.S I meant to say “the vast majority of violent crime”. Obviously, fraud and embezzlement tend to be committed by different kinds of people to robbery and murder.

If, however, the population rises but the number of crimes fall, the problem of inaccurate census data would tend to underply the success of anti-crime initiatives. To whit:

Bandville has a population of 200,000 in 2001.
Since then 10,000 Poles etc. have come in, but the ‘official’ population is still only 100,000
In 2001 there were 100 violent crimes
In 2007 there 90 violent crimes, due to extra police on the streets, economic growth etc.

Therefore in 2001 there was an official violent crime rate (per 100k) of 50, which was also the real rate, while in 2007 there was an official rate of 45, but the real rate was 43..

Since that scenario mirrors the official line on violent crime (down) and the official line on population (up), it’s quite possible that this is what’s actually happening out there, and there are not only fewer violent crimes than a few years ago but fewer violent crimes for the increase in population, too.

The conditions where using the official figures result in an official underestimate of the rate are in a falling population or rising crime or both (strictly speaking you’ll have only some of the first two cases which underestimate too, but it depends on the figures).

The young male point is interesting – I was born in the pinch point in 1974 when no one was having children (the 1973 oil crisis, I suspect). Therefore you’d expect a similar pinch in crime rates around 1990-2000 when my generation were in their violent testosterone filled prime. I think the figures are actually that crime increased pretty much throughout the 90s, however, so there are other factors in this. I could just be from a particularly violent generation, of course…

Bishop Hill – what I was trying to say is that the article you cite, which is about time lags in census data, has absolutely no bearing on the accuracy of (absolute) crime figures.

As other people have pointed out, the fact that census data is out-of-date may well actually mean that crime rates per capita are *lower* than the figures suggest.

John B

Apologies, I actually linked the wrong article. Try this one.

Having thought about it a bit, the crime rise in the early 90s was because there was a recession, wasn’t it? Given that, anyone who suggests that my generation is particularly violent is going to be looking at my forehead from below, OK?

Hmm. If you read the PDF that the jokers at Home Office Watch have failed to link to in their extremely misleading piece (it’s here), then you’ll see it concludes that:

1) HO crime stats are fit for policymaking purpose

2) they aren’t entirely adequate for convincing the public about levels of crime because they’re insufficiently local; the public don’t trust them; the public don’t know enough about statistics to understand them; and media sensationalism makes people believe that extremely rare crimes are actually common

In other words, the stats are accurate, but people don’t trust them because they don’t understand what they mean and because they’re lied to all the time by tabloids and politicians who’re seeking to convince them the sky is falling. This is also my position in every post I’ve ever made on the subject…