Crime Up, Down, All Around Across the Pond

It All Depends on Who's Doing the Talking

Recorded crime fell 5%

Violent crime is up 9%.

Tony Blair pledges a 15% violent crime decrease in 3 years.

Firearms crimes rose 10%.

Reported residential burglaries fell 17%. Reported vehicle thefts fell 16%.

Except the Labour Party uses a survey instead of reports, and it says crime is down 11%, and violent crime has dropped by 10%.

“The survey suggested the risk of being a victim of crime was 24%, the lowest since 1981.”

That must be why Labour has also “suggested” a “Violent Crime Reduction Bill”—and because there are no more real guns to ban, they’re going after replicas. And knives.

That ought to reduce all that crime that they say is at its lowest point in 24 years.

Except the Conservative party is saying crime has risen 15% since 1998. Isn't that the same period when many of the sweeping gun bans occurred? Let's see, Dunblane was in '96...

But Labour counters that "crime has fallen by 30% since they came to power in 1997." That must be why he wants to increase "the number of community support officers from 4,000 to 24,000 by 2008."

Enter the Liberal Democrats who "criticised the Labour pledge, saying the 15% reduction was to be measured against out of date figures, from which crime had already fallen 5% - and thus was only a pledge to cut crime by 10%."

Then there's the charge that for every officer Blair puts on the streets, he puts another 4 in offices.

Just to keep things legitimate and scientific, BBC presents us with a graph.

The red line is what people say. They don't say who the people are, where they live, how old they are, how big the survey sample is, how many were asked, what they were asked, if there were different interviews, etc. But it's clear people are saying there's more crime than the black line indicates, which are incidents actually reported to police.

But then you have to factor in the dotted vertical lines: "Change in Home Office counting rules in 1998/9" and "New crime recording standard imposed in 2002."

There's one more factor not reported in any of this. From Howard Nemerov's interview of Professor Joyce Lee Malcolm:

"The police actually under-report murder rates, because if the court reduces the sentence, the police subtract that case from murder totals. Even so, murder has risen dramatically since the gun ban went into effect."

Does anybody besides me feel like they're watching a Monty Python skit about "Accountancy" unfold?