Thursday, July 09, 2009

Next time someone insists crime isn't that bad in Britain,

you're just 'cherry-picking' data, point them here:
Crime statistics at one of Britain's most beleaguered police forces are being manipulated by detectives, who are under pressure to record burglaries and robberies as lesser offences to meet targets for cutting some of the most feared crimes.

Serving officers in the Nottinghamshire police force have revealed to The Telegraph the techniques they use to help manipulate the headline crime figures, enabling Steve Green, the Chief Constable, to claim that he is winning the battle to combat burglary and robbery
.
And, in the case of crimes involving firearms,
A former head of CID with Nottinghamshire police has also claimed that incidents of gun crime have deliberately not been logged by the force, effectively halving its number of recorded shootings.

Retired Det Supt Peter Coles said last night: "I know for a fact there have been incidents of gun crime which have not been recorded. People have turned up at hospital with a gunshot wound and told the police to go away because more often than not there is a disinclination among villains to pursue the matter. Despite the fact that there has obviously been a shooting, the crime has not been recorded by the force."

A: "...and told the police to go away" and they DID?
B: So they didn't have to report the incident. Just effing wonderful.
The Telegraph has learnt that two officers from the force's robbery squad have complained to their superiors about pressure to break down robberies to their constituent parts of theft and assault in official figures, crimes which are less emotive than robbery and attract less adverse publicity.

An officer serving on the force said: "We have been breaking down the link between the theft and any violence and trying to pretend they are not connected because we have been trying to get the robbery figures down. In one case an Australian tourist had a guy barge into him outside a nightclub and take his phone and wallet off him. It was put down as theft from a person when any threat of violence should make it a robbery."

Guess how far the complaint got?
A force audit was carried out into the detectives' complaint but senior officers decided that there was no case to answer.
Surprise!
In a separate development, crimes which would formerly have been recorded as attempted burglaries, and therefore been included in overall statistics for burglary, are now being logged as criminal damage.

Where an effort has been made by a criminal to force an entry, such as by jemmying a door or window, it is being marked down only for the damage caused to the property. The figures for criminal damage are also far less likely to attract adverse publicity than those for burglary, a crime which inspires a high level of fear in the general public.

Mr Coles said: "The offence of attempted burglary is virtually non-existent in the figures now. If someone contacts the police in Nottinghamshire now to say that a burglar has tried to get into their home, with a window broken but nothing stolen, that will go down in the Nottinghamshire figures as criminal damage."

Which means
Last month Mr Green boasted that figures for burglary, robbery and violent crime had all fallen across the area covered by his force.

"In the past 12 months burglary has fallen by 24 per cent, robbery by 25 per cent and car crime by 18 per cent," he said.

"Violent crime has risen by only 0.5 per cent and our level of violent crime compares favourably to those forces with whom we are compared." He made the comment at a hastily convened press conference after his interview with this newspaper last month, in which he admitted that his force was in "crisis" and "reeling" because of the number of murders being committed
.
So this is what you do instead of something...
Following the interview the Government ordered the Inspectorate of Constabularies to carry out an urgent inquiry into Mr Green's force. A senior outside officer has now been brought in as a "strategic adviser" to monitor its performance. It is not the first time the Nottinghamshire force has been accused of manipulating its crime figures.

In 1997, a damning report by Bedfordshire police declared Nottinghamshire's crime recording policy "was designed to have the effect of artificially reducing recorded crime to a more politically acceptable level".

That verdict followed an act of whistle blowing by Mr Coles, who left the force in 1996 but is still in close contact with senior serving officers. Mr Coles complained that alternative crime recording practices were being used by his bosses effectively to manipulate the figures and paint a rosier picture of the problems faced by his force. He said: "Despite the investigation by Bedfordshire, it is still going on in more subtle ways."

At least one detective sergeant in the force's robbery squad is suspended and under investigation over allegations that he "cooked" his clear-up figures
.

I don't have the link handy, but a year or so ago there was a big stink when it was found, among other things, if someone died beyond a certain time(a few days or a week, I think) after an attack, they labeled it as something other than murder so as to keep the numbers down. Looks like it's still going on over there.

Pointed to by 3 Boxes of BS

1 comment:

Bob S. said...

Firehand,

Thanks for the hat tip. It always amazes me how bad the crime rate is in England....and how blind some people want to be toward it.