‘Fiddling the figures’, ‘Cooking the books’ or ‘Good housekeeping'?

Readers might enjoy this submission by Dr Rodger Patrick to the Justice Committee.

Dr Patrick is recognised as expert in the field of exposing "Gaming" or the manipulation of crime figures by police forces to reflect improved performance.

www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201012/cmselect/cmjust/writev/foi/foi.pdf

It is also worth having a look at the West Midlands Police submission on behalf of ACPO later in the link above.

Ironic that Dr Patrick used the FOI to expose the failings of the IPCC by accessing internal reports from the West Mids Police and the Chief Constable now suggests that submissions raking over investigations conducted by the IPCC should be barred.

Written evidence from Dr. Rodger Patrick

Executive Summary:

The provisions of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 were utilised to access the evidence to
substantiate the Doctoral Study, and subsequent academic articles, on the impact of Performance Management on the Police Service in England and Wales. Reflections on the experience of using the legislation as an academic device are outlined in the submission, as are examples of the type of information disclosed. It was established that the Act was a powerful means of accessing information with the potential to facilitate greater accountability. However, on its own it cannot ensure reform and further legislation may be necessary to realise its overarching objectives.

1. Rationale for utilising the Freedom of Information Act (FOI) as a research tool:

1.1 Participant observations as a Chief Inspector in the West Midlands Police had identified ‘gaming’ behaviour as an unintended consequence of Performance Management introduced as a means of improving Police governance and accountability. However earlier disclosures of similar perverse behaviours by practitioners (Young 1991) had been unable to establish an empirical pattern and was weakened by a lack of corroboration. The Police Federation had also responded to their members’ concerns by highlighting ‘gaming’ behaviours at their national conference in 2007 but were accused by the then Policing Minister Tony McNulty of ‘over‐egging the cake’.

The introduction of the Freedom of Information Act provided a means of accessing unpublished documents and detailed official statistics, thus addressing these methodological limitations.

1.2 Observations had identified four distinct categories of perverse behaviours designed to improve performance by unethical means, or give the false impression performance had improved. Such behaviours are referred to colloquially as ‘fiddling the figures’, ‘cooking the books’ or ‘good housekeeping’. In the academic literature they are referred to as ‘gaming’ behaviour and there is a body of theory on the subject (De Bruijn 2001 2007, Le Grand 2003 and Bevan & Hood 2006)

1.3 The four categories of ‘gaming’ behaviours identified are defined as follows:

• Cuffing: The under‐recording of reported crimes, the term being derived from the magician’s
art of making objects disappear up the sleeve or cuff (Young 1991).

• Nodding: This involves collusion between officers and suspects to admit to large numbers of
offences, usually whilst in prison after sentence, in return for favours such as reduced
sentences, access to partners, drugs or alcohol. The term is used to describe the act of a
prisoner pointing out or ‘nodding’ at locations where they claim to have committed
offences. (Wilson et al 2001:63)

• Skewing: This involves moving resources from areas of activity which are not subject to
performance measures in order to improve performance in areas that are monitored for
control purposes (Rogerson 1995).

• Stitching: This includes a variety of malpractices designed to enhance the strength of the
evidence against a suspect in order to ensure the desired criminal justice outcome.
Fabricating evidence or stitching someone up are forms of this behaviour.

1.4 All of these ‘gaming’ behaviours were operating in the West Midlands Police during the period 1996 to 1999 and had a major impact on the force’s performance (Patrick 2004, 2009 2011 2012a 2012b). In combination they can be regarded as a ‘perverse policing model’. The statistical profile of the force during this period provided a template for identifying similar practices in other forces.

1.5 Various ‘events’, some in response to the behaviours being uncovered by regulators or specific incidents which had the potential to become scandals, had resulted in the force conducting reviews of the concerning behaviours. The resulting documentation, much of which was completed prior to the introduction of the Freedom of Information Act (FOI), was never intended for public consumption. However when presented with a FOI request, the force released the documents. Many of these reports quantified the scale of the behaviours and by supplementing this information with analysis of national performance data it was possible to calculate the extent to which ‘gaming’ behaviour distorted results.

2. Use of the FOI Act to conduct an academic survey:

2.1 The introduction of a False Reporting Policy in the West Midlands Police in 2004 corresponded with a marked reduction in reported crime. It was argued that this represented a return to an evidential crime recording standard and the associated ‘cuffing’ (Patrick 2011). This demonstrated a flaw in the National Crime Recording Standard introduced in April 2002 with the stated objective of standardising crime recording procedures and eliminating such distortions. In order to establish if other forces had experienced similar reductions, when they introduced such a policy, all forces in England and Wales were sent a questionnaire under the provisions of the Act asking them to supply copies of any false reporting policy.

2.2 They were also asked to provide any analytical assessment of the problem of false reporting
completed under the National Intelligence Model (NIM) and any Impact Assessment completed on the policy under the provisions of the Race Relations (Amendment) Act. It was hoped the National Intelligence Model assessment would quantify the scale of the potential threat from what was believed to be the bogus reporting of crime in pursuit of fraudulent insurance claims.

The Impact Assessments should have been completed as the re‐introduction of greater discretion into the crime recording process could be influenced by officer bias. Again some quantifiable results were being sought.

2.3 A 100% response rate was achieved. The identification of those forces operating ‘false reporting’ policies enabled a statistical analysis to be completed and this supported the hypothesis that the crime recording standard had reverted back to its pre NCRS interpretation. Unpublished data on the number of crimes which had been declassified as crimes i.e. ‘no crimed’, was released by the Home Office and this strengthened the academic argument.

2.4 Only two of the forces to have introduced false reporting policies had conducted NIM
assessments on the threat and neither supported the introduction of the policy. None of the
identified forces had carried out comprehensive impact assessments on the re‐introduction of
discretion into the crime recording procedures although one had identified the potentially
discriminatory consequences of the refusal to issue crime numbers to those reporting passports
stolen.

2.5 The ‘evidence of absence’ is a valuable facet of the Act and proved valuable when exploring why the Home Office ceased publishing the validation tests they carried out on the police recording rates in the British Crime Survey (BCS). A FOI request established that they ceased asking the relevant questions in the 2006/7 survey despite the fact that the results in 2005/6 indicated ‘under recording’ was increasing (Walker, Kershaw and Nicholas: 2006:52).

3 Accessing Statistics:

3.1 In order to quantify the extent of ‘nodding’, associated with abuse of the Offences Taken into
Consideration (TIC) procedures, it was necessary to analyse the impact of preventative action on the number of offences detected as TICs. The Home Office again released the data in response to a Freedom of Information request and the scale of the abuse could be estimated from the fall in TICs after the incident or scandal which stimulated the remedial action. A consistent and compelling pattern was evident in all the cases examined (Patrick 2012a).

4 Accessing Confidential Documents:

4.1 The information contained within sensitive and confidential documents had a major impact on the direction of the research and the conclusions reached. Whilst participant observation and
knowledge of procedures was a great benefit, the willingness of organisations to comply with the
statutory requirements was commendable. The release of a confidential force inspection report
completed by Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary (HMIC 1998) stimulated interest in the way regulators addressed ‘gaming’ when it was uncovered. It was clear from this document that HMIC were aware as early as 1998 that post sentence admissions, Prison Write Offs, were being converted to TICs and that the practice was prone to abuse.

4.2 A draft report on Nottingham Constabulary, following the Chief Constable’s admission that the force was struggling to cope with a marked rise in gang related murders, revealed that the redeployment of officers from specialist HQ squads to local policing units had not gone well. This
‘skewing’ of resources in favour of more affluent areas had been identified in the West Midlands and it appeared, in both cases, that it could have contributed to the rise in gang related crime or
curtailed these forces’ ability to respond to the emerging threat. The paragraph referring to this was omitted from the published version of the report.

4.3 Confidential documents released by one force facilitated an assessment of the capabilities of the Independent Police Complaints Commission. The documents challenged their findings on an
important investigation triggered by the death of a child (Patrick 2012b).

5. The Appeals Process:

5.1 In order to pursue the hypothesis that regulators may be pressurising forces to introduce
‘gaming’ type behaviours to improve their performance, information was requested from the Police Standards Unit (PSU). Specifically sought were their assessments and recommendations on West Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire police forces. It was known that both forces had experienced ‘gaming’ type problems during the late 1990s/early 2000s and the remedial action no doubt contributed to their low station on the national league tables. Their performance improved markedly after Police Standard Unit intervention and examination of their performance profiles suggested ‘nodding’ and ‘cuffing’ had been resurrected. The request for full disclosure was refused and this led to an appeal to the Information Commissioner.

5.2 Whilst the Information Commissioner found in favour of the appeal, the process took over three years to complete. This is believed to be due to a lack of resources at the Information
Commissioner’s Office and is something the Committee may wish to comment on.

6. The scope of Organisations subject to the provisions of the Act:

6.1 The Act was again to prove invaluable when studying the behaviour of the regulators. In 2006 problems with the impact of ‘gaming’ on the reliability of detection data appeared to be behind the decision to audit a range of detections which did not involve the charging of a suspect. Contrary to long established practice the results were not published by Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary (HMIC). However, despite the fact that HMIC are not subject to the provisions of the Act, they responded to a request from an unknown applicant and published the results on their web site. The exclusion of HMIC from the Act may be something the Committee may wish to review.

6.2 The audit of detections highlighted major quality failings, including insufficiency of evidence, in relation to cautions, penalty notices and informal warnings. Such deficiencies would have
implications for the Criminal Record Bureau and the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) who administer the Police National Computer (PNC). The use of the FOI to follow the documentary trail was not an option in relation to ACPO as this organisation is not covered by the Act. Again the Committee may wish to review the organisations covered by the legislation.

7. The Operating Philosophy of the Information Commissioner:

7.1 The evidential ‘blind spot’ in relation to ACPO was partially overcome when they wrote to the Information Commissioner admitting that the audit of detections had uncovered potential breaches of the Data Protection Act. All the documentation in relation to this exchange was released by the Commissioner’s Office. The subject of the correspondence was encapsulated by the following disclosure:

“From my perspective I am most concerned that individuals were not being informed that
they were considered to be the perpetrator of an offence even though this did not involve a
legal process, especially if such information could be used in future Enhanced Disclosure
relating to them. This clearly breaches the requirement of the first data protection principle
that the processing of personal data must be done fairly. I am also worried by the sufficiency
of evidence used. If a police force is going to label an individual as the de facto perpetrator
then they must have a good objective reason for doing so. Not having this could lead to a
record being viewed as inadequate or inaccurate (breaches of the third and fourth principles
respectively).” (Information Commissioner 26.3.2007: Unpublished)

7.2 Whilst ACPO were less than candid about the scale and nature of the ‘insufficiency of evidence’ uncovered by the audit, the decision by the Information Commissioner not to alert the public to the risk they had been exposed to demonstrated a tendency towards a ‘professional body’ approach to regulation, as opposed to a ‘democratic model’ where information is made available to the public in order for them to hold officials to account:

“I would prefer to work with chief officers to ensure compliance. I would like to know more
detail about how this has come about and what action is being taken to ensure future
compliance” (Information Commissioner 26.3.2007: Unpublished)

7.3 The reply from ACPO disclosed the fact that the Home Office and HMIC were also aware of the nature of the problem:

“Please rest assured that the issues that have come to light as a result of the recent Association of Chief Police Officers’ and HMIC audits have been taken extremely seriously by the police service. To this end a series of meetings have taken place in fast time with all relevant parties, including the Home Office, to consider how best to address the concerns that you raised to which we are alive” (ACPO letter to the Information Commissioner 10.4.2007: Unpublished)

8. Conclusion/Discussion

8.1. The provisions of the Freedom of Information Act were an invaluable research tool overcoming a number of methodological limitations faced by previous studies. Whilst the findings could be damaging to the State, thus defeating the desired objective of enhancing public trust, research in this area suggests that such loss of trust can be transient (Van de Walle et al 2008). So in the medium to long term, greater transparency will lead to reform and better governance thus vindicating those who introduced the legislation.

8.2 It should also be borne in mind that the study referred to benefited from an element of surprise and many of the documents relied upon preceded the enactment of the legislation. Anecdotal evidence would suggest such candid documents are being shredded. It could also be surmised that they may not be commissioned at all. If this were to be the case then it could be argued the Act has been counterproductive.

8.3 The Information Commissioner appeared to give voice to this concern in Plymouth City Council Vs BBC (2006) (ICO Ref FS50082254). In this case the BBC had requested full disclosure of the documents submitted to a serious case review into the death of a child by individual agencies. The Information Commissioner judged that the disclosure of the reviews conducted by individual agencies may deter them from being open thus limiting the ability to learn from experience. This rational was challenged by the deliberations following the death of Baby P.

8.4 Whilst the reluctance of Chief Officers to disclose relevant information to regulators or other
forms of official inquiry can be addressed by legislation and conferring greater powers on
investigators, this will be to no avail if the regulators themselves are not committed to making their findings public. The failure of the Financial Services Authority was a damning indictment of this approach. Structurally this flaw may be alleviated by aligning the regulators to Parliament and its Scrutiny Committees may be the most appropriate bodies to oversee their work.

8.5 Another consideration raised by the study was the means by which information uncovered by Freedom of Information requests is disseminated to the general public. Many of the documents disclosed were not made public or easily accessible on the web sites of the originating organisations, including the Information Commissioner’s Office. This is seen as good practice but is not a statutory requirement. The media is one outlet but they have their own agenda and move on quickly to the next breaking story (Howard & Waisbord 2004). Academic articles are one outlet but publication is slow. The official regulators appear to be the most obvious recipient but as can be seen from the evidence presented appropriate action may not follow.

8.6 In relation to the information uncovered by this study the most appropriate outlet would appear to be the Parliamentary Scrutiny Committees. Certainly something needs to be done for those citizens who have police records which are not justified. Witness testimonies and analysis of the Home Office data would suggest the same problems are occurring with offences dealt with as Restorative or Community Resolutions. It may be worth the Scrutiny Committees considering making themselves more accessible to un‐solicited submissions.
January 2012

References:
Bevan & Hood (2006). What’s Measured is What Matters: Targets and Gaming in the English Public Health Care System. Public Administration Vol. 84, No 3, 2006 (517‐538)
De Bruijn, H. (2002). Performance measurement in the public sector. (London Routledge
Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary (1998). An Audit Report by Her Majesty’s Inspector of
Constabulary completed on the West Midlands Police in December 1998.Not published: available via Freedom of Information request to the West Midlands Police.
Howard T. & S. R. Waisbord (2004). Political Scandals and Media Across Democracies, Volume II
AMERICAN BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST, Vol. 47 No. 9, May 2004 1143‐1152
Le Grand J. (2003). Motivation, Agency and Public Policy. Oxford University Press.
Patrick, R. (2004). The Lot of the Poor is Unlikely to Improve Until They Have a Greater Say in Their ‘lot’: Going Local and the Impact on the Distribution of Public Services. Vista Perspectives on Probation and Criminal Justice & Civil Renewal Vol. 9 No. 3 2004.
Patrick R. (2009) Performance Management, Gaming and Police Practice: A Study of Changing Police Behaviour in England and Wales During the Era of New Public Management. University of
Birmingham. PhD Thesis.
Patrick, R. (2011). ‘Reading Tea Leaves’ an assessment of the reliability of police recorded crime
statistics. The Police Journal, Volume 84 (2011) pgs. 47‐67.
Patrick, R. (2012a). ‘A Nod and a Wink’: Do ‘gaming practices’ provide an insight into the
organisational nature of police corruption? (The Police Journal. Accepted for publication,11.3.11
Ref.: Ms. No. PJ‐D‐10529R1).
Patrick, R. (2012b). 'Public Champions or Protectors of Professional Interests?' Observations on the performance of those bodies entrusted with the regulation of the Police Service during the era of New Public Management’ (The Police Journal. Accepted for publication 17.6.2011 Ref.: Ms. No. PJ‐D‐11536R1)
Rogerson, P. (1995) Performance Measurement and Policing: Police Service or Law Enforcement
Agency? Public Money & Management, October‐December 1995
Van de Walle Steven., Steven Van Roosbroek and Geert Bouckaert (2008) Trust in the
public sector: is there any evidence for a long-term decline? International Review of
Administrative Sciences 2008; 74; 47
Walker A., Kershaw C. & Nicholas S. (2006). Crime in England and Wales 2005/2006 Home Office, London
Wilson, D., J.Ashton, & D. Sharp (2001). What Everyone in Britain Should Know About the Police. Blackstone.
Young, M. (1991). An Inside Job. Policing and Police Culture in Britain. Oxford: Claredon Press

CRIME IS DOWN ..... OR IS IT? - PART 2 - Lies, damned lies and fudged crime statistics

Lies, damned lies and fudged crime statistics



The problem with crime is that it’s illegal. This means it’s secret, which means that there is not one person at any level of the criminal justice system in this country who can honestly declare that they really know what’s happening.

Over recent years, every Tom, Dick and Harry involved in the compilation, manipulation and obfuscation of crime statistics have thrown their hats and helmets in the air to celebrate a steady fall in crime. The Home Office boasted it was all down to its crime prevention efforts. The police hierarchy said it was their intelligence-led approach that was responsible. Academics said rising consumption, falling inequality, better security devices, fewer adolescent males, an upsurge in abortions (with fewer neglected children) and/or a fall in unemployment were at the root of it all. The last Government would have us believe it was a direct result of their strategy to bolster officer numbers and wonderful performance targeting that brought about the miraculous decrease in crime and increase in detections.

But what if it never happened? What if all that research (and all of the political point-scoring which it inspired) is one big misleading lie? What if it was all a pernicious web of deceit involving Senior Politicians and Police Chiefs with the conspiratorial intention of fooling the public into believing everything in the garden was rosy? What if the truth is that crime didn’t fall at all – that it was only the statistics that fell, and in fact the illusion of falling crime was the biggest crime of them all?

There are two sources of crime statistics in this country. The first is the police whose figures are deeply unreliable because they deal only with the crime which they record. Millions of crimes each year are never reported to them at all: victims of assaults and sex attacks (particularly children) are often too fearful; the stores who are the victims of shoplifting often discover the offence only in their stock-taking and then prefer not to advertise their vulnerability; and a mass of victims of minor crime simply do not bother to contact a system which offers them only a faint prospect of justice.

More importantly, even if crime is reported, it is frequently not recorded because the police have a long and skillful history of fiddling the figures. They call it ‘cuffing’, because the reported offences magically disappear up the officer’s sleeve. On a wider scale, the deception is known as “Gaming” and there are a number of tricks that Senior Officers (who would no doubt deny their existence) employ to satisfy their police authorities and political masters. Make no mistake, this is not a few officers or even forces engaging in some kind of occasional sport. The alarming reality is that “Gaming” (as confirmed by front line officers) is endemic and widespread throughout the police forces of England and Wales.

In July 2000, HM Inspector of Constabulary reported that in eleven forces which his staff had inspected, 24%) reported crimes had been mis-recorded, either through genuine confusion or deliberate concealment. At the end of that year, the Labour politicians celebrated a fall in the crime recorded by police nationally of 122,344 offences. Taking it further, if HMI’s snapshot were repeated across the country, then in that same year, police forces concealed or mis-recorded 1,635,424 offences – more than 13 times the number of “alleged” fewer offences recorded. In other words, for years, the fudged police statistics have been not just slightly misleading but wholly worthless as a statement of what is really happening.

In April 2002, the Home Office introduced NCRS, the National Crime Recording Standard, supposedly to tighten up the process. They rejected HMI’s strong advice to make the rules legally binding and to order ‘robust and independent audits’ of police practice. Instead, they relied on dip-sampling by the Audit Commission and internal checks, enforced by chief officers – even though past scandals indicated the collusion of chief officers in delivering false figures. In the foggy aftermath of the NCRS and other statistically challenged changes prior to that, it is not clear whether the NCRS rules are killing off or even reducing the cuffing, but the Home Office discounted 5% of the reported crime in years that followed it on the basis that police were indeed obeying them.

More recent evidence from front line officers confirms that the "Gaming" practices are as rife as ever in modern policing. This is perhaps what prompted Home Secretary Theresa May to appoint the National Statistician to conduct a full review of the recording processes. Let us hope that the deceitful conduct of the few over the years is finally brought to the surface so the honourable police officers can start afresh with a clean slate.

Theresa May has replaced the plethora of nonsense performance targets with one single focus, to reduce crime. In order that this can be measured accurately with figures that can be trusted going forward, the whole rotten, shoddy corrupt system must be exposed for the sham that it is. It is a pityful display of arrogance by those Chief Officers who have disobeyed her instruction and to this day, implement strategies based on targets they believe will justify their existence.

The really sad part of all of this, is that when the can of worms is finally prized open, it is unlikely that Chief Officers will admit they have condoned and encouraged deceitful practices all along (many have received up to 15% bonus payments on top of their handsome six figure salaries for doing so). No, the likely scapegoats will be the very front line federated ranks forced to implement their devisive and corrupt plans. Little wonder so few rank and file officers are prepared to speak out.

The second source of crime statistics is the British Crime Survey. This is fundamentally flawed because it cannot record crime unless a victim tells one of their interviewers about it, so the survey misses all crimes where the victim decides not to disclose details. Until recently crimes against children (estimated by the Home Office at 600,000), all crimes against commercial victims (all bank robbery; and all shoplifting, which is estimated at anywhere between 7.7 million and 30 million offences a year), were omitted from the survey. Perhaps the biggest criticism of the BCS is that it is based on estimates drawn from the survey of 45,000 citizens. Crimes against public sector property (arson, criminal damage, theft) and all murder offences have been or remain omitted from the survey.

So, the survey fails to record at least 11.3 million crimes and possibly as many as 33.6 million crimes, in addition to the 13 million which it does pick up. And that is without taking account of commercial fraud, which the Association of British Insurers blames for a third of the £35 billion annual cost of all crime.

Let us take a step back and examine the fall in crime figures. Two important clues jump out at us to support the belief that the books have been well and truly “cooked”. First, it has happened all across the developed world. Jock Young, formerly professor of criminology at Middlesex University, likes to tell the story of the American crime conference which he attended a few years ago where the opening speakers armed themselves with a stage full of multi-coloured graphs and flow charts and announced that they had explained the dramatic drop in US crime rates. It was the effect of the Brady Bill in cutting ownership of handguns, plus the peaking of the market in crack cocaine, plus a dip in the population of adolescent males, plus a little of this and a little of that. All the percentages added up – until a delegate from Spain stood up to say that they had the same fall in crime numbers in her country and none of those explanations, and then a delegate from Canada said the same, and so on around the globe.

Second, this fall has happened at the same time as every developed country in the world reports more blackmarket drug use. In this country, for example, since 1998, according to the British Crime Survey, there has been “a statistically significant increase” in Class A drug use, particularly of crack cocaine. The Home Office’s own assessment of the number of problematic drug users suggests that they are responsible for more than 50% of crime. How can there be more prolific offenders and yet less crime?

There is one explanation of which we can be certain: the drug users who drive the crime figures are committing a mass of offences which are statistically invisible. Repeated surveys of drug users in custody show that easily their most common property crime is shoplifting (50% of their offences in most surveys); and, beyond that, most drug users fund their habit by selling drugs, whether to friends or strangers – thousands of them in any major city in the time it has taken to read this article. In both cases, this mass of offences are almost entirely invisible to police records (they are recorded only when they are detected); and completely invisible to the British Crime Survey. Parallel to that, drug users commit crimes against each other – the Yardie dealers are constantly ripping each other off, pimps rob cash off each other’s working girls, rival gangs beat each other up. And these victims don’t go to the police or sit down with a form from the British Crime Survey.

It is one of the enduring problems of criminal justice systems that whilst they can change the pattern of crime they struggle to change its scale. The one explanation which applies to all the developed countries who have seen their crime figures fall is that they have shifted their expanding population of blackmarket drug users into committing a surge of invisible offences. It is difficult to prove that that is what has happened – because crime is hidden. But it is fair to say that the great crime fall is at best unproven and at worst a politically useful myth born out of deceitful practices.

Look at how the “fall in crime” is used. The right have claimed it proves that Michael Howard’s programme of imprisonment was a success. Liberals spun it in the opposite direction, as supposed evidence that there is no need for any kind of fundamental change in the criminal justice system. The Labour government repeatedly used it to claim credit for bringing down crime since 1997. They not only ignored the impact of invisible crime, they also conveniently overlooked the absence of any observable link between the fall and government policy. So, for example, assuming they were right to say that in reality, burglary and vehicle crime have been falling: it must be significant that the same downward trend shows up independently both in the police figures and in the British Crime Survey. But they chose to date this from the year they came to power when in fact the statistics show that burglary figures have been falling since 1993 and vehicle figures have been falling since 1992. Nobody knows why, and, during that time, crime recording policy has changed direction repeatedly adding layer upon layer of obfuscation to the mess, as if to throw distraction techniques into the pot to disguise the deceitful practices.

If you really want to understand the reality of crime in this country, the figures that matter are the research which show that just 1% of the population suffer 59% of all violent crime; that just 2% of the population suffer 41% of all property crime. And where are these victims? Most criminals commit their offences within 1.8 miles of their own front door. In other words, they rob their neighbours. Overwhelmingly, those offenders live in the shabby tower blocks and rotting council estates which have been consumed by poverty and criminalised by the war against drugs. That is where crime is booming, far, far away from where our Chief Officers deploy their resources toward easier middle class detection pickings in the middle class suburbs. In these inner city areas, as a single example, an 18-year-old lone woman with a child is more than five times more likely than the average to be a crime victim – far away from the statisticians and the politicians and their celebrations of success.

In this series of articles we will delve further into the practices that have brought our crime statistics into such a malaise, leaving all but the exceptionally naïve bereft of confidence in a system so corrupt as to undermine the good work being done by our front line officers.