CRIME IS DOWN ..... OR IS IT? - PART 3 - HAVE YOUR SAY!

"Gaming - Cooking the Books" of Crime Statistics

As regular visitors to these pages will know, one of the most contraversial subjects that we have reported on most frequently in depth, is the manipulation of crime statistics and detections. Shortly after her appointment as Home Secretary, Theresa May scrapped the plethora of police performance targets in an effort to free up our police officers to focus on one single objective, what the front line police really want to do, what they do best and what the public want most - simply to cut crime. 

The challenge that faces the Home Secretary, the policing minister Nick Herbert and their team, is that confidence and trust in the integrity of recorded crime and police detections is at an all time low. This lack of trust is fuelled by years of political interference, linking crime reduction and detections to senior officer bonus payments and selective focusing by the media. Until this confidence and trust begins to return, any genuine advances in this area will be received with scepticism and suspicion. 

We have written at length in previous articles detailing the various tactics within the practice that has become known as "Gaming". Previous articles and reports on the subject can be accessed via the links at the foot of this piece. In summary, we conclude from our dialogue with serving officers from all over the UK, that the practices of statistic manipulation remain evident, perpetrating what we have called the "Crime of the Century" - a pernicious conspiratorial deception in an attempt to fool the public that crime has decreased and detections have risen. Officers of the highest rank appear to have colluded at worst, condoned at best, practices that amount to "Cooking the books" of crime for personal financial or career gain. Politicians have used the statistics to gain political advantage in the most blatant point scoring exercise, all based on the fallacy of falling crime and rising detections.

Taking courageous and sensible steps in an attempt to bring about reform, the Home Secretary has invited the National Statistician to conduct an independent review of crime statistics with the aim of increasing public confidence in these statistics. The Home Secretary has decided that the publication of crime statistics should be moved out of the Home Office to promote greater public trust and demonstrate their independence. The review is due to report at the end of April 2011. It is then intended to run a public consultation on the recommendations from the review.

The review will:

•consider gaps, discrepancies and discontinuities within crime statistics;
•recommend the best future location for the publication of crime statistics, and their associated data collection systems; and
•produce an action plan for the implementation of recommendations from the UK Statistics Authority’s report Overcoming Barriers to Trust in Crime Statistics: England and Wales published in May 2010.

The full terms of reference for the review can be downloaded from this link.

The National Statistician will use the following criteria in evaluating options for the future location of crime statistics. She will look at the impact on:


•public confidence in the statistics;
•quality of the statistics;
•burden on data suppliers;
•cost and efficiency;
•statistical expertise and capability; and
•uses and user needs.


The National Statistician would like to invite comments on this review and has published a news release to this effect which can also be downloaded from this link.

To feed your views into the review please respond using the Word template available for download by clicking here. Please send this form back via email or post:

Email: ns.crimereview@statistics.gsi.gov.uk

Crime Statistics Review
National Statistician's Office
Room 1.015
Government Buildings
Cardiff Road
Newport
NP10 8XG

The Overcoming Barriers report states:

Most commentators would agree that measuring crime and reporting on crime statistics are inherently difficult. The crime figures for England and Wales, for which the Home Office is responsible, have been subject to many improvements over the years and, in terms of technical quality, they compare well with corresponding statistics for other countries.


However, there continues to be public criticism of the statistics and mistrust in the way that they are used and quoted. As far as we can tell, this exceeds the level of criticism and mistrust in most other countries.

Research and previous reviews have suggested that this mistrust is exacerbated by the nature of some media reporting of the statistics. This may, in part, reflect wider mistrust of official information, not just statistics, but there are factors inherent to crime statistics that may also play a role:


• the existence of two major data sources (police recorded crime figures and the British Crime Survey). Both sources are essential to create a full picture, but their different strengths and weaknesses lead, on occasions, to a degree of public and political confusion and present an opportunity for selective and misleading quotation and reporting


• the difficulty of ensuring consistent recording practice across the 43 territorial police forces and the British Transport Police. The counting and classification of crime after it is reported to the police is a complex process; and changes to the rules and guidelines are necessary from time to time as problems emerge and are resolved, or in order to reflect changes in legislation. This is a proper part of a process of continuous updating and improvement, but it can also generate suspicion and confusion.

CAUSE FOR CONCERN

Theresa May, in appointing the National Statistician Jil Matheson to review the process, has begun to prize the lid off the "Can of Worms" of crime statistics. The greatest cause for concern is that those who have benefitted most from the orchestrated manipulation of the numbers down the years are adept at disguising their activity or worst, deflecting responsibility downward to the rank and file officers who have been instructed to carry out their strategies.  

The absolute facts must be unearthed if true confidence is to be restored. If, as it is believed, some Senior Officers have abused the process and knowingly received bonus payments for crime reduction and detections that have been manipulated, the scandal that will emerge will undoubtedly eclipse that of the MP Expenses saga. If proven to be the case, the consequences are worse, in that it would involve our most senior and previously trusted police officers, who are expected to conduct themselves in the most exemplorary manner. If this is, as we believe the case, the truth must come out if the slate of crime statistics is to be wiped clean and moved forward with honesty and transparency. If senior officers have knowingly perpetrated or condoned such activity, we must ask and answer the tough question: "Are such officers fit to be controlling our police service?"

From all the evidence we have compiled, from serving, former and retired officers all around the country, we have every reason to suspect that Jil Matheson will face resistance to uncovering the absolute truth. We hope that she will demonstrate the courage and determination to expose any improper activity and that the Home Secretary will deal with any transgressions quickly and publicly.

Concern exists over the "regulatory bodies" of the HMIC (Her Majesties Inpector of Constabuary), the IPCC (Indpendent Police Complaints Commission), and the IOC, (Office of the Information Commissioner), all of whom have been aware of the "Gaming" practices prevalent in our police forces, yet have brought no individual or force to account for fear of the further bad "PR" this would undoubtedly create. If the regulatory bodies have indeed failed in the execution of their respective duties, Jil Matheson, Theresa May and all who seek transparent and honest reporting will face an immense challenge.

The majority of this activity, if and when reealed and proven, will be shown to have taken place under the Labour administration, focused as it was with all the pubic sector, on performance targeting accompanied by financial incentives. This is a divisive tactic, open to abuse and manipulation and Theresa May has a limited window of opportunity to expose the activity before the opposition can weaken her argument that this took place on their watch.

A simplistic view is that the proposed introduction of Locally Elected Police and Crime Commissioners may in part, have been born out of a mistrust of the senior officers to exert proper fiscal control over the fiefdoms Nick Herbert is keen to break up. An extension of this line of thought is that perhaps this is partly why policing was not "ring fenced" and protected from the budget cuts the service now faces. Could it be that profligate spending combined with fudged crime statistics have contributed to the belief that the forces can now achieve "more with less?" and that so many officers fear the security of their future?  

HAVE YOUR SAY

Here at the Thin Blue Line, we are compiling our own submission to the National Statisticians review. We intend to pull no punches. Coincidentally, we are in the process of compiling our own, in depth report "Crime Of the Century", which will appear on these pages when complete. This will accompany our submission to Jil Matheson.

Rank and file officers are naturally fearful of the consequences of speaking out about strategies imposed on them by their senior officers. We have collated numerous examples of "Cuffing", "Stitching", "Skewing" and "Nodding" in forces all around the country. For the uninitiated, or those who simply need a reminder, we have explained these terms below:

1. ‘Cuffing’ is about making crime seem to disappear by failing to record it. The term ‘cuffing’ derives from the magician’s trick of making something disappear up the cuff of their shirt. This is associated with an ‘evidential’ crime recording standard which places the onus on the victim to establish that a crime has been committed. This allows officers to use their discretion on whether or not to accept the victim’s account and record the crime for investigation. This has a long association with ‘gaming’, as officers are known to use a variety of tactics to prevent the crime ‘appearing on the books’.

2. ‘Stitching’ is the fabrication of evidence. Whilst the use of such tactics to secure convictions at Court has largely been addressed by the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, administrative procedures still offer the opportunity to obtain detections in circumstances where there is in-sufficient evidence to secure a conviction. These procedures include cautions, informal warnings, and in some circumstances an offence could be recorded as detected without the suspect being made aware of the allegation against them.

3. ‘Skewing’ is about concentrating effort and resources on areas subject to performance indicators. This involves investing less in the investigation of the more difficult and resource intensive areas of police activity, such as the prevention and investigation of serious crime i.e. child abuse and sexual offences. It could also involve the re-deployment of officers to more affluent neighbourhoods where crime is easier to investigate and detect (Patrick 2004).

4. ‘Nodding’ refers to the practice whereby suspects ‘nod’ at locations where they have committed crimes and are able to have them ‘written off’ without any risk of increasing their sentence. The legitimate aims of this administrative procedure is to reduce court time and enable offenders to admit outstanding offences i.e. ‘clean the sheet’ prior to sentencing. This allows the courts to impose a sentence which takes into account the extent of the offender’s criminal activities and alleviates the offender of the fear of being re-apprehended after they have served their sentence for an offence committed prior to incarceration. This administrative procedure has a long history of abuse and appears in two formats; ‘offences taken into consideration (TIC)’ and ‘prison write offs’, which allows offenders to confess to offences post sentence. In these circumstances a senior police officer or member of the Crown Prosecuting Service (CPS) would make the decision to charge on the grounds of whether the individual was likely to receive an increase in their custodial sentence. In both cases the police should have sufficient evidence to charge the suspect if they subsequently decline to accept the offences as TIC or ‘prison write off’. These procedures have long been associated with abuses involving collusion between officers and suspects. The offer of inducements in return for admissions lies at the heart of these illicit exchanges.

Readers are of course free to click the link to the contribution document above and to send it by post or e mail to the addresses supplied. However, there will be many officers who will wish to expose what they believe to be improper practices they have been instructed to implement, but are fearful of exposure and the consequences. (We are only too aware that the police service does not yet protect well intending officers as well as it might). For those officers who wish to contribute anonymously, we would welcome examples that we may include to demonstrate where changes are necessary. These contributions can be made directly to our e mail contact address at the foot of the page, or via anonymous contribution on this or other similar pages.

LET'S PUT THIS WRONG ACTIVITY TO BED ONCE AND FOR ALL.

One final point. No doubt readers will by now have seen and perhaps experimented with the online crime mapping at http://www.police.uk/ Whilst well intended, the site is at its earliest stages of development and we hope it proves to be an invaluable tool to inform the community of instances of crime in their local area. However, until the process of recording and presenting crime statistics earns the reputation for transparency and accuracy; and the integrity, trust and credibility of the data is restored, the jury will remain out on this one.

Our recent articles and reports about crime reporting :-

(hopefully the link label will decribe each article sufficiently).
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2011/01/crime-is-down-or-is-it-part-2-lies.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2011/01/crime-is-down-or-is-it-part-1.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2010/11/top-cop-pay-bonus-scandal-chiefs-still.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2010/05/too-many-chiefs-part-3-full-report.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2010/05/too-many-police-chiefs-part-2-bonus.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2010/05/too-many-chiefs-part-1-bonus-scandal.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2010/04/crime-of-century-deception-of-falling.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2010/04/criminal-justice-uk-police-part-2.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2010/04/criminal-justice-uk-police-part-1.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2010/02/chief-police-officers-and-home-office.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2010/01/top-cops-are-still-fiddling-crime.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2010/01/national-police-improvement-agency-yet.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2009/12/force-or-farce-police-recorded-crime.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2009/12/top-cops-pay-crime-scandal.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2009/11/home-office-crime-figures-conspiring-to.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2009/10/fudging-crime-statistics-is-no-way-to.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2009/10/crime-mapping-is-police-recorded-crime.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2009/10/no-faith-in-police-statistics.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2009/09/crime-statistics-hide-truth.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2009/09/extracts-from-labours-home-secretary.html

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.