Conservatives Caught Lying About Crime

3rd Feb 2010 17:03:06

Quoting from BBC Radio 4 today, their Home Affairs editor, Mark Easton, said:

I've discovered that the Conservatives party has sent out statistics to every Tory constituency in England and Wales which suggest huge increases in violent crime since Labour came to power. Now, the problem is that the numbers they've used don't compare like with like. They've ignored huge warnings plastered over the official statistics telling people not to try and compare the two sets of numbers.

Before April 2002, a police officer would make the decision on whether a crime was a "violent crime". After April 2002, any incident became a "violent crime" if the victim claimed it was so, regardless of whether the police suspected the incident had even taken place, or knew nothing about the nature of the incident. So there is clearly going to be a massive ride in violent crime after April 2002.

You might think that only an idiot would compare violent crime in 1998-99 to 2008-09 if they knew that this massive change of the method of collecting data had occurred. Comparing violent crime from 98-99 to 01-02 would be perfectly fine, and comparing violent crime from 02-03 to 06-07 (for example) using these statistics would be also perfectly fine.

The change in recording statistics after April 2002 are a fine idea. This way, police officers and the police service in general, cannot massage the figures and make the performance of the police service seem better.

The British Crime Survey does not include murder, manslaughter, nor crimes committed against those under 16. The BCS includes crimes committed BY under 16's, but AGAINST under 16's. Important difference there.

You can catch Chris Grayling on BBC iPlayer talking about this, by which I mean squirming out of the fact that he's blatantly just been lying through his teeth.

So what is the lie? The Conservatives claim that violent crime has massively increased by 70% under Labour, because (from the Home Office's own figures) there were 615,985 violent crimes committed in 1998-99, and 1,034,972 in 2008-09. They get these figures from the Home Office document "Crime in England and Wales", published in October 2009.

Take a look at the document. Specifically, the Conservatives table 2.04, which is available to be seen on page 50 of the report. Feel free to take a look. Then, once you've finished looking at the table, scroll down to page 55, where you'll see the important text:

The National Crime Reporting Standard was introduced in April 2002. Figures before and after that date are not directly comparable.

Nice work, Chris. Thank Christ the Tories wouldn't lie to us and mislead the public. How, you might ask, DO we compare violent crime before and after 2002? We could always use the British Crime Survey, which interviews 46,000 members of the public and asks them for their personal experiences of crime. That might be a good idea, because the questions don't change at all for that. I wonder what that shows about the rate of violent crime over the last 30 years.

Oh. Well there you go. As a sidenote, the Conservatives are already using these figures to make cheap political capital. In Milton Keynes, the police got very cross with their MP when he claimed that crime had risen. They said his claims were "extremely misleading" and the figure he had given included "everything from public order offences, to harassment, to allowing a dog to be out of control in a public place".

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