Police, crime and public honesty - a statistical lesson

****

It is pretty clear that rates of crime don’t correspond to any of things we’re always calling for – more coppers (on the beat of course), tougher sentencing, bigger prisons, capital punishment or flogging in the public square.

Recorded crime...fell by 4%, continuing the long downward trend in crime since 1995, and dropping below 4m offences for the first time in 23 years.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said violent crime had fallen by 7%, including a 2% fall in robberies.

We’d also been told – mostly by chief constables protecting their empires – that reductions in police spending during a recession would result in a surge of crime:

Acting Chief Constable Chris Weigh of the Lancashire force said the loss of front line officers had resulted in an “inevitable” increase in the number of offences being committed.

Seems this top copper was wrong! The real problem is that – because we’ve focused on police, punishment, prisons and probation – we don’t really understand why crime has fallen so rapidly over the past 20 years. Or indeed whether it will continue to fall. What we will be able to say is that the overall funding of policing and economic recession does not lead to more crime.

So what are those factors? Well it seems that simple economics is a factor – stealing stuff is harder and selling it on is more difficult (as well as less lucrative). So professional thieves have shifted to other crimes:

...with significant rises recorded in the last two years in metal thefts triggered by soaring commodity prices

While the opportunist has taken to nicking bikes and lawnmowers from sheds.

However, the truth may be that we’re really a lot more honest than the authorities give us credit:

Mobile phones deliberately left in pubs and clubs by Sussex Police to catch thieves were all returned.
 

Officers planted phones fitted with tracking devices in nine clubs and pubs in Hastings and St Leonards as part of Operation Mobli on Saturday night.
 

However the phones were handed in at the bar or security staff and not one was stolen.

...

Is Sarah Wollaston telling porkies or simply misinformed?

****

Sarah Wollaston, anti-booze campaigner has penned a withering article in Politics Home where she says:

In 2010, the ONS recorded 8,790 alcohol-related deaths in the UK but this is a gross underestimate as it excludes accidental deaths, road traffic accidents, impulsive suicides and homicides. Alcohol causes around 22,000 deaths per year.

This is factually incorrect. Here are the real (or real as we can get) numbers for 2010:

·         Deaths attributable to drink-driving  - 250. This figure has been falling steadily for several years, matching the decline in alcohol consumption since 2002. Deaths are at their lowest level for 30 years.

·         Deaths from fire attributable to alcohol – 113. Again this is a declining figure – the Institute of Alcohol Studies (not exactly a pro-booze organisation) estimates that “...in 47% of cases, the victim was under the influence of a substance of some kind at the time of the fire. In 33% of the cases, the substance was alcohol”

·         Deaths from drowning attributable to alcohol -  68. Again the Institute of Alcohol Studies estimates that alcohol “...was a factor in 13% of the cases”.

·         Workplace deaths attributable to alcohol – 35. Again this has declined steadily – partly because of much-maligned health and safety regulations and partly because of fewer high risk workplaces

·         Home accidents attributable to alcohol – 400. The IAS attributed 10% of accidents to booze and there are around 4000 deaths from home accidents each year.

·         Homicides with links to alcohol – 455. This assumes that 70% of murders in the UK are in some way drink-related which is at the top end of IAS estimates. And murder rates are at their lowest levels for a long time.

·         Suicides linked to alcohol – 3365. Again using to higher IAS estimates. The UK suicide rate is not rising.

I make it 13,256 deaths – still a lot but nowhere close to Dr Wollaston’s 22,000 deaths. There needs to be an adjustment for accidental deaths (other than poisoning which is included in the 8790) outside the home. However, the total number of deaths from “external causes” is only 11,000 or so which includes those suicides.  There certainly aren’t nearly 9000 alcohol-caused accidental deaths outside the home – people would have noticed!

Why do I think that the good doctor – or whoever feeds her data – is just making stuff up?

....

Mistrust, technology and the failures of modern policing

Sir Paul Stevenson, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner (or “Scotland Yard Chief” as the papers like to put it) has observed that the police have lost the public’s trust. In what amounted to a veiled criticism of his fellow top coppers, Sir Paul said:

‘This is more to do with the psychological contract between the citizen and police. And occasionally the citizen might be forgiven for thinking the psychological contract has been broken. They are on the streets and police are in buildings and vehicles, not doing other things. That is the critical issue,' he said.

‘It is a psychological contract, we are not saying the public should do this on their own. We should be out there. We should be saying, 'we want to be on the streets on your behalf. We want to make them safe'.’

He added: ‘Too often in recent years police have fallen into the trap of engaging in social engineering and associated social work, filling gaps left by other agencies. In years gone by we have lost the sense of the importance of visible street patrols - effecting as best as we can, uniform governance of the streets and public places, owning the streets on behalf of the public so that we can enjoy using them.’

Over recent days I have had cause to think about the relationship between the ordinary person and the police. For various reasons the matter of the police, how they operate and the nature of modern policing has cropped up and Sir Paul’s observations struck me as being significant.

Last week, I chaired Bradford Council’s Safer & Stronger Communities Scrutiny Committee where we received a report into “serious acquisitive crime” from officials including a police inspector. In case you don’t know, “serious acquisitive crime” covers domestic burglary, theft of and from a motor vehicle, and robbery.

During the discussion one councillor – as it happens, a Labour councillor – was uncompromising in his criticism of the police’s performance. And it’s hard to take issue with him (representing as he does one of Bradford’s most crime-ridden wards) as he complained that there had been too many excuses for the failure to reduce levels of burglary in the City. What worried me was that the police response was to wave shrouds – ‘it will get much worse after the cuts’ – rather than to address the historic failure. I am reminded that West Yorkshire Police could find 1,600 officers to police fewer that a thousand protesters but are unable to get enough policemen out there catching burglars.

Instead, as Sir Paul noted, police officers are safely and warmly ensconced in comfortable offices away from the questioning, informed engagement with the public that should be the essence of policing. The system falls back on failed technology as a replacement for real people.

CCTV – in Bradford city centre where millions has been spent installing one of the most comprehensive systems for surveillance, the pictures cannot (in most cases) be used for evidential purposes as they are not good enough. And where cameras can zoom in on a suspect, the people operating the system fail more often than not to do this. A waste of money as a system but worse, an excuse for the police to withdraw from patrolling on foot

ANPR – again police in Bradford are forever extolling the wonders of the “automatic number plate recognition” system that rings the city. But this really achieves nothing where plates are obscured, cars are stolen or the numbers are false. Again we replace engaging with the public by sitting before a screen.

Helicopters – hardly a night passes without the police chopper taking to the skies tracking some criminal of other. But again, the chopper can’t do anything other than follow someone, can’t act quickly enough to deal with events on the ground and is very expensive. People want coppers on the streets not in the skies.

Fancy radio systems – police forces spent untold millions on sophisticated radio systems allowing greater communications “security” and a more rapid, secure response. Which, of course, is why every copper uses the mobile phone!

I could go on to talk about over-complicated statistical analysis systems, some really sexy GIS (as a map geek I love this but as a politician and taxpayer I see no point) and loads of really smart souped up motors to hare about in. This is a failed system.

I now hear – from the decent folk who used to trust the police - endless stories of the rudeness of police officers, the targeting of minor offences by middle class people and a complete obsession with minor infractions. If the “twitter joke trial” was a one-off example of over-reaction it would be serious but it is not a one-off example of our criminal justice system’s overkill. Just this weekend I’ve heard of how police use questioning to trap people into admission (before any arrest or issuing of a ticket), how an angry motoring incident is blown up into arrests, charges and criminal investigation and how police officers collude to protect one of their own from allegations of assault.

I do not know whether all these tales are true but the police should be very concerned. Decent, folk living ordinary lives and causing no trouble no longer trust or respect the police – they see the cops not as a community force protecting them but as a threat. Almost as some kind of occupying army – the enforcement arm of a nannying, interfering, controlling Government.

...

Black men, black culture and the economics of crime

****

The Sunday Telegraph today reports on the – unsurprising in many ways – revelation that:

“The Official figures, which examine the ethnicity of those accused of violent offences in London, suggest the majority of men held responsible for gun crimes, robberies and street crimes are black.”

On the back of these figures a debate arises as to the reasons for this situation. And sadly beneath the careful words there is a worrying tendency to promote the view that the situation exists because they are black. That somehow there is something in the nature of black men that leads them to crime and especially violent crime.

Mostly this racism is shifted one notch away from allegations of genetic inclination to criminality towards a “cultural” explanation. This argues that, somewhere in the prevailing mores of Britain’s Afro-Caribbean community is a dark truth of a violent culture. Such critics point to the popularity of music with violent lyrics, to the supposed importing of US gang culture – with its bling, drugs and guns – and to the criminal culture of Kingston, Jamaica’s capital.

Others – including black observers like Shaun Bailey direct our attention to welfare and to the fact that a frightening proportion of London’s black community exists on benefits. Here’s Shaun:

“Our children grow up trapped in the benefit system. They see benefit dependency as a ‘lifestyle’: the best one available other than becoming a criminal.”

There’s a point to this except that, in and of itself, benefit dependency does not make criminals – it is as likely to provide a cover for criminality as it is to be its cause. And it is in this fact – in the reality of economics that I think the ‘explanation’ lies. Black kids get involved in violent crime because it is – on the face of it – the rational thing to do. I know this sounds bonkers but allow me to elaborate.

There's a hint in the second half of the quote from Shaun Bailey – becoming a criminal seems to many kids (and not just black ones) a pretty rational option. They grow up surrounded by crime – from fiddling benefits and shoplifting to burglary and bag snatching – and most of those involved are not obviously economic failures (at least in the limited perspective of the kids looking on).

The crime industry on our estates – and elsewhere in our inner cities – is become the dominant private business. It has clear hierarchies, provides (fairly harsh) discipline and control, allows for low level entry and competes aggressively for business. And the leadership of the business promotes machismo as a key attribute because the willingness to conduct acts of violence is crucial to the continuing success of the business. And such violence – the guns, the knives and the testosterone-fuelled strutting – becomes attractive because it is directly associated with the most successful in business.

You will find no real difference if you turn to look at the criminality of white young men from the peripheral estates surround Northern cities or for that matter the same behaviour among Pakistani immigrants to those same cities. The precise nature of the business varies (although drugs are always involved somewhere) with some preferring burglary to mugging but the reality is that, across Britain, there’s a group – a socio-economic group not a racial or cultural group – for whom crime pays.

....

Police crime figures not a "reliable measure": Official

***

Sir Michael Scholar, Chairman of the UK Statistics Authority, has confirmed that the official crime statistics are useless.

"But a more balanced commentary on national trends in violent crime would, in the view of the authority, also make reference to the estimates given in the British Crime Survey, which in our view provide a more reliable measure of the national trend over time."

Lets get this clear. Records of actual crimes recorded by the police are less reliable than the ESTIMATES in an opinion poll based on the memory of those surveyed.

...