Crime statistics

A couple of interesting blog posts on the BBC – part 1, part 2 – about a recent set of crime statistics publicised by the Conservatives.

The basic gist of the Conservative claim is that violent crime is vastly increased over the past decade; the basic problem is that the method of recording violent crime changed in the middle of the period, to a much more “permissive” approach, where police were obliged to record a complaint rather than dismissing it. Which, unsurprisingly, tends to lead to a lot more reported crime, without actually saying anything about the underlying crime rates.

I suppose in an ideal world Labour would be running a campaign of “Do you really want to be governed by people who can’t read printed warnings on graphs?”, but sadly all we’ll get is a bit of he-said-she-said over the next two weeks and a few more people will be left beliving that the country is a far scarier place now than it ever was.

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