It's the end of a long week pulling together our special report on race crime in Britain for tomorrow's paper and, if it doesn't sound too pompous, there's a moment to reflect. And also to admit to a few glitches along the way. Give me time. I'll get to them. Whatever the complications in a report like this, however, it still strikes me as exactly the sort of thing Sunday newspapers are for: its proactive, not reactive. We went out and investigated instead of waiting for the story to come to us. It's important stuff and should set the agenda for a few days at least. Whether it does or not will depend upon the fall-out from the Tory front-bench gaff, what our rivals are leading with and, of course, the vagaries of the Easter weekend. All that aside, I'm rather proud of it and I think the design team and particularly our graphics guru, Michael Agar, have done a terrific job.
Now to the glitch. Aside from all the worn-out shoe leather and the myriad interviews that went into the piece at its heart is a statistical crunch. I took two sets of figures available in a government report and crunched them against each other.
The report has the snappy title of Statistics on Race and the Criminal Justice System, which the Home Office must publish by law.
You can read it here. (Beware. It's a long PDF document.)
One table lists the number of racist incidents per police constabulary in England and Wales. The other lists the size of the visible ethnic minority population in each area. Putting aside questions of black on white crime, which are dealt with in the article itself, the calculation gives a sense of which communities are most at risk and which are safest.
So here's the thing.
I first did this four years ago, using the report for 1999-2000. When I started looking at the 2003-2004 figures on ethnic population I noticed something extraordinary. It seemed the ethnic minority population had exploded in just four years. In some places it appeared to have doubled. Over all it had gone from around 2.5 million to more than 4 million. Was this true?
Er, no. The population figures for 1999 were created by the Office of National Statistics, who had extrapolated them forward from the 1991 census, based on the Work Force Survey. And they had got it completely wrong. The numbers the Home Office published for 1999 were a vast underestimation. This, of course, has major ramifications for Government. Policy makers use statistics like this to work out what services communities need. It also had ramifications for me. It meant all the calculations in my original piece, published in 2001, were also wrong.
Happily it didn't mean that my thesis – that racism was worst in rural areas – was false too. All the statistics were wrong by roughly the same amount, so the proportions and the relative numbers were still the same. The bad areas were still bad. the good ones still good. Why did I not mention this in the piece we're publishing? Frankly, because it detracts from the main point we're making, and is confusing rather than informing. I'm mentioning it here instead.
In any case for this latest report I have recalculated everything, so we can see the step change there has been from 1999 to now. (For anybody who is interested, and hasn't drifted off yet, I did it by averaging the growth in population forward across a dozen areas and two years from 2001 and then used that percentage to work backwards. It's not perfect but its far more accurate than the original numbers we published in 2001.) In short it works. The only thing the report lacks is a comment from a Government minister. But that's a different story entirely.
