The Home Office is trying to scare the public, so it can squeeze more money out of the Treasury. Hardly a day passes without “news” of soaring knife crime, rampant sex offences, computer fraud and, on tonight’s Channel 4 Dispatches, the revelation that there are too few police to follow up half of all offences.
West Yorkshire reported an 11% crime rise last year, yet it has decided not to chase up half of them. Crimes “including child abuse and terrorism” must be pursued by civilian staff, “prompting fears that public safety is at risk”.
This is rubbish. The figures are put together by local police forces to a variety of ends. They reflect police activity, insurance requirements, Home Office priorities and media pressure. The only remotely reliable crime figures come from the official Crime Survey for England and Wales (formerly known as the British Crime Survey), and they show Britain’s crime rate, however defined, as falling for over a decade. This year there was some evidence of that fall slackening, but even for much-publicised violence, the 2018 survey recorded “no change in overall violent offences”.
Confronted by criticism, the Home Office and Office for National Statistics admit that a rise in crime reported by the police “does not necessarily mean the level of crime has increased”. Indeed they stress that, “For many types of crime, police-recorded crime statistics do not provide a reliable measure of levels or trends in crime.” Why then publicise such a blatant invitation to misreporting? Nor does the caveat stop the ONS jumbling together crime survey and police figures in a mish-mash of false alarm.
Britain’s police forces are under extreme pressure. They have become the community’s all-purpose fall-back for failures in the austerity welfare state. Week after week, parliament and the media tell them to up their game on gangs, fraudsters, drug traffickers, sex harassers and cybercrime. Never is the arm of the law shortened, only lengthened. And always the demand is to meet some political diktat or central target.
When the public is ordered to report anything and everything, the police inevitably ration resources. There is a difference between rowdy teenagers and murderous gang wars. There does appear to be a surge in knife crime and attacks using mopeds in some city neighbourhoods. There does appear to be a rise in rural drugs marketing. “Historical” sex crimes have undoubtedly become a Home Office obsession. But we don’t know if any of this indicates a national crime wave, or just a shift in political or police priorities. There is no evidence that British society – unique in western Europe – is becoming ever more criminalised.
The media prey on police crime statistics. They are a poison in the body politic. The once-respected ONS should have nothing to do with them. The media should expose such blatant lobbying, not pander to it. Crime in Britain has, for years, been a good news story. But good news gets no headlines, and no budget.
• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
