>#It’s mad to record petty problems as crime, says police chief
>Fiona Hamilton, Crime Editor
>Monday October 31 2022, 12.01am GMT, The Times
>Incivility and petty disputes are being routinely recorded as crime, warping statistics and scaring the public, one of the country’s most senior police officers has warned.
>Sir David Thompson, chief constable of the West Midlands, told The Times that crime was being measured in a “completely mad way”. Verbal arguments between neighbours, and people’s fear of violence, were being recorded as criminal acts, which distorted the public’s view, he said.
>Thompson said that, according to official statistics, the rate of violence against the person was higher in Warwickshire, West Mercia, Norfolk and Cumbria than London because the regional forces were abiding strictly by crime-recording rules.
>Recorded crime hit a high last week of 6.5 million offences in a year, with police solving the lowest proportion. The Office for National Statistics said that 5.4 per of recorded crime led to a charge in the year to June, down from 6.5 per cent in the previous 12 months.
>Rick Muir, director of the Police Foundation think tank, said the statistics were misleading and crime was “not at an all time high”. He said: “Crime recorded by the police has increased. Crime as measured by the [annual British] Crime Survey, the best metric we have, is falling and is much lower than it was 20 years ago.”
>West Midlands, the second biggest force in England and Wales, has recorded a 203 per cent increase in violence without injury since 2018, even though the number of cases that end in criminal charges has remained stable. The increase was “almost totally” down to crime recording because the watchdog that inspected police had been focused on the issue, Thompson said.
>Minor disagreements and incidents are routinely recorded by officers because of a Home Office edict that all complaints from the public must be included in official statistics.
>The rules were put in place after revelations several years ago that crime statistics were manipulated to meet targets, and that victims were being ignored because their complaints were not recorded, particularly in sex- offence cases.
>Thompson said it was right to record every sexual crime, particularly given police failures in the past. But he questioned why crime recording across the board was being included in the Office for National Statistics bulletins, given that matters were often not fully investigated.
>Thompson said that he did not have the resources to deploy detectives to investigate complaints that were clearly not criminal, yet unless the allegations made could be fully disproved they had to stay recorded in the statistics. This had resulted in a misperception among the public about the scale and threat of some crimes, particularly in cases of less serious violence.
>In recent cases West Midlands police recorded violence without injury when a person had a walking stick raised towards them during an argument with a neighbour and complained of having felt threatened. In another case, recorded as a crime, a woman felt threatened and harassed because a neighbour said they were unhappy about her children running on their driveway.
>Thompson acknowledged that improvements needed to be made in investigations and charging, especially on rape, but he added that police were being assessed on “deeply flawed data”.
>The chief constable, who is due to retire this year, called for a Home Office inquiry into the recording rules, and an examination of whether some allegations should be included at all in official statistics. He said: “We are recording colossal amounts of stuff in this violence category that makes the public think violence is going through the roof. But their actual experience of violence is going down.
>“Over the last couple of years, for the first time in history, the police recorded more crime and violence than the public say is happening in the official crime survey. They’re inverted and it’s not right.
>“We like to tell people to be polite and civil, but our job is about crime. Where somebody might wave a stick at you or come around and be rude about your children, that’s incivility. It shouldn’t be crime, but it’s getting really close to how we’re recording it.”
>The Home Office said: “The public have a right to expect that the police get the basics right and that genuine crimes that have been reported to the police should be treated seriously and investigated. Everyone should have the security of a safe street and home, and it is promising to see that knife crime, burglaries and drug-related offences have fallen across the country.
>“As of 30 September 2022, 15,343 additional uplift officers have been recruited in England and Wales through the Police Uplift Programme, 77 per cent of the target of 20,000 additional officers by March 2023.”
>__Behind the story__
>If a patient with serious health issues declared to their GP they were sure they had cancer, they would be examined properly by a professional.
But their belief that they were suffering the disease would not be recorded on NHS statistics until it was actually confirmed.
>That is the analogy used by Sir David Thompson, chief constable of the West Midlands, to highlight “mad” crime recording rules, because the approach taken by the police is the opposite.
>If a member of the public reports a crime it must be recorded, and it goes on official statistics unless the force actively disproves the allegation.
>The system comes from good intentions a decade ago when a Metropolitan Police officer blew the whistle on how crime statistics were routinely manipulated. Rape and child sex abuse were recorded as being “crime-related” or “no crimes” and burglaries were downgraded to lesser offences.
>It became clear that victims of sexual violence were being dissuaded from pursuing their cases, and that police were not recording their complaints in the first place.
>The scandal resulted in much more stringent recording of crime to improve public trust and assure victims that they were being listened to. But, as is often the case with policing, the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction and the public’s perception is being warped by extreme recording rules. It cannot be right that an incident in which a child picks up a potato peeler in an argument with a parent would be recorded as a knife-crime incident, as other chiefs have claimed. There have been previous claims that police count misdemeanours such as a “stolen” spray of perfume and an assault with a sock.
>There needs to be a wholesale examination of crime recording so that the public is given a measured and realistic view of issues such as violence, and so that the crime solving ability of police forces is assessed using accurate data.
Well…crim stats are being manipulated, There’s a shocker.
I was a copper 30 years ago and the exact same bullshit used to go on then.
If fact one of the detective sergeant’s entire job was massaging crimes stats.
Things like, 10 cars broken into in the same car park on the same night = 1 crime. Unless we caught the toe-rag. Then for sure it was 10 solved crimes.
Stolen car (unsolved) + Stolen MarsBar (solved) = 50% clear up rate.
I think it depends on the definition of “petty” as that term is overloaded.
Some of the examples given in the article, it seems to me, are examples where “petty” really means “not a crime”. Raising a walking cane at somebody, get real. Same for “non crime hate incidents”.
However, there does seem to be a real issue in this country where what is also dubbed “petty crime” just goes on with almost no police involvement. Such as harassment, vandalism, minor robbery and muggings, bike theft, and so on.
These are the crimes that actually make lives of people, disproportionately working class people, I’d argue, miserable. They not only need recording as crime but the police really need to double down on sorting them out.
Imagine if we gave out stricter sentences and made prisons actually a prison. Something to be feared rather than a holiday camp with your mates. Imagine if the UK took on the stricter sentences and fines as Singapore. You’d think twice knowing if your out robbing you could be getting 15 years.
The rules around what to record as a crime have always been an issue, as they have 0 regard for common sense.
To abide by the rules, every time somebody feels harassed, alarmed, or distressed, we would have to record a crime. I suspect people feel like that at least a dozen times in an average day, and if they were all reported to police, even the most quaint suburban neighborhood would seem like a crime ridden hellscape.
Abiding by the rules also means that we record every crime reported to us, regardless of who it is reporting it. This is usually a great idea, but it also means that mental health facilities have an astoundingly high crime rate, as we have to record every single crime reported, despite the fact that a demon definitely did not come up out of the floor to molest someone for the 12th time in a week.
To strictly abide by the rules is madness, as it results in massively inflated crime figures and workloads. However, not having any rules will result in lots of things going unreported, by either lazy or incompetent officers not bother to report things. Allowing a common sense approach to the rules is the better approach to take.
Why not have a record of complaints, and a separate record of crimes (issues that result in a formal warning/fine/conviction)?
Seeing him say “it’s mad” reminds me of the Scottish police officer skit.
8 comments
>#It’s mad to record petty problems as crime, says police chief
>Fiona Hamilton, Crime Editor
>Monday October 31 2022, 12.01am GMT, The Times
>Incivility and petty disputes are being routinely recorded as crime, warping statistics and scaring the public, one of the country’s most senior police officers has warned.
>Sir David Thompson, chief constable of the West Midlands, told The Times that crime was being measured in a “completely mad way”. Verbal arguments between neighbours, and people’s fear of violence, were being recorded as criminal acts, which distorted the public’s view, he said.
>Thompson said that, according to official statistics, the rate of violence against the person was higher in Warwickshire, West Mercia, Norfolk and Cumbria than London because the regional forces were abiding strictly by crime-recording rules.
>Recorded crime hit a high last week of 6.5 million offences in a year, with police solving the lowest proportion. The Office for National Statistics said that 5.4 per of recorded crime led to a charge in the year to June, down from 6.5 per cent in the previous 12 months.
>Rick Muir, director of the Police Foundation think tank, said the statistics were misleading and crime was “not at an all time high”. He said: “Crime recorded by the police has increased. Crime as measured by the [annual British] Crime Survey, the best metric we have, is falling and is much lower than it was 20 years ago.”
>West Midlands, the second biggest force in England and Wales, has recorded a 203 per cent increase in violence without injury since 2018, even though the number of cases that end in criminal charges has remained stable. The increase was “almost totally” down to crime recording because the watchdog that inspected police had been focused on the issue, Thompson said.
>Minor disagreements and incidents are routinely recorded by officers because of a Home Office edict that all complaints from the public must be included in official statistics.
>The rules were put in place after revelations several years ago that crime statistics were manipulated to meet targets, and that victims were being ignored because their complaints were not recorded, particularly in sex- offence cases.
>Thompson said it was right to record every sexual crime, particularly given police failures in the past. But he questioned why crime recording across the board was being included in the Office for National Statistics bulletins, given that matters were often not fully investigated.
>Thompson said that he did not have the resources to deploy detectives to investigate complaints that were clearly not criminal, yet unless the allegations made could be fully disproved they had to stay recorded in the statistics. This had resulted in a misperception among the public about the scale and threat of some crimes, particularly in cases of less serious violence.
>In recent cases West Midlands police recorded violence without injury when a person had a walking stick raised towards them during an argument with a neighbour and complained of having felt threatened. In another case, recorded as a crime, a woman felt threatened and harassed because a neighbour said they were unhappy about her children running on their driveway.
>Thompson acknowledged that improvements needed to be made in investigations and charging, especially on rape, but he added that police were being assessed on “deeply flawed data”.
>The chief constable, who is due to retire this year, called for a Home Office inquiry into the recording rules, and an examination of whether some allegations should be included at all in official statistics. He said: “We are recording colossal amounts of stuff in this violence category that makes the public think violence is going through the roof. But their actual experience of violence is going down.
>“Over the last couple of years, for the first time in history, the police recorded more crime and violence than the public say is happening in the official crime survey. They’re inverted and it’s not right.
>“We like to tell people to be polite and civil, but our job is about crime. Where somebody might wave a stick at you or come around and be rude about your children, that’s incivility. It shouldn’t be crime, but it’s getting really close to how we’re recording it.”
>The Home Office said: “The public have a right to expect that the police get the basics right and that genuine crimes that have been reported to the police should be treated seriously and investigated. Everyone should have the security of a safe street and home, and it is promising to see that knife crime, burglaries and drug-related offences have fallen across the country.
>“As of 30 September 2022, 15,343 additional uplift officers have been recruited in England and Wales through the Police Uplift Programme, 77 per cent of the target of 20,000 additional officers by March 2023.”
>__Behind the story__
>If a patient with serious health issues declared to their GP they were sure they had cancer, they would be examined properly by a professional.
But their belief that they were suffering the disease would not be recorded on NHS statistics until it was actually confirmed.
>That is the analogy used by Sir David Thompson, chief constable of the West Midlands, to highlight “mad” crime recording rules, because the approach taken by the police is the opposite.
>If a member of the public reports a crime it must be recorded, and it goes on official statistics unless the force actively disproves the allegation.
>The system comes from good intentions a decade ago when a Metropolitan Police officer blew the whistle on how crime statistics were routinely manipulated. Rape and child sex abuse were recorded as being “crime-related” or “no crimes” and burglaries were downgraded to lesser offences.
>It became clear that victims of sexual violence were being dissuaded from pursuing their cases, and that police were not recording their complaints in the first place.
>The scandal resulted in much more stringent recording of crime to improve public trust and assure victims that they were being listened to. But, as is often the case with policing, the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction and the public’s perception is being warped by extreme recording rules. It cannot be right that an incident in which a child picks up a potato peeler in an argument with a parent would be recorded as a knife-crime incident, as other chiefs have claimed. There have been previous claims that police count misdemeanours such as a “stolen” spray of perfume and an assault with a sock.
>There needs to be a wholesale examination of crime recording so that the public is given a measured and realistic view of issues such as violence, and so that the crime solving ability of police forces is assessed using accurate data.
Well…crim stats are being manipulated, There’s a shocker.
I was a copper 30 years ago and the exact same bullshit used to go on then.
If fact one of the detective sergeant’s entire job was massaging crimes stats.
Things like, 10 cars broken into in the same car park on the same night = 1 crime. Unless we caught the toe-rag. Then for sure it was 10 solved crimes.
Stolen car (unsolved) + Stolen MarsBar (solved) = 50% clear up rate.
I think it depends on the definition of “petty” as that term is overloaded.
Some of the examples given in the article, it seems to me, are examples where “petty” really means “not a crime”. Raising a walking cane at somebody, get real. Same for “non crime hate incidents”.
However, there does seem to be a real issue in this country where what is also dubbed “petty crime” just goes on with almost no police involvement. Such as harassment, vandalism, minor robbery and muggings, bike theft, and so on.
These are the crimes that actually make lives of people, disproportionately working class people, I’d argue, miserable. They not only need recording as crime but the police really need to double down on sorting them out.
Imagine if we gave out stricter sentences and made prisons actually a prison. Something to be feared rather than a holiday camp with your mates. Imagine if the UK took on the stricter sentences and fines as Singapore. You’d think twice knowing if your out robbing you could be getting 15 years.
The rules around what to record as a crime have always been an issue, as they have 0 regard for common sense.
To abide by the rules, every time somebody feels harassed, alarmed, or distressed, we would have to record a crime. I suspect people feel like that at least a dozen times in an average day, and if they were all reported to police, even the most quaint suburban neighborhood would seem like a crime ridden hellscape.
Abiding by the rules also means that we record every crime reported to us, regardless of who it is reporting it. This is usually a great idea, but it also means that mental health facilities have an astoundingly high crime rate, as we have to record every single crime reported, despite the fact that a demon definitely did not come up out of the floor to molest someone for the 12th time in a week.
To strictly abide by the rules is madness, as it results in massively inflated crime figures and workloads. However, not having any rules will result in lots of things going unreported, by either lazy or incompetent officers not bother to report things. Allowing a common sense approach to the rules is the better approach to take.
Why not have a record of complaints, and a separate record of crimes (issues that result in a formal warning/fine/conviction)?
Seeing him say “it’s mad” reminds me of the Scottish police officer skit.
https://youtu.be/GDrZpuGp6aA
Hello cops some kids are smashing up the local bus stop
Go away we are having donuts
But they called the bus stop gay
Okay we are scrambling the helicopter and swat