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Crime Of The Century - A Chilling Look At Crime Statistics In The UK


21. Any new approach to commentary on the statistics would need to be introduced after suitable consultation and be closely monitored to assess public and media reaction (recommendation 3). The National Statistician would need to seek wide agreement to changes in presentation and content, such as the commissioning of one or more independent commentaries. To facilitate this, we think it would be helpful to produce and use an agreed conceptual framework for crime and criminal justice statistics, along the lines suggested in paragraph 26. 22. A more targeted approach to statistical commentary would need to be balanced by enhancing access to the underlying statistical data so that anyone interested could investigate further and make different judgements if they wished. It would remain essential that comprehensive statistics from each source continue to be available, and actively developed and disseminated. In this context, it would be useful if non-expert users could be given improved access to BCS data (for example, via a facility to build tables on the Home Office website), together with guidance on the need to consider sampling variability when interpreting patterns or trends2. This would complement the work that has been done to make national recorded crime figures more accessible.


(ii) Joining up crime and criminal justice 23. As far as the reader is concerned, there is little evident linkage between statistics from the Home Office on crime and those from the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) on criminal justice. Publication of separate volumes makes it hard to find an answer to simple questions (albeit deceptively simple in some cases) about the proportion of crimes that have been brought to justice or the form of sanction that has been applied. There are plans to provide more information – especially at a local level – but the large number of agencies and websites currently involved does not tend to promote a joined-up approach (paragraph 181). 24. At the England and Wales level, we think that the number and range of publications on the criminal justice system (which mostly deal with the treatment of offenders) should be reviewed, with the aim of making them more usable by the non-expert. For example, selected offence groups might become the subject of a specially commissioned commentaries, each covering trends in crime, detection rates, offences brought to justice, penalties, sentences (handed down and actually completed) and re-offending. This would provide an overview across the criminal justice system. 25. Such an approach would have to be based initially on cross-sectional data, as longitudinal analysis (which would follow a ‘cohort’ of offences or offenders) is still a longer term goal3. We hope that MoJ will continue to work on the development of linked data systems to ensure that progress through the criminal justice system can be modelled effectively in the future. 26. It would be helpful to have a high level framework showing flows through the criminal justice system, how the available figures fit together, and where gaps, discrepancies or discontinuities occur (recommendation 4(i)). This would make it easier to see the extent to which the various stages and processes in the system are covered by the existing data.


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