Crime Of The Century - A Chilling Look At Crime Statistics In The UK A POTTED HISTORY OF RECORDED CRIME
National statistics about crime in England and Wales have been collected and published by the Home Office since 1805. Initially, these only included court-based data about proceedings and convictions. From 1857, data about crimes reported to and recorded by the police were added, the latter providing the means by which the government was able to exercise oversight over what was then a highly localised policing structure accountable at the local political level.
Despite this long history of reported and recorded crime statistics being used to judge police performance, such statistics have long been recognised as having a number of weaknesses.
First, there have been regular claims that the police adjust their crime statistics to improve measured reported performance. Second, the processes and categories used by local police to record crime have historically had a significant degree of local variability; this has made it difficult both to make comparisons among local forces and to form aggregates to provide a meaningful national picture. Third, the picture that emerges from recorded crime is potentially distorted by the unknown and uncontrollable variability in the public’s reporting of crime to the police. A number of attempts have been made over the years to address these perceived problems but they largely remain.
In the late 1960s, American criminologists began experimenting with the alternative approach of using large-scale population surveys to measure the extent of crime by recording the experiences of victims of crime. This approach has the advantage of being free of the potential distortions of both the variability in police recording procedures and in the vagaries of public reporting of crime to the police.
In 1981, this approach was sufficiently well established for the Home Office to set up its own version, the British Crime Survey (BCS)1. The BCS soon became established as an alternative source of crime statistics2, complementing those derived from police recording of reported crime.
The statistics became politically more sensitive when governments undertook to reduce crime
From the late 1960s, and for most of the remainder of the 20th century, crime in England and Wales rose, as it did in most developed countries. From a political point of view, the trend became so established that the main political parties tended to assume that their function was to manage these increases rather than to challenge them. However, in 1993, the then Home Secretary, Michael Howard, set about challenging the assumption that such rises were outside the control of government.
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