Crime Of The Century - A Chilling Look At Crime Statistics In The UK
government was moving towards more rigorous performance management of policing and this depended on reliable and standardised local crime data for comparative purposes.
The body representing Chief Constables, the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), reacted to these reports by accepting that the police collectively had to standardise crime recording much more than had ever been done in the past. The internal police debate focused on how to standardise but also took the opportunity to try to ensure that crime recording was more responsive to victims. It concluded that the key to standardisation would be that an event would be recorded as a crime if the victim reported it as such, and the police had no evidence to disbelieve them – previously some officers only recorded a crime if the victim produced convincing evidence that it had occurred.
As with the 1998 counting rules change, one consequence of the NCRS, was that more crime would be recorded. However, the NCRS had already been pioneered by some forces, with the result was that it was rolled out nationally in a piecemeal fashion between 1999 and 2004. Because of the extended implementation period and the fact that the NCRS necessitated a cultural change in the behaviour of recording officers and not just a simple rule change, it was not possible to arrange a double counting period in order to calculate precisely the effect on recorded crime, as had happened with the 1998 counting rules change.
Initially the NCRS-affected crime data were produced together with an estimate of what the data would have been without the introduction of the new recording standard. However, a number of media commentators and key opinion formers were by now becoming more questioning of government performance data and the attempt to allow for the changes was greeted with considerable scepticism.
This became worse as NCRS implementation dragged on over a number of years. The existence of two versions of police recorded crime, together with the BCS estimates, clearly caused considerable confusion for everyone trying to form a coherent picture of crime trends. It also allowed partisan commentators to pick and choose between alternative interpretations of the data. All this contributed further to undermining confidence in crime trend data.
The argument advanced by Home Office statisticians was that the increase in police recorded crime was a consequence of introducing the NCRS and that the BCS crime trend was correct. However, the crime statistics themselves provided suitable ammunition to argue either case. Very little of the media reporting attempted to engage with the technical issues behind these divergent trends and much of it reflected a simple cynicism about statistics in general, with Disraeli’s “Lies, damned lies and statistics” being frequently quoted.
To further complicate matters, the 1998 counting rules change had brought into the national crime statistics a number of lesser offences and had extended the definition of what counted as offences of violence. The NCRS focus on the credibility of victim reporting meant that the recording of these lesser offences – especially those deemed in the new definitions to involve violence – was inflated even further.
This time the Home Office was left not only trying to explain the effect of the NCRS in inflating the recording of violent crime but also the counter-intuitive fact that – following the 1998 counting rule change – half of all recorded so-called violent crime involved no injury to the victim.
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