We are not alone Police forces across England and Wales have been under-recording serious violent crime for at least a decade, the Home Office admitted today as it tried to explain away a sudden spike in the crime statistics.
But it refused to name any of the forces involved in the miscounting, and Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, said that overall crime, including violent crime, was still falling. The official figures for the three months to June showed the number of serious violent crimes - which include serious assault, murder, attempted murder and manslaughter - rising by 22 per cent. The Home Office said that much of that that increase was the result of new guidance given to police in April on how they define and record the crime of "GBH with intent". Previously, and for at least ten years, many forces had recorded that crime under a lesser category if no "grievous bodily harm" had been incurred, whereas the question of intent should have taken priority. The Home Office said that a "minority" of the 43 forces in England and Wales reported a rise in the number of GBH with intent cases after the guidance and were asked to submit estimates as to how much the new guidance had contributed to that rise. "A total of 13 forces were able to provide information in time for this statistical bulletin," the ministry said. "These forces overall had seen an almost doubling of recorded GBH with intent compared to a year ago, which in itself accounted for about two-thirds of the overall national reported year on year increase." If it had not been for the guidance, the Home Office added, the 13 forces which had submitted estimates said that they would only have seen a 5-per cent year-on-year increase in GBH with intent. There was confusion, however, as to how many forces had been under-reporting, but a senior police officer said that the problem was widespread. Keith Bristow, Chief Constable of Warwickshire Police, told The Times: "This is an issue that affects all police forces to a greater or lesser degree." The Home Secretary said the news that some forces under-reported some of the most serious crimes should not dent public confidence in the crime figures. She said: "Last year we reduced police targets to give them greater flexibility to deal with local crime problems and to prioritise tackling the most serious violence. We revised offence categories for recording the most serious violence and clarified our guidance to police forces. "This change means that this quarter's figures are not comparable with last year's. However, for most types of violence where the guidance hasn't changed - like homicide, robbery and death by driving - the numbers are down since last year and the overall number of violent crimes is down too - by 7 per cent - almost 18,000 fewer violent crimes. "Although it represents less than 1 per cent of recorded crime, reducing serious violence will always be a priority for us." The figures were released as an influential group of MPs criticised the Government's attempts to tackle knife and gun crime, which in the news because of a spate of teenage murders in London. The Public Accounts Committee said it was "worrying" that the number of 15 to 17-year-olds carrying a knife had doubled between 1998 and 2006, as had the number of crimes involving a gun. It said that the Home Office was guilty of "poor distribution of funding" and its performance in spreading good practice was "mixed". The MPs said that funding for Crime Reduction Partnerships - which include police, local councils and residents' groups - was "often one-off and short-term". They found nearly half of the partnerships did not have enough resources to analyse how much violent crime there was in their areas. Money was being targeted at the consequences of violence, and not its causes. Edward Leigh, the PAC chairman, said that the Home Office and the police needed to tackle the "root causes" of why youngsters carried knives. "They need to know a lot more about why youths join gangs and how they can be diverted from membership," he said. "This whole subject of violent crime is bedevilled by a continuing lack of reliable data on the effectiveness of interventions. The Home Office has been slow to collect the data and spread good practice." Reacting to the overall crime figures, and the sharp rise in recorded serious violent crimes, Dominic Grieve, the Shadow Home Secretary, said: "These figures fatally undermine Government spin that violent crime was getting better and betray a Government that is completely out of touch with what is going on, on our streets and in our communities. "Labour's target-driven approach has simply been to manipulate the statistics. They should now face up to the reality of their failure and realise that if you can't count a problem, you can't combat it. "In any event, serious violent crime would still have increased before miscounting was revealed. After 10 years the Government have proved themselves incapable of delivering crime statistics that reflect what is going on and which the public can have confidence in - a lot of this is due to their obsession with spin." http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article4998731.ece Efforts by politicians of both main political parties to persuade the public that crime is falling have been bedevilled by the lack of confidence in police and Home Office statistics. As Louise Casey said in her report on how to get the public engaged in fighting crime, which was published earlier this year: "The majority do not feel that crime has fallen". Today's admission by the Home Office that police have for years been failing to properly record serious violent crime is a further blow to those efforts. It gives ammunition to those who argue that the crime figures - both police recorded crime and the British Crime Survey - are manipulated. However, the statistical controversy disclosed by an embarrassed Home Office today does not show that overall violent crime is rising. The crimes recorded by police under "other violence against the person" should have been put in the category of "most serious violence against the person". As a result the rise in most serious violence is from 4,500 offences to 5,500 crimes. Instead of putting grievous bodily harm with intent where there was no injury in the more serious violent category, police forces in England and Wales have put it in the less violent category alongside assault occasioning actual bodily harm. As a result the proportion of serious violent crimes has been underestimated in official recorded crime figures by up to one fifth for years. This is deeply embarrassing for the Government which has always insisted that serious violent crime is the issue of most concern to the public. It could be argued that police are simply being sensible. If a grievous bodily harm with intent attack results in no injury, it may seem appropriate to categorise it as a less serious violent crime. But that is not what the Home Office guidance on police recording says. The damage to public confidence of today's disclosure goes much deeper than the simple admission that police forces have not been recording crimes in the right category. The Home Office was unable to say how long this had been going on but it looks as if the misrecording could have been taking place for a decade. Officials said that crime recording by police was assessed by the Audit Commission and Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary to ensure that they were abiding by national standards. Just how both those organisations missed the misrecording of grievous bodily harm with intent offences was left unexplained. But it hardly provides assurance that there is not other misrecording taking place. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article5000532.ece -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, October 24, 2008 3:00 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Firearmsregprof Digest, Vol 59, Issue 8 ------------------------------ Message: 2 Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2008 19:28:20 -0400 (EDT) From: "Philip F. Lee" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Civilian legal defensive homicides To: [email protected] Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 We know that the FBI does not report all civilian legal defensive homicides (CLDHs) by citizens by a significant factor. We know the FBI UCR reports a shooting death by a citizen as a DGU only if there is no question at the time of the initial investigation by police that the shooting is justified. By contrast police shooting homicides tend to be reported as justified unless an initial investigation has significant evidence to the contrary. We can understand why the FBI UCR contains so low a count in self-defense homicides by examining the FBI UCR Handbook which gives guidance on reporting for the annual UCR. On the UCR Handbook (linked from: http://www.fbi.gov/filelink.html?file=/ucr/handbook/ucrhandbook04.pdf) page number 17, the following note is given: NOTE: Justifiable homicide, by definition, occurs in conjunction with other offenses. Therefore, the crime being committed when the justifiable homicide took place must be reported as a separate offense. Reporting agencies should take care to ensure that they do not classify killing as justifiable or excusable solely on the claims of self-defense or on the action of a coroner, prosecutor, grand jury, or court. The Handbook clearly establishes a criteria for justified homicide that doesn't match the usual notions of self-defense -- in fact, it obviously promotes a policy of police determining whether a homicide is justified notwithstanding findings by a "coroner, prosecutor, grand jury, or court". Obviously, a claim of self-defense doesn't mean the homicide is justified. Just as obviously the FBI and local police authorities are too busy with real police work to go back to correct reporting the classification of homicides weeks, months and even years later based on the results in courts or other extended evaluations of the circumstances. The real question to those of us not enthralled by the bureaucracy (and the desire to defend their work) is "what are the annual numbers of homicides that comport to our notions of self-defense -- especially those from legal defensive shootings?" We have a hint of the scope of this under-reporting from Time magazine which published the article "7 Deadly Days" July 17, 1989 (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,958158,00.html). That article reported 199 murders (charges since trials had not yet been held) and 14 civilian legal defensive homicides (CLDHs) or 6.6% of gun homicides for the week of 1-7 May 1989. A year later, Time followed-up their report with the article "Death by Gun: One Year Later", May 14, 1990 (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,970085,00.html), to see the results from trials on the charged cases. They reported that there were now 28 CLDHs (13.1% of gun homicides), an increase of 100% on the original report with at least 43 cases not yet adjudicated by the one-year later follow-up. With the attitude presented in the UCR Handbook we see why the FBI UCR count of justified homicides is such a small fraction of CLDHs as evaluated by the people or other non-police agents. Phil _______________________________________________ To post, send message to [email protected] To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/firearmsregprof Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private. Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others.
