Crime figures distorted, say ex-police chiefs
New system proposed for measuring detection rates but critics say it will normalise many offences
CRIMES such as burglary, theft and vandalism should be given less weight in official statistics, say 11 former chief constables, as they are accused of legitimising the failure to investigate such offences.
The chief constables, including two former Scotland Yard commissioners, say the way overall crime and detection rates are presented can be “misleading” by giving too much weight to solving minor offences.
Calling for a “radical transformation” of the way crime statistics are presented, they argue that more serious crimes such as murder should be given a higher value than theft or burglary to reflect the greater harm to individuals and society. They say this would give the public a more realistic idea of whether they were safer and whether police were succeeding.
However, the proposal was criticised yesterday for “formalising” the shift away from investigating minor crimes, where as few as one in 50 of some thefts is now solved.
The number of crimes resulting in a charge has fallen from 15.5 per cent in 2015 to 7.3 per cent with some thefts “screened out” by police because they are determined as unlikely to be solved.
Marian Fitzgerald, Professor of Criminology at Kent University, said: “This is formalising the expectation that many crimes that affect people and the people they care for are not going to be investigated.
“If these are not serious enough for anyone to do anything about, then we could have people who can afford it buying-in private security or the vast majority who cannot afford it taking the law into their own hands.”
The police watchdog warned earlier this year that public confidence is being damaged with officers “rumbled” for struggling to investigate crimes such as burglary. It feared the public was giving up reporting crime as victims withdrawing from investigations was up 8.7 per cent to 22.9 per cent.
In the paper, jointly published with criminologists, a leading statistician and academics from Cambridge University’s Institute of Criminology, the chief constables say: “Few would ask the police to give the same effort to investigating a burglary as to a murder.
“Yet when low burglary detection rates are reported, the related fact of high murder detection rates goes unmentioned. Unless these problems are remedied, the public will not be able to tell whether their police have ‘cut crime’ and ‘made the streets safer’.”
They propose scrapping the single measure of overall offence and detection rates per 1,000 of the population.
Instead, there would be a new system that weighted crimes according to the harm they caused, based on the number of days in jail that an offender would be expected to serve under sentencing guidelines.
This would mean for example that 100 bicycle thefts would score 200, after being multiplied by “2 days,” 20 burglaries would be 380 (multiplied by 19 days) and two murders 10,950, each multiplied by 5,475 days. The paper is published in the Cambridge Journal of Evidence-based Policing.