SPECIAL REPORT
THE true scale of serious crime is revealed in a controversial new method of ranking offences that is changing how police patrol Britain’s streets.
Under the new national ‘Crime Harm Index’ disclosed by The Mail on Sunday today, robbery is considered worse than child abduction and bike theft more serious than drug possession.
Now, chief constables are using the same approach to focus on offences deemed to cause the public most harm, including putting more effort into deterring dangerous drivers and less into catching shoplifters.
The new analysis by the Office for National Statistics shows that serious crime has been on the rise for the past two years, despite politicians and police insisting the country is becoming safer.
Peter Neyroud, a former chief constable who has pioneered development of a harm index at Cambridge University’s Institute of Criminology, said last night: ‘A crime harm index will help us – police, politicians and citizens – to understand crime and the harm it causes to victims and communities better.
‘It helps police to target serious crimes more effectively, exposing crimes like child sexual exploitation, rape and domestic violence more starkly. All crimes are not equal. We all know that a minor theft and a murder cause a different level of harm, yet our traditional crime recording systems count both as one crime.’
But questions are being raised about the ranking of crimes, which is based on jail sentences handed out by judges but, for example, misses out fraud. There are also fears the new system may again tempt police officers to fiddle the figures.
Experts told the ONS at a recent meeting they were ‘sceptical about the value of an index’ and concerned about possible ‘perverse’ incentives for officers to ‘downgrade recording of serious offences’.
Marian Fitzgerald, visiting professor of criminology at the University of Kent, warned it could mean that less serious crimes are no longer investigated. She said: ‘Large sections of the public will increasingly find that the police may record the crimes they report to them, but will not even go through the motions of following up these reports since they are now officially sanctioned not to take any action.’
Michael Levi, professor of criminology at Cardiff University, said it was ‘deeply regrettable’ that fraud is being left out of the first index, to be published in the autumn, even though it is now the most common crime reported to police, with some six million cases last year. ‘If you’ve got some categories that are excluded, they are automatically left out of the police’s priorities,’ he said.
Currently, the ONS publishes two sets of crime statistics – one based on all offences recorded by police in England and Wales and another based on a survey of victims. The latest figures published in July showed 4.5 million offences were recorded by police in the year ending March 2016, an annual rise of eight per cent. Part of the increase is believed to be down to a surge in reported sex offences dating back decades in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal, but homicides have also risen to a five-year high. The credibility of crime figures has been undermined in recent years by growing evidence that police had grown skilled at fiddling them to meet targets. MPs heard claims that officers persuaded victims to withdraw reports or wiped cases from the books. Two years ago, police recorded figures were stripped of their ‘gold standard’ status by the UK Statistics Authority. Now the ONS is preparing to reopen the debate about the purpose and meaning of crime statistics by publishing the ‘experimental’ crime harm index alongside the traditional quarterly figures for the first time. Papers seen by this newspaper show the ONS obtained actual sentencing data from the Ministry of Justice in order to work out the severity of individual crimes, following similar approaches used in Canada and New Zealand. The resulting table gives a ‘weight’ of 5,393 to homicide, based on the average number of days in jail offenders serve, followed by 3,338 for attempted murder.
Preliminary results show the harm index rose 7.8 per cent between April 2013 and March 2015, while the traditional measure of recorded crime remained stable, ‘indicating that although the volume of crime showed little change, there was an increase in the severity of the crime recorded’.
The ONS said this was down to ‘large increases in violent and sexual offences’, reflecting better recording practices, alongside ‘a large decrease in theft offences’, which are seen as less serious. Merseyside showed an 18 per cent rise in its crime index score in the past two years and Surrey’s increased 19 per cent, while South Wales remained the same and the Metropolitan Police’s index score actually fell over the same period.
Senior statistician Roma Chappell said: ‘Current police recorded crime figures treat all offences as equally serious, so ONS is looking at the possibility of a crime index where more serious crimes count more heavily. This could allow people to understand better the crime profile in their areas.’
Forces are already looking at how their priorities change if they judge crime by seriousness rather than volume. Leicestershire’s new approach meant that the ‘top offender’ locally was no longer a shoplifter who had committed 89 shop thefts, but a mugger who had committed five robberies in two days. West Midlands officers are hoping to use the harm system to make better use of automatic number plate recognition technology, by targeting the cars of the most dangerous suspects. Last night, Keith Vaz MP, chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, told The Mail on Sunday: ‘Any new method of assessing crimes in order to give guidance to police priorities is welcome. However, we should take care to ensure there should be no downgrading of the ratings of serious crimes.’
‘The police will now not follow up some reports’