Truenumberofcrimes may never be known
common subsuming crime was. It was difficult to tell who was the driving force behind the policy, he said, labelling the “complex” practice “unnecessary and unhealthy”.
Mr Pearson said: “Police Scotland like to present low crime figures to the Scottish Police Authority, who then like to present the low figures to the Scottish Government.
“It in turn likes having a ‘headline’ figure to report to the public, saying crime has never been lower.
“But it’s not what the communities across Scotland say.”
As far back as 2012, the Scottish Police Federation was warning the government was “hiding” the true extent of Scotland’s crime rate.
But this is the first time authorities have admitted it was having a detrimental effect on the stats presented to the public.
The Sunday Post has tried to find out the extent of subsuming knife crime.
Our repeated requests, under Freedom of Information laws, were turned down.
Coincidentally, as we were asking questions about the issue, police chiefs quietly changed the rules.
The Scottish Crime Recording Board (SCRB), set up in 2015, met to discuss the discrepancies at a private meeting in March.
Details of what was discussed at St Andrew’s House in Edinburgh aren’t available to the public yet. But, just weeks later, Assistant Chief Constable Malcolm Graham ordered staff to alter the way knife crime was recorded.
An April 12 memo said Police Scotland wanted the change because of a “crimecounting anomaly which somewhat obscured an enhanced level of analysis as to the real extent of knife/ weapon crime.”
The memo states: “From 1 April 2017, where an offensive weapon or an article with a blade or point has been used in the commission of a crime, the possession of the knife/ weapon or bladed article will no longer be subsumed into the substantive crime and should be the subject of an additional ‘possession’ crime.”
Callum Steele of the Scottish Police Federation said: “Police officers all over Scotland know instances of violence involving knives are a massive problem. It’s difficult to conclude anything other than the practice of subsuming many of these crimes distorted this reality for reasons that are impossible to fathom.”
A Police Scotland spokeswoman said compiling and publishing crime statistics was a matter for the SCRB.
A Scottish Government spokesman said: “All recorded crimes and offences involving knives are counted and published by independent statisticians.
“The approach taken to recording these crimes has been in place for more than 20 years and is the same approach taken elsewhere in the UK.
“Knife crime has fallen significantly over the past decade, as indicated not only by recorded crime figures but by other sources including a 59% fall in emergency hospital admissions for assault with a knife since 2006-07.” OVER the past couple of months, The Sunday Post has repeatedly tried to uncover the true extent of knife crime in Scotland.
In a series of Freedom of Information requests, we asked Police Scotland to tell us how often possession of knives and weapons was being hidden in official statistics by being combined with other offences.
But the force’s data team repeatedly knocked back our requests, telling us to do so would require manually trawling through crime reports because the information wasn’t held.
And that was something, they said, would take them too long.
They said such a search was further complicated by the fact that Police Scotland’s 13 geographic divisions continue to record crime in different ways – a legacy of the separate forces it replaced.
As a result, the public may never know how often knife offences have been wiped off the official record books by being combined with another offence.
For the authorities to have decided the rules must be changed – even though this could lead to a spike in recorded knife crime in coming years – suggests there is concern that the picture currently being presented does not reflect the reality on Scotland’s streets.