British street crime soars by almost a third

There were 121,000 robberies in 2001/02 The number of robberies soared 28% last year according to the latest statistics which show a reversal in the long-term trend of falling crime in England and Wales.

The rise in street crime prompted Home Secretary David Blunkett to vow to make this "significant" problem a "high priority".

There were 5.52m crimes recorded by police in 2001/02, 356,239 more than the previous year - an increase of 7%.

The Home Office says the rise has been inflated by a new method of recording crimes, which accounts for about 5% of the increase.

"It does not mean there is an increase in crime out there, it simply means the police are recording more of the crime out there," said statistics chief Professor Paul Wiles.

But Peter Dunn, of Victim Support, said the rise in recorded robberies mirrored the experience of victims of crime coming to the charity.

"We are definitely seeing more referrals from violent offences in the street," he said.

"There are more people being mugged, particularly young people mugging other young people for their mobile phones."

Robbery up 28% to more than 121,000 incidents, including a 31% rise in robbery of personal property.

The figures showed police solved slightly fewer crimes than last year - 1.3 million crimes out of 5.5m were detected, or 23% compared with 24% in the previous 12 months.

However officials said the new way of collating figures also had an effect on this and the overall detection rate was virtually unchanged from last year.

Shadow home secretary Oliver Letwin blamed a "muddled" government policy for the rise in street crime.

"No amount of statistical manipulation can conceal what everyone on the estates in our inner cities already knows - that it is the gangs and the drug dealers rather than the forces of law and order that are in charge.

"We need the police back on our streets, a serious programme to reform the characters of youth offenders and a serious attack on the gang culture."

The government has published recorded crime figures at the same time as the results of the £2.5m British Crime Survey (BCS), which asked 33,000 people about their experience of crime.

Prof Wiles said the separate survey showed crime last year was "stable after a period of decline".

The survey paints a brighter picture regarding some forms of crime including burglary.

It found the chances of being a victim of crime were at about their lowest since the survey began in 1981.

Burglary was down 7% and thefts from and of vehicles were down 7%. The average person had a one in 50 chance of having their home burgled last year.

Mr Blunkett said: "The crimes that affect most people - burglary and vehicle crime - remain at the lower levels seen after the significant reductions in recent years.

"This fall in crime has been sustained thanks to increased police numbers, a focus on police performance and many crime reduction initiatives."

Director of the Victims of Crime Trust, Norman Brennan, said ministers should "hang their heads in shame" at the "appalling" figures.

"It is clear that the streets are not going to be safe by September, as the prime minister promised just two months ago," he said.

"If ministers do not get the police back on the beat and get the criminal justice system to do the job it is supposed to, I predict that things will get much worse."

Logically extending the reasoning involved in gun control, I think they should tie everybody's hands behind their backs. Then nobody could punch you and take your wallet.

To truly capture the madness that is Great Britain, you would need to make sure that only the law-abiding would have their hands tied.

Criminals would have free hands, in order to better perpetrate their crimes.

The British courts would wring their hands with angst whenever a criminal appeared before them, decrying their poor social upbringing and societies injustice. But any law-abiding citizen who had his hands free would be harshly and quickly punished!

Yes - if everyone was armed, we would have fewer problems. No wonder there were a massive 68 gun related deaths in the UK last year, compared with a mere tens of thousands in ths US. Oh hold on - that doesn't work...must be some mistake in my reasoning...

Yes, there is a huge mistake in your reasoning.

You may have 68 *gun* deaths, but you have about an equal per-capita number of homicides as there are in America, and about *two* times the level of robbery and home invasion.

Stay on your side of the pond, please. Keep your crime over there.

The U.S. is not the U.K. It would be more appropriate look at all of Europe.
European gun laws have everything American gun control proponents advocate. Yet, the three very worst public shootings in the last year all occurred in Europe. Indeed around the world, from Australia to England, countries that have recently strengthened gun control laws with the promise of lowering crime have instead seen violent crime soar.
Sixteen people were killed during last Friday's public school shooting in Germany. Compare that to the United States with almost five times as many students, where 32 students and four teachers were killed from any type of gun death at elementary and secondary schools from August 1997 through February 2002, almost five school years. This total includes not only much publicized public school shootings but also gang fights, robberies, accidents. It all corresponds to an annual rate of one student death per five million students and one teacher death per 4.13 million teachers.
In Europe shootings have not been limited to schools, of course. The other two worst public shootings were the killing of 14 regional legislators in Zug, a Swiss canton, last September and the massacre of eight city council members in a Paris suburb last month.
... Australia also passed severe gun restrictions in 1996, banning most guns and making it a crime to use a gun defensively. In the subsequent four years, armed robberies rose by 51%, unarmed robberies by 37%, assaults by 24%, and kidnappings by 43%. While murders fell by 3%, manslaughter rose by 16%.
...It is hard to think of a much more draconian police state than the former Soviet Union, yet despite a ban on guns that dates back to the communist revolution, newly released data suggest that the ©¯worker©ˆs paradise©˜ was less than the idyllic picture painted by the regime in yet another respect: murder rates were high. During the entire decade from 1976 to 1985 the Soviet Union©ˆs homicide rate was between 21% and 41% higher than that of the United States. By 1989, two years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, it had risen to 48% above U.S. rate.

... In fact, the countries with by far the highest homicide rates have gun bans.

By John R. Lott, Jr.

I live in New York, supposedly one of the meanest cities in America, but it has one fifth the rate of muggings that London has. We accept a higher gun death rate in exchange for vastly reduced levels of every other kind of crime and for citizens' not being put in the position of being a helpless ward of the state.

Anyways, why compare the UK to the US when you can compare the UK to the UK pre-ban? Violent crime is up by 30%-50% in the UK, so if the recent restriction of gun ownership isn't to blame, what is?

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