Posted on 07/16/2002 7:55:49 AM PDT by meandog
England and Wales now top the Western world's crime league, according to United Nations research.
The UN Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute reveals that people in England and Wales experience more crime per head than people in the 17 other developed countries analysed in the survey.
The findings are expected to cause further embarrassment to the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who has pledged to have street crime under control by September.
This week, the Home Office will publish its White Paper outlining radical reform of the criminal justice system, in part to curb spiralling street crime and to punish more offenders. Government sources confirmed to the IoS that the reforms will also include empowering judges to tell rape-trial jurors about a defendant's previous convictions.
In the UN study, researchers found that nearly 55 crimes are committed per 100 people in England and Wales compared with an average of 35 per 100 in other industrialised countries.
The UN study analysed Home Office crime statistics for England and Wales and also carried out telephone interviews with victims of crime in the 17 countries surveyed, including the US, Japan, France and Spain.
England and Wales also have the worst record for "very serious" offences, recording 18 such crimes for every 100 inhabitants, followed by Australia with 16.
And "contact crime", defined as robbery, sexual assault and assault with force, was second highest in England and Wales - 3.6 per cent of those surveyed. This compares with 1.9 per cent in the US.
News of the survey comes days after the Government published its long-awaited national crime figures, which showed the first increase in burglaries and thefts for 10 years. A record 108,178 street robberies last year prompted the Metropolitan Police Federation to demand an extra 12,000 officers for London alone. The US, by contrast, has managed to reduce its crime rates, despite its reputation for street robberies and shootings.
Experts say this is the result of a committed policy of ploughing resources into training prisoners, finding them jobs after release and then monitoring them to ensure they do not reoffend.
The Government's reforms are also expected to include similar schemes to those in the US, where prison officers act as "mentors" to inmates both inside prison and on release into the community.
However, the success of these schemes will depend on how much money the Home Secretary receives from the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, in the comprehensive spending review. Last week, Mr Blunkett is understood to have told colleagues that "He [Mr Brown] doesn't like me" after the pair rowed over the Home Secretary's share of the new spending budget.
But government sources say that the Prime Minister has now personally intervened and managed to salvage a better deal for Mr Blunkett.
Harry Fletcher, the assistant general secretary of the National Association of Probation Officers, said any attempt to curb crime by reforming the criminal justice system would require substantial resources. "The whole package is massively expensive," he said.
Shadow Home Secretary Oliver Letwin said: "This just shows why it is ridiculously complacent for the Government to claim a respectable record on crime. The fact is, we have a crime crisis in our inner cities and no coherent programme from the Government to tackle it."
An excertp from the Times...
Two sets of figures on crime in the UK were reported today. Police records show that crime is on the rise while a Home Office study suggests that it is decreasing. ...
Can we trust these figures?
Police figures, which are collated by individual police forces, have always been a somewhat unreliable guide to crime trends, and they are particularly misleading at present. We would do better to look at the Home Office's British Crime Survey (BCS), which is based on interviews with 33,000 people over the age of 16. Looking at the coverage of today's figures does not give you an accurate picture of crime in this country.
Why are the police figures misleading?
Not all crimes are reported to the police, and not all reported crimes are recorded. The proportion of crime which finds its way into police records changes over place and time. In the mid-1990s the police were under pressure to improve their performance figures, and there is also evidence from the BCS that they recorded fewer of the crimes reported to them. At the time, the police figures looked misleadingly rosy.
The reverse is true now. The police have moved to a policy of fuller crime recording. This started in 1998, and has continued since. From April 2002 there has been a policy of accepting a victim's word at face value, rather than requiring evidence of a crime before recording it as such. In the past, many police forces would have excluded crimes from their statistics if they regarded the victim's account as misguided or inaccurate.
Some police forces introduced the new system last year, and as a result of this, the police figures are now overstating any increase in crime. The problem will be even worse next year, when all forces will have adopted the new approach.
Why can we trust the British Crime Survey more?
The BCS includes crimes which go unreported to the police and are unrecorded by them. It is therefore free of the sort of distortions to which police statistics are subject. The British Crime Survey shows a decline in crime from the mid-1990s to 2000 when that downward trend bottomed out.
Street robbery figures are one important exception to this, as both the police statistics and the BCS indicate a rise, and only a small proportion of the increase in police figures can be attributed to changes in statistical procedures.
A sceptic would say that even this year's BCS figures cannot be wholly trusted as its methodology - the way that people are interviewed to record their experiences of crime - changed this year, so the figures may not be fully comparable to previous years'. But even taking that into consideration they are still a more reliable guide to crime trends than the police statistics.
Will we ever be able to trust these statistics?
Yes, in about a year or two when the new methodology of the police records has settled down, and when we have a longer trend-line for the redesigned BCS. Between them, the BCS and the police statistics should give a much clearer and complete record of crime in this country - provided that no further changes are made to the recording systems. The current uncertainty stems from the fact that we are in a transition period, when both approaches to crime measurement have changes.
Thoughts?
...even the most trusting British subject should be able to look at the "Home Office" study and deduce that its name alone means the stats are skewed politically to continue the incompetence of Clinton clone Tony Blair!
-Empty-Barrel Gun Policies-A legacy of nonsense from Clinton, Blair, and the Left--
-A Problem With Guns (Long... but SOOOO good)--
Shooting More Holes in Gun Control
HCI Aussie Style (read it and weep-or laugh)
The Great Australian Gun Law CON!
| Canadian Gun Control Has Little Impact on Crime (Home Gun Confiscation/Resisters) | ||||||
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Israel is Arming Its Civilians - Why Aren't We?
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| Through the Looking Glass and Back Again - From Anti-gunner to Firearms Instructor in Four Months | ||||||
Wasn't it Chappaqua NY of all places that publicly tried to make the community gun free, but quickly rescinded the idea when crime started to skyrocket?
Saginaw isn't exactly Michigan's safest city....
Fning great isnt it we Brits join up to help your country deal withy those who attack you, and what do you selfish small minded types do, slag my country of.
There were more gun related dcrime in LA than in the whole of my country.
America what a paranoid schitzo nation.
Cheers for making me think I did the right thing giving up my job so that I could rejoin the regiment when you were attacked.
God you slag off and look down on everyone even your closest ally.
What a bloody nation.
Tony
Calm down, Tony! Thinking that Tony Blair's govt is doing some stupid things is not the same as putting down the British people. Unless you are Tony Blair, or part of his gun-control office, none of this has been aimed at you and your mates
What I said is true, is FreeRepublic set up to spread right wing ideas or to help Yanks feel good about them selfs by slagging of the rest of the world.
None of you have any idea about why we have gun crime here and what it is lnked to and how it came to Britain in the first place.
No sodding idea at all.
I used to debate this last year and the year before, but it was like sending yank kids of to fat camp a waste of time.
It goes in one ear and out the other.
Tony
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