 | | | | by Bruno Waterfield |
The release of the latest UK recorded crime statistics on 16 January, covering the period September 1999 to September 2000, has confirmed the highly political and subjective character of crime statistics in the run-up to the general election 2001.
| The UK government now effectively has two sets of figures: one compiled under the Tory system of accounting, which can be used to show that the New Labour government is doing better than the previous administration; the other, based on rule changes introduced in April 1998, which is used to give political impetus to New Labour's crime agenda.
| Take violent crime. It is increasing in both sets of figures: up by 13 percent since March 1997 using the Tory figures, and up by a massive 106 percent using New Labour's. Home secretary Jack Straw is fond of saying that, on violent crime, there is 'always more to do'. The new figures provide an argument that even more needs to be done.
| The largest percentage increases occur in the areas of harassment, racially aggravated crime and common assault. All these are key policy areas for the New Labour administration, and measures to deal with domestic violence, stalkers, hate crime and 'yob culture' loom large in the government's rhetoric.
| By creating new crimes to count, the government has increased the total number of counted violent offences from 348,032 to 716,519. When crime is the dominant political coin, rampant inflation - 142 percent in the category 'violence against the person' - provides the justification for more police resources, more laws, more intrusion into people's behaviour and more manipulation of people's fears.
| As property crime falls, the new inflated counts reorientate public concerns and policy towards a new crusade against interpersonal violence and drunken young men. Under the old regime, total crime has fallen by 7.1 percent. Under the new regime, it has risen by 5.9 percent. No surprise, then, that new policing powers, expanded budgets, sweeping partnerships, and, of course, a Labour second term are presented as necessary to hold back the tide.
| Public fears are particularly susceptible to concern about violent crime. By more than doubling the number of violent offences, as a consequence of including in the figures offences like harassment and common assault (including non-injury incidents) and thereby upping the ante by 302,600 incidents, politicians manipulate public fears to justify their political agendas. In doing so they also criminalise people, and areas of life, that have hitherto not felt the unsubtle, and often brutal, hand of the state: for example, through new laws like the Protection from Harassment Act, which is being heavily used to police personal relationships.
| | Sexual offences are down - only by 0.4 percent, but this is the first fall in five years. Why? Because the police have been told to lay off homosexual men. Gross indecency is down 38 percent, 'buggery' down 22 percent. Homosexuality, the social scourge of the 1980s, is (rightly) no longer regarded as criminal.
| Drug offences, too, are down, by 20 percent in three years (10 percent over this last year) under the old rules. But they are up 410 percent under the new rules. This does not mean that people are smoking dope either 410 percent more, or 10 or 20 percent less. It reflects a changing political climate. New Labour is not for liberalisation - it has inflated the measure of drug offences fourfold, branding it a problem. But nor does it subscribe to ridiculous Ann Widdecombe-style clampdowns. The solution is very New Labour: using friendlier police to suck increasing numbers of offenders into a quasi-judicial world of treatment, drug courts and community sentences.
| Robbery - a cause of great anxiety ever since the racist 'mugging' scares of the 1980s - has risen by 21 percent. Nobody is sure why, and no politician is interested in finding out - perhaps because police and politicians alike are able to make great political capital from people's fear of robbery.
| The headlines have focused on the increasing theft of mobile phones. But this surely indicates that it is not muggers who have mushroomed in recent years, but mobiles. Mobile phones are carried by many teenagers and schoolchildren: ironically, partly because of parental fears about crime. No doubt some get pinched; but when a mobile gets lost, in the playground or on the bus, it often ends up recorded as a robbery. Police officers and Home Office civil servants, anecdotally, confirm that many children and adults would rather say the phone was 'stolen' than lost. Most phones are sold with insurance policies that encourage 'no fault' reports of theft - what would you rather tell Orange? 'I was drunk and left it on the tube', or 'one minute it was in my bag - the next it was gone!'?
| Nobody is suggesting that politicians or police officers cook the books, and nobody is suggesting that politicians benefit from crime in a literal way. But crime figures certainly tell us more about perceptions and politics than about changing patterns of antisocial behaviour. As the coming election battle shows, politicians from all sides benefit from inflating public fears to justify policies that otherwise might not see the light of day. This might not be criminal - but it's certainly dishonest.
| Bruno Waterfield is a Westminster based journalist for ePolitix.com
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