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| You have landed on top of: Home > News | 30th July |
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| Blunkett struggles to understand new crime stats 17 Jul 2003 by Malcolm Drury A senior Home Office source, speaking on the condition of anonymity, today told DeadBrain that the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, is deeply concerned about the newly-released crime statistics, as he has absolutely no idea what they mean. According to the statistics, the number of violent crimes recorded by police in England and Wales has risen by 2%, including an 18% increase in the number of murders, manslaughters and infanticides, and a 13% increase in the number of people attacked with shopping trolleys, but overall crime levels have fallen slightly by 3%. But unadjusted figures that do not take into account new methods of recording crime, which involve the police actually recording it, suggest violence increased by 22%. New police methods of recording crimes have meant certain offences appear to have increased dramatically. For example, Lincolnshire saw a 92% increase in recorded crimes of violence but county police said the actual number of incidents has remained largely unchanged. Similarly, in Hampshire, the number of people cautioned for "being townies" rose by 81% but the actual population remains only "annoyingly high". Adding to the confusion, 73% of the adults interviewed by the British Crime Survey said they believed crime had increased in the last two years. "Frankly," said the Home Office source, "we haven't the slightest idea what any of this means. We've read the report several times, and we still don't know if crime is up or down. The Home Secretary has had to go home because of a migraine and our computers have blown all the fuses trying to analyse it all." DeadBrain asked media statistical analyst and illustrator Peter Snow to explain. "Well," he said, "look at these three coloured buckets. The red one is 80% full, 58% of people surveyed believe the yellow one is 35% full, and the green one is 60% full but has a leak and is losing water at the rate of 2% a minute. So if the green one represents violent crime, and the red one overall crime, you can see that overall the yellow one stays pretty much the same." Totally baffled by this explanation, we asked statistics expert Professor Douglas Ramsbottom of the University of Bootle to elucidate further. "The problem with statistics is that, statistically speaking, 43.4% of them are wrong 17% of the time, 38.2% are misleading because they have not been properly adjusted for external factors such as season, the value of the pound against the euro, and Newcastle United's chances next season, and the rest are only accurate to within 6%. Also, they have to be weighted properly. For example, the 18% increase in the number of murders is skewed because 172 of Harold Shipman's victims have been included in the year's figures. They should have been pro-rated using a bell distribution curve to the year he first started". At this point our reporter excused himself and went home, also with a migraine, and a feeling of great empathy with Mr. Blunkett.
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