Map of the Week: Recession cuts crime?
The quarterly blind feeding-frenzy on crime stats is in full-flow.
It is a pretty unedifying sight - and uniquely British. No other country spends so much time, effort and money collecting data on crime.
No other country has so many journalists detailed to trawl the data for evidence of social chaos. No other country gets fed more alarming nonsense as a result, I suspect.
Many of the papers today are reporting a "recession fuelled crime-wave". I wonder if some wrote the story before they saw the figures.
It is a funny sort of crime wave that sees total recorded crime in England and Wales down 5% in a year and people's experience of crime stable. Not so much a "wave" as a slowly-draining mill-pond.
The figures, we are told, contain powerful evidence of a rise in property crime - particularly burglary.
Well, recorded burglary from people's houses in England and Wales did go up. There were 3,700 more incidents year on year - 10 more burglaries every day. A 1% rise.
But hold on. Recorded burglary from other buildings (offices, factories, shops etc) went down by 6,050 incidents - 16 fewer burglaries every day. A 2% fall. (Do let me know if you find that figure in your newspaper.)
What sort of burglar is this recession creating? The kind, apparently, that is driven to break into domestic property more but commercial property less.
Our credit-crunched villain is also less prone to nick a car or something from it. But more likely to take someone's bike, purse or indulge in a bit of shoplifting.
I am sorry - this is getting absurd. Today's crime stats offer a level of detail and complexity which is in danger of confusing rather than clarifying what is happening in our society.
Journalists plunge into the ocean of data and triumphantly emerge, like free-diving oyster fishermen, clutching some statistical pearl - a crime category where the figures show a year on year increase.
How about this one? "Theft of mail" up 22%. Yup, it is true. (But don't mention that theft of mail is actually down 83% from where it was in 2004.)
It is the trends we need to be interested in and the trends are clear. Crime has been falling for over a decade and is currently stable. No time for complacency. Still unacceptably high. But the recession has not, yet, fuelled a change in direction.
What it may have done, though, is helped push violent crime down. As I suggested last September if the downturn means young people have got less cash to spend on large amounts of alcohol on a Friday and Saturday night, the effect might be to reduce drunken disorder and violence.
Today's figures show almost 60,000 fewer violent offences recorded by police year on year. I know, I know - you don't believe it. But when you ask lots of people about their experience of violent crime, (46,000 rather than that bloke in the dry cleaners) the number saying they had been a victim in the previous year is at its lowest level since 1981, 4% down on last year.
The are affected by alcohol - so it is not daft to suggest there might be a link. Year on year, recorded violence is down around 6% and alcohol consumption is said to be down around 3% [].
One needs to be careful in suggesting straight cause and effect because violence has been falling since the mid-nineties and alcohol consumption rose for much of that time. But logic surely suggests that if too much booze makes people more violent, slightly less booze might make people less violent.
Finally, if you haven't found it already, you might want to look at the .
You can see where your neighbourhood fits in compared with all kinds of crime in the rest of England and Wales.
I suspect it may actually be a statistical blip of some kind, but I couldn't help but notice that the map shows the risk of crime in Westminster is virtually off the scale. I wonder why that is?
Graphs above from the Home Office Statistical Bulletin
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