Posted: December 18th, 2011  Author: Dan   No Comments »

Last week, the Sunday Times used UKCrimeStats data – all of which in it’s raw form is freely available from Police.uk – to run a news feature entitled Austerity crimewave hits Britain. It was subsequently picked up by a number of other papers and radio stations. For obvious reasons, with a new recession probably on the way and public sector cuts just starting to come through, mostly in local government – many people are keen to see if there is any correlation to the overall crime rate or at least acquisitive crime.

Here’s the data in an open office spreadsheet which was always available free to view from our Police section with a small amount of exporting and formula work which I’ve done for you. There are a number of points that need to be made and have not been yet debated;

1. The Weather: According to a piece in today’s Sunday Sun and quoting UKCrimeStats- “POLICE say people in the North are turning to a life of crime to make “ends meet” after Government cuts” by Michael Brown. As you’ll see from the spreadsheet, the comparison is between monthly December 2010 and October 2011 totals. To paraphrase the article “ . . . these show that  burglary rates were 55.5% higher in Cleveland in October 2011 compared to December last year, while in Northumberland robberies have apparently rocketed”. But “ Northumberland Police assistant chief constable Jim Campbell rejected any comparison as “nonsensical” and blamed snow for the rise. “December 2010 was a month which saw the most severe weather conditions experienced in the north east for a generation,” he said.“The extreme weather conditions lasted throughout the entire month and undoubtedly suppressed crime levels across the entire force area”. 

That would make sense if you were to view Northumbria and Cleveland in isolation. The trouble is that the whole country had bad weather in December 2010, it was a national whiteout.

I do think there is a correlation between bad weather and lower crime and soon we will be overlaying weather data to have a more precise understanding of the correlation. The trouble is, Northumbria’s criticism doesn’t account for other parts of the country – that also had bad weather conditions – showing a marked fall in crime from December 2010. Was there an unknown freak mini-heatwave going on in the areas administered by Gwent Police in Wales and Thames Valley Police which both showed a 19% drop in burglaries? Soon with our weather data, we will be able to look back and know.

2. Month to month comparisons may not be perfect, but they are valid and interesting: I do agree that in the ideal academic world, to smooth out a seasonal variation, one month’s data should only be compared to that of the same month a year earlier. And then truth to tell, I don’t really agree. The Police themselves look at a time series of data, daily, weekly, monthly – with much more temporal granularity. They don’t wait 12 months to find out what’s really going on. Patterns and differences can emerge quite quickly over 43 Police Forces – it only takes 3 data points to see a trend and a fourth to break it, if it even exists.  It is nonetheless a reflection of what’s happening on the ground, across the country between two different time points. If the 43 Police Forces would like to release another 12 months of historical data prior to December 2010, we would be more than happy to upload it to UKCrimeStats.

3. The data should decide the headline, not the other way round: if you look at Cleveland’s page on our site, perhaps the most interesting question is not so much the jump between December 2010 and October 11 which was 55%.

It’s much more about the jump from Dec to January where it has remained remarkably flat – irrespective of the weather. I wonder what it was for November 2010? Media stories about rising crime may pique everyone’s interest more easily, but we should be equally  fascinated in learning where and why it has fallen in other areas at the same time.   There’s a story there too. Were those Forces pursuing different policies or is it something completely unrelated?  As you’ll see from our spreadsheet there is a far from uniform pattern of seasonal variation.

4. The days of the Home Office and Police Forces presenting crime statistics on their own terms with the best possible spin are (nearly) over: the crime data is out there available for everyone to see – it’s unrealistic to expect everyone to interpret it the way you’d like them to. Anyone looking at this site is free to draw their own conclusions based on what range of data they select. We have no control over that.

But let’s be clear – I have great admiration for the Police. Theirs is a very difficult job, damned for being too soft or too hard in a very political environment when most of them probably joined up thinking they were going to just fight crime – not ingratiate themselves with or go up against pressure groups and politicians. And as I have said here before, I reject entirely the idea that crime or the lack of it is 100% linked to Police effectiveness  (although if you read Cost of the Cops by Policy Exchange, there’s obviously much room for improvement). We are a post-religious society, broken in parts that is trying to find a new balance between freedom and responsibility. So I do support the idea of elected Police Commissioners. Not because this may lead necessarily to better policing policies that reduce crime although it probably will in the long run. Moreso because I sense that it is a far better method of getting more of the public to engage with the issues, restore faith in Law and Order and develop a sense for what is achievable and what is not.

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• share via Reddit
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post

Article source: http://www.ukcrimestats.com/blog/2011/12/18/you-cant-always-blame-crime-on-the-weather/

A major news feature in the Sunday Times today which draws on our increasingly successful platform, UKCrimeStats. All the data for the article, Austerity Crimewave hits Britain, comes from UKCrimeStats which the EPC owns.

Posted: December 11th, 2011  Author: Dan   No Comments »

A big news piece today in the Sunday Times today – Austerity crimewave hits Britain – who we worked with to compile the data about the austerity wave of crime across Britain. You may not have immediately realised from the feature article but all the data was compiled by this platform which the Economic Policy Centre owns. The report focuses on burglary and robbery across the different Police Forces between December 2010 and October 2011.

We find increasingly that media sources like the Sunday Times find it much easier to work with UKCrimeStats because we are independent, transparent and our platform thanks to careful design and database management can give context and meaning to the underlying data.

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• share via Reddit
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post

Article source: http://www.ukcrimestats.com/blog/2011/12/11/ukcrimestats-and-crime-data-in-the-sunday-times-today/

Posted: December 3rd, 2011  Author: Dan   No Comments »

We now have 11 months of aggregated data on UKCrimeStats – a special thanks again to our Chief Data Architect for working to make this available asap. We have some new upgrades coming through shortly which we’re excited about too – watch this space.

On a separate note – we are aware of – and will always be open about – some errors in the data (which we take from police.uk, unchanged) which have still not being fixed in the latest despite multiple proddings of the NPIA and RKH – amongst the worst is probably Cheshire Police (who we don’t blame) – their ASB figures for the first 3 months - just look at the chart and Sussex neighbourhood totals for December 2010 and January 2011 – still unavailable. We track these and others on the Forum part of our website.

I’ll be adding some more posts on the forum about data I’ve found which look suspect very shortly. Notably;

Lincolnshire Police – March 2011 Robbery and Vehicle totals

Wiltshire Police – March 2011 ASB total

Hertfordshire Constabulary – Jan 2011 ASB total

The original open data philosophy is just get it out there as fast as you can, no matter how flawed it is, with little or no regard to data governance. This is flat wrong. It is as academically misinformed as the “experts” who told us in the early 90s, all that counted regarding privatisation in the ex-Soviet Block was speed and a liberal market economy is just a series of institutions – central bank, regulators, etc. – as if trust and corruption were immaterial. This misconstrued blind faith has in the worst case, arguably turned Russia into a nationalist oligarchy rather than an outwardly open democracy.

We know at UKCrimeStats how expensive and time-consuming it is to clean up the crime data and we don’t receive a penny for it or even a word of thanks. I could understand that in the first couple of months that not everything was right with such a large dataset and have said so frequently. But we’re now 10 months in, they’ve had all the time in the world to sort it out and there are no excuses any more.

Open data from government should not be immune from commercial standards of accuracy – especially if you’re paid by the Home Office allegedly £300k to release it in a format for developers and have now started charging for advice on the api.  Beat that for a vertically-integrated conflict of interest.

That’s why I am sceptical about the case for a £10 million Open Data Institute quango when just minor increases in data responsibility, resource and political will could lower the barriers to entry for developers and deliver the £6 billion open data economy (and possibly much more) the likes of Dr Rufus Pollock dreams about.

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• share via Reddit
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post

Article source: http://www.ukcrimestats.com/blog/2011/12/03/october-2011-data-now-live-on-ukcrimestats/

Posted: November 27th, 2011  Author: Dan   No Comments »

I’m looking forward to talking in a couple of weeks time to some Sociology A-level students about UK crime, crime statistics and a host of related crime issues – one of which was crime related to gender. Do get in touch if you’d like me – Dan Lewis – to talk to you abuut UKCrimeStats, crime issues etc.. I can’t afford to give these talks for free but offer a much reduced and affordable rate for Schools and village societies as well as the angle and insight of an independent.

Anyway, back to the title of the post – if you’re interested in crime and gender relationships, you absolutely have to read this article in The Sydney Morning Herald, Counting the social cost of masculinity by Cynthis Cockburn, an honorary professor in the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, Warwick University and Ann Oakley, a sociology professor.

Amongst the many factual points they assemble;

“Take the August riots in Britain this year. As the suspects were charged, considerable detail was published by the Ministry of Justice. The press focused on the age, ethnicity, neighbourhood and employment status of offenders. Yet by far the most dramatic divergence the statistics revealed was gender: 92 per cent of the first 466 defendants were male.”

and

“If men committed crimes leading to jail at the rate women do, the government would save about £3.4 billion a year. Zoom out to the overall cost of crime, calculated by the Home Office at £78 billion a year in 2009, including not only criminal justice system costs but lost productivity, service costs, and impact on victims.”

Here at UKCrimeStats – we currently have no data on the criminal and certainly not on their gender. I don’t think there’s much doubt that most crime is committed by men. The trouble is, I don’t think men will ever commit crimes at the rate women do and a male-free society is not really an option. And I’m not wholly convinced that the culture of masculinity (how do you define that?) is the root cause for crime. Moreover, what about the thumping big majority of men who are not criminals but manage to be seemingly masculine?

The authors didn’t seem to have space to say which of “. . . the certain widespread masculine traits and behaviour are dangerous and costly to individuals and society“.

I do much agree though that it is violent crime that is so worrying and there does seem to be an established long-term rise. Measured as a percentage of the total of reported crime, violent crime has been;

2.4% in 1900

1% in 1937

0.9% in 1967

5.6% in 1997

About 10% so far in 2011 - CORRECTION (28/11/2011) – sorry, it worse than I thought as I was including ASB under the crime total which it isn’t.  In September 2011, violent crime made up 17.42% of the total of recorded crime. 

These first 4 figures come from a quite brilliant book, “The Strange Death of Moral Britain” by Professor Christie Davies that explores how the UK went from being a low crime, highly moral society from the end of the Victorian period to the 1950s to what we have today. I couldn’t give justice to his book here but there really are many factors at play – family breakdown, drug addiction, the death of religion, alcoholism and a major decline in moral habits of orderliness, honesty, duty and loyalty.

The good news is, as a country, we have been here before – the early Victorian period was heavily marred by crime and social breakdown and they managed to put nearly all of these negatives into reverse by the end of the 19th century.

And I for one am young and naive enough to believe it can be done again.

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• share via Reddit
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post

Article source: http://www.ukcrimestats.com/blog/2011/11/27/men-the-real-cause-of-crime/

Posted: November 23rd, 2011  Author: Dan   No Comments »

This is a post I started writing back in June and parked for a bit. Now it’s very much back in the news.  And just a couple of days ago, the Conservative Party set up this page for potential candidates to apply.

When we set up UKCrimeStats we understood back then that elected Police heads would be held accountable not just at the ballot box but by their relative performance over time according to the crime data. An independent and trusted platform, UKCrimeStats would be needed to keep track of their performance as well as provide more incisive analysis and statistics, dig deeper into the data and where necessary, expose the errors – see our new page and spreadsheet and crime data forum - a lot of data still needs cleaning up.

For all that, I’m well aware that one can be a very effective Police Leader in a high crime area, where it is even rising through no fault of their own – correlation is not causation. But I’m disappointed that some Policing traditionalists believe the voting public is quite unable to discern the externalities to local crime trends and is even less capable of making a sensible choice at the polling booth once they were made part of the process.

Anyway, I’m all for lots of open debate on this – your comments as always, are most welcome.  What do you think, will PCCs be  a help or a hindrance to fighting crime?

What we need to do is move beyond this disappointingly one-sided article in the Western Mail from earlier this year. Here are a couple of points the article faithfully reports without challenge (in italics) and what some of us might have said in rejoinder in bold;

Actually, this is back to front. The whole point of this reform is to create bottom-up political pressure which diverts resources away from bureaucracy to the front line. And according to a Policy Exchange report, The Cost of the Cops – there is quite a lot of bureaucracy.  As Police Minister Nick Herbert says here

“I believe that elected police and crime commissioners will have a very strong focus on reducing the burden of bureaucracy and administration in their forces precisely because they will feel pressure from their electorate to ensure that resources are directed to the front line. We are also placing police and crime commissioners under a duty to collaborate and I am sure that they will work together to drive out unnecessary costs from their forces.”

Quite the most preposterous argument I’ve ever heard. Electricity or money don’t work too well in Zimbabwe either, does that mean we shouldn’t have these too?

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• share via Reddit
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post

Article source: http://www.ukcrimestats.com/blog/2011/11/23/elected-pccs-a-help-or-hindrance-to-crimefighting/

Posted: November 19th, 2011  Author: Dan   No Comments »

Having just learnt of this terrible story – Four Metropolitan Police officers stabbed in London – it took place in this neighbourhood,  I did some research and came across this very informative website, www.knifecrimes.org which I’ve now added to our blogroll. Violent crime as I’ve written here before, is a very broad category that we have to work with on UKCrimeStats with 143 types of offences that can be used to charge a suspect. We now have a new category called Public Disorder and Weapons, with just 1 month of data so far.

Now back to the theme of the post – according to KnifeCrimes, the arresting fact is that in the 9 years to 2005, victims were 4 times more likely to be murdered by knives than by guns – by 2,026 to 601.  When you add to that the number of people who are merely injured rather than murdered, one starts to understand why knife crime has been such a priority for Politicians and the Police for some years.

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• share via Reddit
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post

Article source: http://www.ukcrimestats.com/blog/2011/11/19/in-britain-knife-crime-is-much-more-deadly-than-gun-crime/

Posted: November 6th, 2011  Author: Dan   No Comments »

Ok, we’ve done it. It took longer than usual because we had new 5 new crime types to build into the database. These are;

1. Theft-shoplifting
2. Drugs
3. Criminal Damage and Arson
4. Public Disorder and Weapons
5. Theft-Other

As you’ll see from our main chart below, we have added these under the Other category (from whence they came) so you can keep track going backwards. Going forwards, when we have more than 1 month of data, we will split them out and on the reports section too.  See our national page here where we have already started doing this.

We have also updated constituency populations to mid-2010 estimates using the latest data released by the Office for National Statistics. IMHO, Constituencies are a much better guide than neighbourhoods to comparing crime in different areas because they generally have similar and larger population samples, the boundaries don’t change (well, not much – every 4-5 years !) and the population data is far more up to date and precisely sourced. I suspect a lot of the neighbourhood population data – where Police Forces have included it and still too many haven’t – may date from as early as the 2001 census. And as I’m sure you appreciate, this is quite a different country today to then. How many people do you think live in the same place they did 10 years ago?

Comments and suggestions always welcome – just email me, Dan Lewis, on crime@economicpolicycentre.com.

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• share via Reddit
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post

Article source: http://www.ukcrimestats.com/blog/2011/11/06/ukcrimestats-now-updated-for-september-with-new-categories/