Week 4

Mostly statistics this week!

The point of this week's seminar & lecture was to think about how statistics on crime are produced. There is no "God's eye view" of crime: if we want to know what's going on, we've only got statistics to go on (apart from anecdotes and personal experience). So if we want to understand, for example, why the statistics show that a particular kind of crime has gone up, we need to understand how those statistics were produced. Usually there are a whole range of factors influencing statistics, and changes in those factors may lead to changes in the figures.

There was one particularly interesting example in the seminar, with the statement that "petty offences, many of them committed by young people, form an increasing proportion of crime". This could be because

• People are committing more crime at the moment, opportunistic petty crime in particular, due to the recession

or

• Young people in particular are committing more crime at the moment (because of the recession) and young people are more likely to commit petty crime

These are perfectly valid explanations. But it could also be because

• Petty crime is being more heavily policed at the moment (by PCSOs, street wardens etc), leading to more petty crime being recorded in police figures (although it may be that no more crime is actually being committed)

or

• A number of new low-level offences have been created recently, leading to a rise in overall crime because people are committing new crimes (although it may be that people's behaviour hasn't changed)

It could even be because

• Low-level offending has remained constant, but more serious offending has dropped, leading to a rise in low-level offending as a proportion of the total

What's the right answer? We don't know!

This kind of problem is the reason why it's useful to have different statistical sources of information on crime. In this case, most of the external factors we've identified affect police recorded crime figures; cross-checking against figures from the British Crime Survey would help to eliminate external influences on the statistics. (Although BCS data has its own potential distorting factors.)

Finally, I said at the end of the lecture that next week's lecture would look at sentencing. Wrong! Next week's lecture is about "due process" and "crime control". In advance of it, please read the first chapter of Sanders and Young's Criminal Justice, which is called "The aims and values of 'criminal justice'". You can find it (the chapter) online; it's linked on Moodle under the Essential Reading heading.