Are the figures of recorded crime any use?
norman dennis, 31 December 2004
Cultures and Crimes, Civitas’s new book on crime and the police, will be published early next week. Cultures and Crimes looks at crime and policing within the context of the cultures of four societies, England, France, Germany and the United States.
I am one of the authors, and in the case of this volume I have the unusual advantage of being able to answer the principal criticism before it is made. It will be that “everybody knows”, and everybody has known “for the past thirty or forty years”, that the figures of police recorded crime are no good, and that nothing can be said about crime on the basis of them.
Well, if “everybody” means most sociologists and social policy academics hired since the end of the 1960s, and most prominent pressure groups whose wholly worthy business is to protect the interests and extend the rights of suspects, offenders and prisoners, then “everybody” does know that the crime figures are useless.
If these people are “everybody”, then without doubt, everybody has repudiated the police figures of recorded crime for decades.
The great cry in the 1960s was against what was called the “cultural hegemony” of bourgeois values. The “bourgeois values” whose dominance was so deplorable included prudence, fortitude, temperance, thrift, fidelity, and duty, with a heavy emphasis on the myriad of values supporting life-long monogamy as both socially necessary and, on the average, individually beneficial. There were the specialised bourgeois values of the different professions: courage for the soldier, political impartiality for the government bureaucrat, scholarship for the academic.
From the 1960s, bourgeois values were attacked by the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie with might and main, often in the name of the superior values propagated by Trotsky, Mao Tse-tung, Che Guevara, or even Enver Hoxha. As one or other of these heroes failed or fell out of fashion, there was a drift into the impregnable solipsism and elitism of so-called “post-modernist” culture of anti-any-values nihilism.
Cultural dominance now lies almost entirely with those who when young had been scandalised that there was such a thing as dominance. You would not think it, witnessing their childish persistence in shocking and challenging people who supposedly hold values that have largely ceased to exist. Today it is only their own world-view that goes unchallenged.
They have replaced the bourgeois morality of self-restraint, in accordance with which they and their parents and grandparents had been raised, with their own post-bourgeois amorality of unregulated self-expression.
Part of this new hegemonic outlook is the faith–the unquestioned belief–that their own hegemony has not had the adverse effect of drastically increasing the crime rate. A corollary of that belief is a second unquestioned belief, that any statistics, reports and memories that showed such an increase–and all statistics and nearly all reports and memories did show an increase–must be false.
For forty years, therefore, the people who were eventually to take over the cultural dominance of this country have maintained with the passion of zealots that anyone alleging that crime was rising in England was a benighted reactionary in the throes of moral panic.
Characterisically for a faith, glaring logical contradictions are easily accommodated. In the field of policing and crime, the most glaring is the juxtaposition of the following two beliefs. One is the belief in the uselessness of all crime figures, and of most reports and memories of crime. The other is the belief that crime rates have not risen.
But if the statistics, reports and memories are useless how could anybody know whether crime had increased, decreased, or remained the same? They would be just as useless for their case that crime has not risen since 1955 as they would be for my case that crime has risen dramatically since 1955.
That many people for a long period have repetitively asserted that the crime figures are rubbish is not at all the same thing as showing that they are rubbish.
The statistics of police-recorded crime do present many difficulties and contain many defects. The basis of some statistics has changed in now unmeasurable ways over the years. All we know is that they have changed, and that a time series constructed from them would be of little value. Others have been changed explictly and clearly from one series of years to another, and the effects of the change can be easily calculated. A good example is criminal damage. Recently, changes in the definition of violence against the person as a recordable offence broke that historical series, but also in a measurable way.
I should be glad to be directed to any study that deals systematically and not tendentiously with what is wrong with statistics of specific crimes which disables the statistics of other and most police-recorded crimes from being of value for use for specific purposes. I am sure such a study or studies must exist. It’s just that I haven’t come across one yet.
The fact that year by year there is an unrecorded figure (in some cases a very large unrecorded figure) for a specific crime renders the recorded figure a useless measure of the total volume of that crime. But that does not mean that the statistics of the proportion of the total that are recorded is not a good measure of the trend in the crime over the years.
Whether and to what extent the ratio of the unrecorded figure to the recorded figure of any particular crime is stable from year to year, and whether and to what extent the recorded figure is therefore available as a measure of the trend, is an empirical question to be answered in each case.
The pattern of actual crime statistics makes the assumption highly implausible that the ratio normally varies widely and randomly from year to year. But it is on this assumption that the “moral panic” and “useless statistics” schools consciously or unconsciously depend.
Cultures and Crimes, recognising that the statistics of some crimes are problematical, simply by-passes most of the problems.
First, the crime statistics are never used (except, possibly, in inadvertance) as evidence of the total frequency of all crimes or of particular offences. They are used only as evidence of changes in frequency over time.
Secondly, the statistics used are mainly those of robbery. This is a category of crime the legal definition of which has changed very little over the years, and is very similar in the four countries studied. Public attitudes to robbery as a crime have not changed, unlike other crimes such as domestic violence. Police recording practices, which have changed from time to time, and recently greatly affected certain categories of offence, had hardly affected the recording of robberies.
Thirdly, the statistics are placed wherever possible side-by-side with contemporaneous reports of social conditions that throw light on whether or not observers accepted the figures as being a true reflection of crime rates.
In the next few days, therefore (if we are fortunate enough to attract comment in the national media) we can expect to hear the contentless objection that the crime figures used in the book, though an accurate account of what the statistics report, are useless because the statistics themselves are useless.
What we shall not hear is any analysis of what precisely renders them useless–what changes in definition or recording practice or public attitude, occurring when, render them useless, or for what stated purpose they are useless. We shall not, that is, have the benefit of very much scholarly criticism.
What we shall not be given are any facts that show that the smooth curves of growth have somehow been created out of random jumps each year in the case of each crime in the proportion of unrecorded to recorded cases.
Preeminently, we shall not be supplied with anything but the odd eccentric contemporaneous account (if we are supplied even with that) that is capable of contradicting the many contemporaneous accounts that are quoted in detail in Cultures and Crimes, and which show that the figures of reported crime are a broadly reliable representation of the changes that have actually taken place in this country since the statistics were first collected in 1857.
I can’t agree with Ron Bramwell. I was born in 1954. My father worked as a fitter and turner in the Shipyards and my mother as a typist – both considered low grade positions and paid accordingly – and lived on a council estate with similar working class people.
My mother owned a fur coat and my father a Rolex watch – both bought during the early years of the marriage along with some jewellery before kids came along and absorbed the cash. Both items are desirable even now (OK political corectness will see the fur coat burned rather than worn and the wearer reviled far worse than a child molesting, murdering drug dealer) and were worn for special occasions but never hidden or any care taken to ensure our neighbours did not know that my parents owned them. Looking back on the ludicrously simple “security” of the house, by todays standards we might as well have lived in a tent in the front garden with all our valuables stored there.
What HAS changed is the attitude towards what constitutes acceptable behaviour. If I was caught by anyone on the estate doing mischief I could expect at the least a telling off or, more likely, a crack around the earhole. And if I was stupid enought to complain about the injustice of it all to my parents, I would have been punished far more by them for “showing the family up”. Again, modern political correctness would say that I have had my self worth diminished, my “rights” violated and that I should apply for post traumatic stress counselling and compensation for the humiliation – please forgive me if I’m not au fait with the exact terminology and range of redress available – but I suppose I’m just one of those unreconstructed reactionaries referred to by the intellectual manipulators of the truth.
I would agree that from the point of view of possessions, I and my parents are far better off now than 50 years ago but as a percentage of my disposable income, the value of the items are a tiny fraction of their cost 50 years ago. I recall that to purchase their first TV in about 1959, my parents paid for it over a period of 18 months or perhaps 2 years. Last night I was in Tescos looking at a 28″ Colour TV with teletext and all the modern bells and whistles for less than £100. Or about 3 weeks grocery costs for myself.
No. The truth is that there aren’t any real sanctions for wrongdoing. On the contrary there is a vast industry geared to excuse, explain away and support the wrongdoers. And like any business, it must expand to survive. Expect more of the same from the intellectual manipulators of the truth to further their religion.
Your ‘total volume’ vs ‘trend’ comparison reminds me of a sales director I did some work for ten years ago.
‘I don’t care if the figures are wrong, as long as they’re consistently wrong so that I can see the trends’ he said.
I agree with much of what has been said, but people forget the growth of stealable items. If there had been colour tellies and mobile phone in the 1890s there would have been people willing to steal them, and others equally willing to buy the stolen items. In my opinion there is a clear relationship, betweeen the growth of consumer goods and crime. Unfortunately I can not provide the research to support my opinions, just many years as a thief taker.