My suspicion that government crime statistics could be misleading (see previous entry) is supported by a study published by Civitas in June last year.

It appears that the British Crime Survey has a very particular way of counting crimes. The real incidence of all violent crime appears to be 83 per cent higher than that which given in the British Crime Survey. This understating of crime has been going on since the survey started in 1981. Since the total level of crime in each year since then has been understated but to an unknown but presumably varying degree each year, the assertion that violent crime is going down is not wholly reliable. I suspect there are further reasons to doubt the trustworthiness of the crime figures. A few have already been suggested in comments on my previous post (below).

I should add that the academics who wrote this report went out of their way not to criticise the statisticians themselves. The fault they find is with a way of treating the figures that was started in 1981.

Here is part of the Civitas press release:

...ever since its inception in 1981, the British Crime Survey (BCS) has omitted many crimes committed against people who have been repeat victims. If people are victimised in the same way by the same perpetrators more than five times in a year, the number of crimes is put down as five. The justification for this was ‘to avoid extreme cases distorting the rates’, but, as Farrell and Pease point out, ‘if the people who say they suffered ten incidents really did, it is capping the series at five that distorts the rate’.

By recalculating the figures without the arbitrary cap of five crimes, Farrell and Pease have revealed that there are over three million crimes omitted from the BCS:

In its most recent published sweep, BCS estimated an annual total of some 6.8 million ‘household’ crimes (covering burglary; theft in a dwelling; other household theft; thefts of and from vehicles; bicycle theft; and vandalism to household property and vehicles). It estimated some 4.1 million ‘personal’ crimes (which covers assault, sexual offences, robbery, theft from the person, and other personal theft). Our re-analysis reveals that, if we believe what the respondents tell us, there would be 7.8 million household offences and 6.3 million personal crimes. Thus, removing the arbitrary five offence limit, over three million extra offences come to light… Household crime is increased by 15% and personal crime by a staggering 52%. As the sum of personal and household crimes, total crime would have been understated by 29%.

The increase in the number of crimes is not evenly spread across all types of crime. For example, theft of vehicles is not increased at all, but levels of vandalism are almost a quarter more than reported, and there are 20 per cent more burglaries. Violent crime of all types increases by 83 per cent. Violence perpetrated by an acquaintance increases by 156 per cent and domestic violence by 140 per cent. As Farrell and Pease say, ‘these are not minor differences’.

The full press release is here.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime

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Last week I suggested at a meeting that the figures for unemployment in Britain had been manipulated. A member of the audience who said he was a civil servant was appalled and angry, suggesting that I was impugning the integrity of civil servants. I was somewhat taken aback by his outrage since I have become very accustomed, in the past ten years, to the thought that many government statistics are highly misleading. There are so many examples of it.

Hospital waiting lists are a prime example. Much unemployment is hidden under the category of incapacity benefit. Education is an outstanding example. My confidence in all government statistics has been completely undermined.

When I was a once-a-week leader writer for the Daily Telegraph (about five years ago) I would often start my research with some headline government statistics that appeared to support the official line and then find, on looking more deeply at the figures, that the headline figures were extremely misleading and, in some cases, that the real story was the very opposite of what the government was suggesting. Exam results are a well-known - or rather 'notorious' - example of this but there are many others that are less well-known and which succeed in fooling people (or at least the media).

As I explained to the irate civil servant, I am not suggesting that that figures are simply changed by the statisticians - that numbers are moved around Mugabe-style. No, I am suggesting something more subtle. I am also not suggesting that the statisticians are driving the misleading of the public. That is a political matter and therefore surely driven by the politicians and their 'special advisers' and public relations advisers - although let us not pretend that statisticians are all without political views and that all of them can put those views away when they select which, of the many ways of measuring things, they choose.

It is quite easy to manipulate statistics. One can choose the numbers that put the best gloss on things, ignoring ones which tell a different story. One can quote one study which ignoring others. One can redefine what counts and does not count as an instance, say, of an exam pass (just change the pass mark from 50% to 10% and you get a surge of apparent academic success.

One of the statistics I am currently suspicious of is the supposed fall in violent crime. I have not had time to mine the statistics. But I noticed this weekend a story in the Sunday Telegraph which encouraged my suspicion. A professor of 'advanced social sciences' surveyed frontline police officers, contacting them by email. No such study can be regarded as conclusive. However she apparently contacted 1200 of these officers which is quite a big sample.

She

...found that 80 per cent of borough police officers agreed or strongly agreed that knife crime was worse in their community than five years ago. Only eight per cent disagreed.

Some 70 per cent judged that gun crime had worsened and nearly three quarters said they had seen a rise in gang crime.

Professor Qvortrup herself remarked that the result of her survey 'flies in the face of other research from the Home Office and the British Crime Survey, which says that gun crime is falling'.

I wonder. Is gun crime really falling? If so, why?

The full story is here.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime

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Further evidence comes that the NHS, despite the vast injection of funds, is failing to deliver medical care that is of the average standard in the rest of Europe.

Professor Mike Richards, the national cancer director, has said that in 2004, Britain spent £76 per head on cancer drugs compared with £143 in Germany and £121 in France. Even after adding in private spending on cancer drugs in Britain, our figure still fell well short of the others at £90 a head.

This spending on cancer drugs - particularly new and therefore expensive cancer drugs - is a forward indication of what the survival rates will be (so I am told by Professor Sikora, the leading cancer specialist). So we may be confident that when the figures finally emerge for cancer survival rates for the past few years, Britain will again be among the worst performers. Or, to put it quite clearly, thousands of people will continue to die of cancer in this country because we have the NHS instead of one of the other systems in the advanced world.

The story from the Daily Mail is here.

The situation with prostate cancer is more complex. But there is reason to suspect, at the very least, that the USA has dramatically lowered its deaths from prostate cancer because of active screening. A friend of mine in the USA is screened as a matter of routine for prostate cancer and colon cancer. Prostate cancer is apparently the second biggest killer of men in Britain. The screening test for it is far from ideal. The British medical profession tends to be sceptical of it to the point of hardly using it at all unless the patient pushes hard for it. I suspect that this is one of many instances where the medical opinion of the British has been influenced by the rationing mentality of the NHS. It is true that the American may over-test and over-prescribe but British medicine certainly has the opposite, more serious defect. In any case, in America, where they screen for prostate cancer, the death rates have come down more dramatically than in Britain. Or, to put it clearly again, many men die of prostate cancer each year in Britain because we have the NHS. The news story is here.

In a single week there was yet one more story about how the NHS has failed to perform as intended. Figures from the NHS Information Centre, apparently, show that nearly half the population has not seen an NHS dentist in the past two years. Story here.

It is possible that regular publicity about the bad record of Britain in treating cancer compared to other advanced countries will, eventually, prompt the government to spend more money on cancer drugs. That could be regarded as a 'good thing'. However, given the huge amount of money wasted in the NHS on excess back-up staff, poor use of staff and under-used equipment, it only means that money will be taken away from other service to patients that are less easily measured - care for the elderly for example. So even if the government moved to spend more on cancer drugs, it could well mean no net improvement in the amount of unnecessary suffering British people accept because we have the NHS rather than the medical care of other advanced countries.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in NHS

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