Sometimes it is truly worrying how much is claimed by this government that is repeated, unchallenged, by the BBC and other media. One of the government's repeated claims of late has been that crime is falling. In reality, we don't appear to have the information to know either way - or so it would appear from the fascinating comments of Roger Graef, quoted in the Mail on Sunday. Roger Graef, according to the website of the London School of Economics, is a visiting fellow at the Mannheim Centre for Criminology. He is basically asserting that the official statistics are thoroughly inadequate.

In an interview, Mr Graef, voiced his 'worries' that official crime figures did not reveal the true scale of violence affecting women and children.

He warned that attacks on children by other children not reported to police were absent from the official British Crime Survey (BCS) - other areas of unreported crime are included to get a wider picture of trends.

Mr Graef said: 'We did our own survey of 1,800 schoolchildren aged 14 and 15. One in three had been kicked or hurt. One in four admitted to kicking or hurting somebody else in a month and that's not recorded anywhere.'

He also pointed out the Home Office-compiled BCS did not include unreported assaults at hospitals and prisons.

And Mr Graef highlighted the limitations of official police crime records - based on his own research.

He said: 'We spent two weeks in Oxford and watched how much crime, how much violence, how much harm was happening.'

Out of 12 incidents that ended with the victim attending hospital, only seven were reported to police.

Mr Graef also disclosed how domestic violence goes unreported. 'Women's groups say that 35 assaults are made on the victim before they call the police. That means there's a dark figure of violent crime which we simply cannot know for sure.'

Sir Hugh Orde, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, said Mr Graef was 'absolutely right' to say the BCS was incomplete, and that 'some crimes will not end up on a police computer'.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1249094/Expert-backs-Conservatives-violent-crime-figures.html#ixzz0f2B2rKTX

This is yet another example of government statistics being unreliable or actually misleading. Please use the search facility on this website citing 'statistics' for more entries on the subject.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime • Media, including BBC bias

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