Crime figures: Ask the expert

Chris Fox, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, answered your questions on crime.

Click here to read the transcript

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The number of violent crimes recorded by police in England and Wales has risen slightly, new Home Office figures show.

But the Home Office says the statistics indicate overall crime levels have fallen slightly in the year to April, continuing a decline that started in the early 1990s.

But research, published at the same time, suggests that in spite of the figures most people believe crime is on the increase.

How worried are you about crime? Do the figures boost public confidence in the police?

You put your question on the latest crime figures to Chris Fox, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, in an interactive forum.

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Transcript

Andrew Simmons:
Hello and welcome to this BBC News interactive forum, I'm Andrew Simmons. We're taking your questions on the latest crime figures for England and Wales. Violent crime is sharply up but overall the crime rate is down on last year. Violent offences have gone up by almost a quarter, though the Government says that figure includes incidents such as harassment in which no one was physically hurt. The Home Office says when the changes in working out the figures are taken into account they show a modest rise in violent crime of 2% but rape rose by 27% for example. Here to answer your questions from our Westminster studio is Chris Fox, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers. Welcome to this programme.

Thanks for joining us. Let's get straight to the first question, which comes from Mike from London who asks: As a resident of Shepherds Bush the government figures certainly do not marry up to real life. What I want to know is, how are these figures produced and calculated, and what are they based on?

Chris Fox:
Okay, it's quite complicated to explain but basically there are two sets of figures that have just come out, which is why there are sort of conflicting scores, if you like. The British Crime Survey for 21 years has interviewed a huge number of people and asked them about their experiences of crime - and that's nothing to do with the police, that's researchers talking to people about what's happened to them. And that gives us the trends and that gives us the British Crime Survey figures, which are in general terms very good trends in the right direction.

There's a second set of figures which are collected by the police - reported crimes to the police. And we've done this for years and years, categorised them from murder down to shop theft or assault, child abuse, abduction, rape etc. They have been collected in the same way for a number of years, up until recently when we realised that we were missing a lot of minor crime from those figures. Now the police were attending those but they were attending them as incidents. And so to get a better picture of the whole crime world, we decided to change our crime recording to capture them. Things like a common assault where nobody's hurt - it's a bit of pushing and shoving. Things like some traffic offences and as you said harassment - they're not injury cases. In fact in the violence figures, 66% are either no injury or very minor injury. But what they do is give us a picture of behaviour that enables us, the police, to target policing. So it's as much from our benefit as to look at the trends in crime. The British Crime Survey gives us long term trends.

Andrew Simmons:
You could understand that there is some scepticism amongst the public because the method of actually working out these figures seems to change so much. William Lewis, Sheffield asks: How are we to judge one year's crime figures against a previous year's when the government keeps on re-classifying the definition every year?

Chris Fox:
Well that's not absolutely fair because this was a police service and government response to the problem of the crime figures. We felt we had to get them right once and for all to get a full picture of crime. And it takes a couple of years to do that because you actually - it's not that easy to get a 130,000 odd police officers to suddenly change the way they record crimes - it's quite complicated. So that has happened over a couple of years which has meant that the figure has changed and is not very comparable. By next year I'm hoping that it will be a straight comparison and that's when the new way of collecting will become a very useful piece of information for all concerned.

Andrew Simmons:
Nick, England asks: Figures might show the drop in recorded crime, but these statistics ignore the number of unreported crimes which I have little doubt went up. Maybe people just don't see the point in reporting incidents anymore. Does that worry you?

Chris Fox:
That's interesting. It worries me if that's the case. But it is interesting because the British Crime Survey doesn't deal in reported crime - it interviews people and asks what's happened to them and then continues the interview to ask whether they reported it and if not why not and so on.

The British Crime Survey reports crime falling and that's not the numbers that have reported, that's what people are telling them has happened to them - crime is falling. Now our counting organisation is now getting closer to the British Crime Survey total. The British Crime Survey total of crime is higher than ours because it covers the non-reported crime. And that's why it's really important that people do understand that that figure that's collected by interview is falling and you've got less chance of being a victim of crime now than you had in 1982, which is quite remarkable. And in terms of the public sector we should be proud of that.

Andrew Simmons:
Duncan, UK asks: We hear about NHS statistics being massaged - is there a suspicion in some quarters that the Police downgrade some offences such as robbery to assault in order to meet the targets?

The point he's getting at is there could be some slippage on the seriousness of crimes being downgraded.

Chris Fox:
Obviously the viewers are really interested in crime recording because this is really difficult. If you phone up the police and tell us that your car's been damaged, the police officer that attends has to make a choice - has it been damaged or has somebody tried to break into it? If somebody has broken a window in your house, are they burgling the house or are they throwing stones? So there's a judgement at each stage.

Now what our new figures reflect, we're recording this crime on what the public tell us - so if the public tell us that someone's trying to break into their car, that's what gets recorded. Now we then do an investigation and it might change during investigation but the crime that's recorded is what the public tell us.

I suppose there is opportunity for local managers to reclassify crime but we audit it. The Audit Commission have just audited the new process to see if it's working properly and they've found areas where we need to be tighter and make it better. But at the moment it's a very strange thing that if we're massaging the police recording, that it's going up - you would expect that if we were massaging it, it would be going down.

Andrew Simmons:
Gareth Bowles from London wants to know, what is being done to tackle rising street violence generally and also particularly in London?

Chris Fox:
Okay again it depends what we call street violence. I'll deal with it on two levels. There's the very, very violent street crime which is sort of reflected in perhaps the crack cocaine world where drug dealers get very violent, often with each other and their fraternity - we are really targeting those people. Violence at that level is not going to be tolerated on the streets of London or anywhere.

There's a second level which is the often young men, often alcohol and often late at night in town centres or around places of entertainment. We're going to put a lot more effort into what is really antisocial behaviour - the noise, the low levels of violence, the damage, the antisocial behaviour. We've got to put a little bit more effort in that because that's what people see and it makes them think that they're under threat. In fact the victims are the young men and the older you get the less likely there is that you will be one of them.

Andrew Simmons:
Russell, Essex asks: There is no question that crime is on the increase. The problem is that whilst major crimes such as violent crime are reported, lesser crimes like break-ins, mugging, car crime do not. The reason for this is, that most of us know little or nothing will be done and the perpetrators are unlikely to be apprehended. What do the Police intend to do improve this perception?

Chris Fox:
It's very difficult. He starts off by saying it's common knowledge that crime is rising. The British Crime Survey interviews people, that's what's happened to them, and they say it's not, it's going down. So there's a major problem here. There are two parts to his question - one, what do we do about the perception and then two, what do we do about improving our detection rate - catching the offenders?

Well the first is that we have to get people to trust the figures and we have to explain them very locally so that people know what it means to them in the place they live. The number of very serious child murders over the past few years hasn't altered and yet when an incident occurs, like happened tragically in Soham, people in every city in the country begin to feel under threat and to protect their children. We have to make people see what the local experience of crime really is - that's the first thing.

Secondly, what can we do to improve our detection? Well the fact that our detection rate is quite low is a little bit misleading in some respects because we often arrest a person who has committed many, many offences but they'll only be charged with one or two, they'll be sentenced appropriately for those and in fact for us to spend a lot of time re-investigating other offences to see if we can put that name to those offences is just not good use of time. So they are a bit misleading.

Nevertheless what we have to do is we actually have to get a lot more people taking the consequences of crime and antisocial behaviour, putting good evidence to the court and making better use of technology - like DNA and like fingerprinting - to make sure that we're actually getting prolific offenders who commit something like 70 or 80% of all crime and it's committed by quite a small number of people.

Andrew Simmons:
Gary Oliver, Bedworth, Warwickshire asks: Police clear-up rates are reported to be as low as 21%. Why are the police so happy with clear-up rates as low as 21% and why do they only target soft crimes for results?

Chris Fox:
Right, target soft crimes - that's interesting because our targets are very heavily based at burglary in people's houses, vehicle crime, violence and of drugs - they're our top line targets - they're not easy crimes. In fact our detection rates need to be better - I can't actually argue that they shouldn't be. But then I've just explained in the previous answer there are reasons why the 21% isn't actually a clear view of our performance because we may well have put the right person behind bars but we haven't actually had the time to go back and investigate all the offences that individual has committed.

So what we have to do is target those really prolific offenders that are making people's lives a misery and make sure that we convict them and that when they go to court they're getting sentences that are appropriate to protect the community. And that when they come out of prison or when they are sentenced to work community orders, that they have programmes that actually get them away from their offending behaviour.

Andrew Simmons:
Mike Asher, UK: How can we allow burglars to bring criminal and even civil charges against otherwise law-abiding citizens merely defending their property? What sort of message is this putting out to these offenders?

Chris Fox:
We've got a principle in law about reasonable force, which means that you can actually defend yourself with any means at your disposal as long as it's proportionate and reasonable to the fear that you feel. So if you feel somebody's going to kill you, you can defend yourself very, very vigorously. However, if not - if a person is trespassing - then you cannot treat that person with violence because it's not a reasonable response - and that covers all of English law pretty well.

The Englishman's home is his castle principle, has to also deal with that. So if we had a different principle which allowed you to, let's say, shoot people who broke into your house, without any thought or any view of the threat to you, then I'd be really concerned that we would be moving towards some very, very difficult times for people who quite innocently were knocking on the wrong door at the wrong time late at night. It's a very sensitive area.

The real knack to this is that we the police actually clamp down on burglary. The real knack to this is that members of the public make sure their houses are secure and sensibly so and between us it doesn't become an issue. It's an issue when people think they're under threat of being a victim of crime.

Andrew Simmons:
Let's get back to this business of perception which is one of your big problems. The public seem to think that the business of speed cameras is interfering with other crime-fighting measures. Andy reflects this: are the figures for violent crime up due to the fact the police are concentrating on best serious offences such as speeding?

Chris Fox:
Right, speed cameras - that's again a very good question and again another misperception. The speed cameras actually are paid for and the people who operate them are paid for from income from the fixed penalty tickets. So if you're caught speeding on a targeted accident area then your fixed penalty money goes in some way to pay for the equipment and the officers doing the checks. It's completely independent from the rest of policing. Except that we have a target to reduce road casualties and the number of people killed and seriously injured has dropped dramatically in areas where safety cameras have been used.

So it's working towards a police target but the actual running of the process is self-funding. If it wasn't run in this way, we would have had to move people from crime fighting or street patrol or crime reduction or whatever. Instead we've been able to do the safety camera work and maintain the same levels - and indeed with the government's crime fighting fund there are more officers now dealing with crime fighting.

Andrew Simmons:
Okay thank you for that. Now if we could - we haven't got a great deal of time left - if you could be fairly brief on these. This question's from Rose from in London: Are more police officers the answer to rising crime or an improved justice system?

Chris Fox:
Short answer is: more police officers will help us target and we will become better at what we do but we're only part of the system. We need drug treatment programmes, we need a very, very clear criminal justice process but we need programmes to get people who are leading chaotic lives into constructive ones. So it's a very, very complicated process.

Andrew Simmons:
This e-mail has just been handed to me - it's just come in, its from Jamie in Milton Keynes: you said we have to get the people to trust the figures. How will you ever manage to get the public to trust the figures when bad news sells and it is therefore in the interest of the media to highlight serious offences thereby raising public alarm?

Chris Fox:
Well again that's at the core of this whole problem for us. If you look at some of the media headlines today they are quite dramatic and concentrate on some of the areas that are bad news. There are overall good news stories that we've got to get across. So we have to get the media to understand the figures we're presenting. There's cynicism about them at the moment because they're changing. Next year, I hope, they'll be comparable to this and we can talk sensibly about the trends.

Andrew Simmons:
We'll have you on the spot next year possibly.

Chris Fox:
I'll look forward to that because I believe the police service and the criminal justice service are making the right progress - you're safer than you've ever been for 20 years. We've got to do better with violent crime and we've got to make people feel safer at home.

Andrew Simmons:
This is the last question from Rebecca in London: I'm about to join the Metropolitan Police Service. How do these figures affect the morale of policemen and women doing their job in a difficult environment?

Chris Fox:
It depends how you read them - those officers will all have very clear targets about what's important for them wherever they're working, whether it's Lambeth or Peckham or Hounslow and they'll be concentrating on the crimes that are important there and they'll be having a great deal of success. At the moment the Metropolitan Police are being very successful in driving down crime. They will tell you they've got huge work to do, to deal with the defence against terrorism and they are determined to make sure that London's a safe city. Believe me the Metropolitan Police officers will see these figures and say we're going to do better but we're doing pretty well now.

Andrew Simmons:
Great, I'm afraid that's all we've time for. Thank you Chris Fox, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, for joining us and answering all of those questions. And thank you for the questions and of course for watching. From me Andrew Simmons and the rest of the news interactive team goodbye for now.