Fall in crime rate slowing down

By Danny Shaw BBC News home affairs correspondent

On-the-street warnings for cannabis possession count as drug offences

Are drug crimes going up - or are police just better at detecting drug offences?

That is the question emerging from this latest set of crime statistics for England and Wales, comparing the last quarter of 2005, with the same period in 2004.

A 21% rise in drug offences is not an insignificant increase - and it is not a one-off - similar rises were recorded in the previous two quarters.

The annual total is also substantially more than it was in 2004, by about 16%.

Some of it is probably due to new police practices regarding cannabis offenders.

Since January 2004, officers have been able to issue an informal, on-the-street warning to people caught in possession of cannabis for their own use, rather than arrest them and take them to a police station to be charged.

Crack dens

Although it may have taken time for the guidelines to be implemented in full and for police to get used to the new approach, there are indications that officers are making extensive use of these new powers.

It is a simpler, speedier way of tackling low-level cannabis misuse - and every warning is recorded as a drug offence in the official figures.

The Home Office says the increase is also because police are carrying out more drug raids, making use of new powers to close crack dens and identifying addicts because of community-based drug intervention programmes.

What is more worrying for ministers, however, is that the increase also probably reflects the wider availability of drugs and lower street prices.

Gloomy news

The other main source of concern is that robberies are up again, by 6%.

This is thought to be chiefly due to the problem of mobile-phone and iPod thefts from children and teenagers in particular.

The robbery figures have contributed to a 1% rise in violent crime - less than in the previous three quarters of last year.

But this mixed bag of figures contains some potentially very gloomy news for the government - the long-term decline in overall crime rates may be coming to an end.

Acquisitive crimes

This is signalled by the figures for acquisitive offences - burglary, thefts and car crime.

These are the offences that make up the bulk of overall crime.

Since the mid-1990s, with the exceptions of a couple of blips, these categories of offences have been decreasing.

They still are decreasing - but the rate of decline has slowed, and the next set of crime figures, released in July, may well show that acquisitive crimes are on the increase.