Wednesday, January 03, 2007

[soft on crime] only 1% lead to conviction

Central News reports that: Just one crime in every hundred now leads to the offender being caught, charged and punished by the courts, latest statistics reveal. The Home Office's own figures showed crime on the rise last year and more criminals being caught by police, yet the numbers being sent before the court dropped sharply by eight per cent year-on-year. Opposition critics blamed the dramatic rise in the use of "summary justice" - instant fines or cautions and warnings handed out by the police.

1 comment:

  1. The Mail, though, if you read the article in detail, reaches this 1% figure by massaging the numbers in a way that would make even Gordon Brown blush. That is, it takes the figure not for crimes detected by the police, or reported to them, but those reported in The British Crime Survey (i.e. crimes that people say have been committed against them but that they haven't bothered to report). It then multiplies that by three because

    the British Crime Survey counts only a third of all crimes as it ignores all offences against businesses including shoplifting, "victimless" crimes such as drug possession and any offences committed against under-16s.

    Well, how on earth are the police supposed to prosecute crimes that aren't reported to them? Yes, I'm sure my local Tescos could give the police a weekly estimate of what they've had shoplifted without their security chaps spotting it, but I don't quite see how the police are supposed to catch the criminals any more than they can be expected to catch the people they estimate take drugs without the police being aware of it.

    The real story, I think, is the march towards summary justice, with fixed penalty notices and the like, about which Bystander JP frequently blogs. The enthusiasm of some police services for cautions is also a tad worrying, though perhaps not for the reasons The Mail gives.

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