Murder rate at lowest level since 1997/8

I didn't talk about this recent report from the Home Office when it came out last week. Probably because it received almost no press coverage whatsoever, although there was an article in the Gruaniad.

As well as the decline in murders it's also interesting to note to note the more recent decline in injuries from firearms (p. 43). One of the arguments trotted out when declines in murder rates are pointed out is that more people are actually being attacked, but better healthcare means that a higher proportion survive. With regard to firearms, at least, this doesn't really seem to be the case.

There's no point in being panglossian about these things (especially when you look at the position of Scotland in the European 'league table' on page 12 of the report). Any murder is one too many and liberal backslapping is not going to cut much ice with a public by and large convinced violence is on the increase. Something which, of course, has some quite negative implications in terms of support for more punitive policies, less help for offenders etc.

I've said before that I don't think individual press stories have much of an effect on public opinion in this area. But I wonder about press frames or tropes, those long-term story arcs and ways of looking at the world which influence what gets covered and how. This short piece gives a good example I think. If something doesn't fit the dominant agenda it just doesn't get covered in same way. And I guess a decline in the murder rate falls into the same category - it doesn't fit with the way the world it thought (ought?) to be.

A quarter of Scottish adults admit having tried drugs

Shock horror! Surely they're all going to turn to a life of crime and then expire in a heap of burnt spoons and other 'drug paraphernalia'. Or perhaps not, since looking around there never seem to be that many drooling crack fiends rampaging across the Meadows of an evening.....

It's a point that's been made before (although I can't remember by who), but you can't help thinking that the massive disconnect between many people's experiences of drug use (i.e. might make you feel a bit funny but won't put you straight on the conveyor belt to hell) and the blood curdling stories told about drugs by government and media must be a contributing factor to processes undermining the legitimacy of the law. Certainly drugs laws, but perhaps others as well.

If people are continually told something is illegal because it's extremely dangerous, but their own experience tells them that at the very least it's a bit more complicated than that, then they will surely start to think something is wrong with the law and those behind it. In the final analysis laws are about the regulation of moral behaviour - they encode prevalent moral standards. If the connection between law and public morality is broken, for a significant minority at least, then the whole system starts to creak.

Mind you, perhaps the disconnect is not as large as us lefty/liberal types might like to think. According to the latest British Social Attitudes Survey, attitudes to cannabis, at least, are hardening:

In 2001 nearly half of those surveyed thought the drug was not "as damaging as you think". Now that is 24%.

"Risk Intelligence"

This is quite cool.

I scored 84, which is high, apparently. Although I'm still trying to get my head around what it actually means.......

Mr R. Liddle

So Rod Liddle is on Radio 5 Live just now, and he's repeating his claim that 'most' gun crime in London is committed by 'the Black community' (didn't know communities committed crime, but still). In fact he seemed to be suggesting a figure of 85 per cent.

Which sounds pretty unbelievable. And it fact, it is. Although the figures are pretty hard to come by, this (PDF) suggest that in London in 2005, 47 per cent of those proceeded against for gun enabled crime were Black (and 38 per cent White). Which, given the suspicion that Black people are more likely to be proceeded against than White, given the same crime, is probably about parity. So Black people (well, men) are probably over-represented, based on raw population proportions, but not by nearly so much as Liddle claims.

There are a number of other points to make. For one thing, there were 14,250 offences in which firearms were used in England and Wales in 2008/09 (that includes air rifles and imitation firearms). Of these, 38 per cent took place in London (around 5,400). These numbers have been going down in recent years, too (all figures from this PDF). So we're talking about a rather small number of crimes, probably committed in large part by an even smaller number of men - i.e. repeat offenders - of whom less than half were apparently Black. So to blame an entire 'community' seems a bit harsh, to say the least.

The other thing is definition of the denominator. If raw population figures are used then, as I said above, Black people probably are somewhat over-represented in the gun crime data. But surely class and economic status is a confounding factor? If nearly 50 per cent of young Black men are unemployed, is it really surprising that their involvement in crime is somewhat greater? Simply treating 'Black' and 'White' as homogenous blocks means all any subtlety is missed and, essentially, like is not being compared with like. I've not seen any work which looks at this in detail, but someone must have done it.....

Be afraid, be very afraid

Actually, this is pretty scary. While the usual caveats apply about how many there will be (presumably not many) and how much ground they will actually cover (presumably not much), the implications are quite unsettling.

Worst of all, perhaps, is the notion that perfectly law-abiding citizens - and yes that includes protestors - will, because these things fly so high, be under surveillance without knowing about it. Although I guess they might now suspect it.

Freedom from covert state surveillance should be a corner stone of a free society and this plan, on the face of it, appears to fundamentally undermine this precept. Overt surveillance at demos and so forth is bad enough, although in the interests of balance I should probably say that it is probably neccessary at least some of the time.

The big unanswered question is, of course, why? What are these things suppose to do? The argument that they are needed in the light of the Mumbai terrorist attacks is pretty weak, unless we think that Al-Qaeda is going to be invading from France aboard rubber dinghies. At the other extreme, I've yet to see convincing evidence that the mass use of CCTV cameras has had much of an effect on crime, although I'm open to persuasion that they may have made a bit of a difference.

Overall, it seems unlikely that even this level of surveillance will be of much use in actually stopping a crime which is about to happen or is already underway. Either the patrols will be random, in which case they will have almost zero chance of catching a crime in progress, or they will be targetted, in which case why not send, you know, a person to do the job and who might actually be able to arrest someone? Because you're going to have to do this anyway, and if they're not already at the scene it'll probably be too late. Unless we're going to be sending multi-million pound robots out to shadow kids who've just vandalised a bus shelter until someone on the ground can catch up with them.

So presumably the actual argument is about intelligence, although this doesn't come out much in the article. But as so often in these things I suspect the real reason why is 'because we can'. This stuff exists, there must be something we can do with it, so let's go for it! Especially since it's shiney, hi-tech, expensive and they probably use it in 24.

Hold the front page - crime stable!

Based on British Crime Survey (BCS) interviews in the year to September 2009, the overall level of crime is stable compared with the year ending September 2008. The number of crimes recorded by the police fell by eight per cent for the period July to September 2009 compared with the same quarter a year earlier.

Curiously enough, this isn't being featured heavily on the Mail or Express websites. Can't think why.

data.gov.uk

Although I haven't had time to have a proper look, this looks pretty impressive. It's hard to say what's not on there, which is probably the clincher in terms of genuine freedom of information. But anything which gets a wider audience for, and hopefully promotes the use of, the huge range of statistics the UK government now holds has to be a good thing.

And again.....

This from a member of the MPA. The IPCC comes in for some probably deserved stick, too.

As usual, some pretty damning stats:

File on Four, on Radio 4, told us that the IPCC only directly investigated a tiny proportion of complaints against police last year – just 88 of more than 31,000. On one level that is reasonable, but coupled with the following statement from a former commissioner, you have to wonder if they are doing the job they were created for. The IPCC "has not produced any significant change that anyone can point to in the fairness and rigour of the police complaints system" said ex-commissioner John Crawley.

'Reasonable' is probably alluding to the undeniable fact that many complaints against the police are not well founded and largely a by-product of the situations in which officers find themselves. But on occasion they create those situations themselves, and when they do, sometimes, just sometimes, it would be good to see someone held to account in some way.

If you can wade through the usual Comment is Free loons, there are some interesting comments under the piece, too.

They just can't help themselves, sometimes

Another day, another rash of stories about various police forces screwing up, finding bad apples, and generally misbehaving.

While the details of these stories are too depressing, nasty or downright dumb to go into here, they do all speak to a refrain often heard from the within the service - that it doesn't matter how often we get things right, the times things go wrong are so over-hyped we've got no chance. It's no wonder the public hate us.

To which two obvious replies are: (a) you did (collectively or independently) actually do these things, do really expect people to ignore them; and (b) be that as it may, the public don't hate you. Some do, but many don't. Indeed, that the police remain one of the more trusted and popular public services/professions is, seen from this angle, something of a mystery.

There are many possible reasons why the police continue to be so (relatively) popular, despite 40 years of stories similar to those above. Perhaps people are just too sensible to extrapolate from a few bad apples to the whole tree. Perhaps not enough experience the truly negative side of organized British policing to have their faith shaken. If it happens to other people, the impact is just much less.

But I think the idea of faith perhaps gets closer to what's going on. For large sections of society the British police continue to represent many 'good things that have been lost' - and they will continue to cling to this through thick and thin. Equally, many people have a deep-seated need for order and stability, and the police continue, for all their faults, to represent this to them.

This is a topic which really interests me, and to which I'll no doubt return. For one thing, I think it helps explain why stories such as the above seem to have so little medium-term influence on what people think about the police.

Something lost in translation?

I'm not quite sure what to make of this story in the Indy about police targeting the 'mostly law-abiding middle class' with ANPR technology to push up arrest (and seizure) rates.

On one hand there's a lot to be sceptical about. For one thing, the story is rather vague about what's actually meant to be going on. It suggests that ANPR is being used to pull people over, with the subsequent encounter being used to get an arrest and/or seizure by any means necessary. Which is always possible, but the key quote...

"In short, officers do not have a complete understanding of the law, use flawed databases to justify immediate seizures, fail to adequately research and evidence the basis of their belief and almost certainly knowingly seize vehicles just to satisfy service and personal performance targets,"

... says nothing about the middle class specifically. And the paragraph about the 'soft-crime initiative' is a bit of a red herring since most parking fines are not given out by the police.

Furthermore, the current police target regime, APACS, says nothing about arrest rates that I can see - although it does mention asset recovery, which might be relevant. So what are the targets the police are meant to be meeting?

Finally, what's wrong with stopping the 'mostly law-abiding' on those occasions when their otherwise apparently high standards slip? As we so often hear in relation to anti-terrorist activities, if you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to fear, surely. Or does this is not apply to the middle class, who should have to fear nothing even if they've done something wrong?

But there might be an important point buried here somewhere. Although the new HO targets don't seem to mention arrest rates (I keep saying seem because the HO guidance is horrendously complex and I can't face going through it properly), and definitely push public perceptions as the most important measure, has this sunk down to the operational level? Or do local managers still prioritize arrest rates and similar concerns?

This would certainly go against the spirit of the new target regime. But more importantly, as the Indy story rather clumsily suggests, targets based purely on arrest rates and the like seem almost certain to end up having negative unintended consequences in terms of pissing people off. Officer's use of discretion is central part of British policing, and what's more the public know this and expect police to take account of the circumstances of a case when making decisions (see this paper, for example). Anything which encourages police to make decisions based on external criteria seems likely, in the UK at least, to damage the relationship between police and public.

Which, to their credit, is something the HO does seem to have taken on board. Which is why stories like this, if true, are so disappointing.

Section 44 stops ruled illegal

Good news from the European Court of Human Rights, although radio reports seem to suggest that government will continue sanctioning s44 stops for the time being.

As so often with these things, it's not the existence of the power to stop and search which was the issue, it was the blanket and allegedly 'random' nature of these stops. It should be a keystone of policing in any democratic society that police can intervene in the lives of citizens only with good reason, and, if those citizens are not obviously doing something illegal, with their consent.

s44 ignores both these precepts, fatally undermining the role of consent by making it illegal to refuse the search even though no reason need be offered for it. And, of course, the searches were never going to be random and would inevitably be targeted at 'police-property' groups, thereby plainly contradicting the professed purpose of s44, which was to allow police to stop randomly. s44 stops were always targeted, and in a way much less transparent than even other types of police activity.

Not much posting on this blog business

Christmas, New Year, personal trauma - it's not been a good time to have started a blog.

So this is really just a post to keep the thing alive, until I have more time to devote to it. There also seems to have been a lack of specifically crime (as opposed to e.g. terrorism) stories in the press recently. Which, although probably a bit of a relief, puts a spanner in the works of any project set up specifically to comment on crime and policing.

But perhaps they have been stories and I've just not been looking hard enough.

In the mean time, this is pretty interesting. Such a low rate of detections involving DNA evidence really is quite damning. And if those detections which are achieved through the use of DNA are at the more serious end of the spectrum, why is it then necessary to keep the records of so many people on file? Because involvement in serious crime is so rare, most of these people are by definition extremely unlikely to be involved in any serious crime in the future.

The 'used in 40 per cent of detected burglaries' is also pretty meaningless unless this means that the proportion of burglaries which are being detected is going up. Otherwise DNA is just replacing more traditional, and possibly ethical, methods of detection.

In fact, Table 6.02 here suggests that sanction detection rates for burglary are very low, having risen slightly from 2002/03 to 2006/07 (from 11 to 14 per cent) but since falling back to 13 per cent. This certainly suggests that the use of DNA evidence has not lead to a major increase in burglary detection rates, and is in most cases simply replacing other methods.

But I have to say I'm not an expert in this area so it would be interesting to see what others think.......