Pithy economic commentary from Edinburgh

What many of us have to look forward to in the coming months and years, perhaps?

More police = less confidence = more fear?

Lots of interesting points made here, but there is a rather lazy conflation of confidence in the police and fear of crime in the later part. These two phenomena are likely to be related in very complex ways, but however you look at it I think it's hard to believe that less confidence in the police automatically means more fear of crime. Especially if the loss of confidence stems from personal contact with the police and is therefore most likely to be down to the experience of unfairness on the part of the officers involved.

Some of the research quoted looks vaguely familiar, though .......

Measuring public opinion

I think this article is pretty much on the button in raising some concerns about the dominance of opinion polls in the current election and the potential pitfalls involved in trying to use them to second guess the outcome. This is priceless:

Page, however, chose to inform the Radio 4 listeners, without any sense of irony, that six out of 10 voters tell pollsters that they pay no attention to the polls. But here's the problem: 10 out of 10 journalists do.

Of course there are very good reasons why apparently similar (even more or less identical) survey questions can, as Hasan points out, generate really quite different response sets. Was the survey telephone, face to face or was some other method used? Were people contacted at home, via mobile phone, or via the internet? What time of day was it when the interviews were carried out? Even more important are the technical issues: what was the sampling frame? How were the raw data weighted? What was the response rate like?

Now, aside from the issues raised by Hasan - and they probably are quite important, for example if people start to base tactical voting decisions on erroneous polling data - in terms of the election we'll ultimately get the real answer from the election poll itself.

But my interest is with the use of opinion survey data, in the form of the British Crime Survey, being used to judge the performance of the police. Obviously the BCS is not some two bit survey conducted on a wet Thursday afternoon by a small research company. All the issues raised above and many more have been taken into account when estimates such as those linked above are produced. But when Lincolnshire (for example) is given a little down arrow - and implied black mark - on the basis of a 4.9 per cent fall in positive views year on year (see Table 1), what does this really mean? More precisely, perhaps, it surely means something - but is it fair to judge the performance of a police force on the back of such a relatively small shift in public opinion bearing in mind some of the provisos raised above?

Don't get me wrong here. Investigating public assessments of police performance is a useful and worthwhile endeavour, both in and of itself, and because, over relatively long periods, change in public opinion is likely to provide an extremely useful barometer of how well the police are doing both in general terms and in relation to specific elements of performance (dealing with issues of racism within the force, for example). What people think about the police is important and we should be measuring public opinion on this topic. But I'm much less sure that year on year change in point estimates of opinion as measured by single questions can provide much useful information.

Even worse, such an emphasis may generate perverse incentives by shifting manager's attention away from what really matters (which I would claim to be most importantly the relationship between police and community and how fairly people feel treated by police) toward trying to address apparent local problems in 'dealing with crime and disorder'. 'Problems' thrown up, remember, by perhaps 5 per cent more people holding negative views this year compared with last.

Political cognitive dissonance

Reaction to the latest crime stats - showing a 7 per cent fall in both BCS and police recorded crime - is very revealing.

Chris Grayling:
"Any improvement is obviously welcome, but we still live in a more dangerous country than when Labour came to power. The government has presided over a surge in violence, while Labour's target culture means the police spend more time on paperwork than on the beat.

Knife crime remains a serious concern on our streets and Conservatives will make tackling it a priority. Too many families have their lives ruined by low-level crime and antisocial behaviour. This has got to change."

This despite falls in worry about crime and concern about disorder, as well as actual victimisation, in recent years. Obviously the election is an issue here, but it's almost as if politicians (and perhaps the rest of us) have simply lost the cognitive ability to grasp that crime can go down as well as up, and that things can better, sometimes.

Classic headline misdirection alert

Violence against children is up! Admissions to hospital emergency departments for violence related injuries among under-1os rose by 8 per cent between 2008 and 2009.

But hang on, overall violence related admissions are down (slightly) on the year, and have fallen every year since 2001 except for 2007-2008 (when there was quite a strong upwards blip). And the rise among children may be due to more at-risk children being kept at home in violent conditions because of the troubles afflicting many social work departments (so it might be a political/structural problem creating the space for more violent incidents rather than an increase in the number of violent individuals).

So overall, a pretty mixed picture - some good news, some bad, with a genuine suggestion (although it is only that) that institutional problems are implicated. But sod that subtlety, make sure we have a scare-mongering headline suggesting, yet again, that children are more threatened and more in danger than they were yesterday.

See here for more details.

Plain English policing

This is fun. Interesting to see it being picked up elsewhere, too - churnalism at work, I guess.

But you have to feel a bit sorry for Cambridgeshire police. For one thing the headline (or subhead, if you read elsewhere) was written in 'plain English' - people just didn't like what it said! Perhaps if it had been written in police professional jargon they wouldn't have found it so annoying - "Local teams continue to prioritise intelligence-led policing techniques in order to target known offenders. We aim to reduce recidivism within this key demographic".

More broadly, it might come as a bit of a shock to Telegraph readers but policing isn't just about 'targeting offenders'. The largest part is of course responding to calls for service (emergencies and other events), but there's also public order policing, street patrol etc. etc. Resources allocated to these other activities are resources that can't be used in targeting offenders (and vice versa) so, from an internal point of view, the leaflet is simply telling people about how money and time is being spent.

That the article appears to have gone down badly (among reporters, at least) points to one of the dangers inherent in police using newsletters and freesheets to communicate with the public. This can be a useful and desirable thing to do - people have a right to know what their local police are doing and why - but getting even a small element wrong seems to hold the potential to annoy the intended audience and be very counter-productive.

Shameless self-promotion: see here (and here) for more on this issue.

Well that didn't take long

While this story presumably has to be taken with a fairly large dose of salt, the inevitability of it all subsequent to the mephadrone debacle must be triggering an 'I told you so' moment across, well, almost everyone in the country. Bar government ministers, their opposition shadows, and tabloid leader writers, of course, for whom the efficacy of banning drugs appears to be something of a faith issue.

Crime and the election - what's going on?

Since the election was announced I've been religiously (OK, occasionally) checking for crime and policing stories to comment on. But there don't seem to be any! Except for a less than stirring defence of the Tory's plan for elected police chiefs from Philip Blond (rightly being opposed by ACPO, I note), and some rather desultory sniping from Labour about the DNA database there's been very little.

Is it just me missing stuff? Or is crime a bit of a non-issue in this election, up until now at least? If so, why? I guess one reason might be the paper thin differences between the main parties on most issues - although that hasn't stopped them going at it hammer and tongs about who will cut the most, which hardly bespeaks massive policy differences elsewhere.

Surely it can't be a nascent sense of perspective about the relevant importance of crime compared with other issues? You know, jobs, education, health, saving the planet, stuff like that. Actually, probably not, given the continued utter lack of perspective (or indeed truth) about immigration in the tabloids and the complete absence of green issues from the election debate ....

Labour's record on prisons

Now that we actually really definitely know the date of the election, as opposed to just knowing it, the usual look back at the government's record seems to be in order. So to kick off an occasional series, here's a couple of pretty damning stats mentioned in today's Guardian.

1. There are more people serving life sentences in England and Wales than in the rest of Europe combined, including Russia, Turkey and Ukraine. A total of 12,090 compared with 11,477, according to this, although there is no date.

Either we think people in England and Wales are much, much nastier than other people or we conclude that the justice system here - excepting Scotland, perhaps - is considerably more punitive than others. To what end though? It's not that the UK is murder capital of Europe, which might explain some of the difference - murder rates are higher in several western and eastern European countries, for example France, Finland, Portugal, Poland and the Czech Republic. The overall rate of crime victimisation is comparatively high, although not especially so, and this in any case can't explain the difference in the number of life sentences handed down.

2. In 2008, over 5,000 children (aged 15 to 17) entered prison, half for sentences of under six months (we are also imprisoning large numbers of sometimes much younger children, who have committed no crime whatsoever, in immigration detention centres). Not only is this almost certainly higher than anywhere else in Europe, the relatively short sentences suggest that many are not imprisoned for serious crimes. This in a sense is worse than the number of life sentences; these young people are not allowed to vote, drink or even drive a car, yet are held responsible enough for their crimes to be imprisoned for them, as opposed to finding some other way of dealing with their behaviour.

These facts probably do reflect a strain of popular punitiveness in English speaking countries which is stronger than in the non-Anglophone world. Higher imprisonment rates are what some people want. However we are not that much more punitive, by any stretch of the imagination. Furthermore, it is not the government's job to simply accede to such populism, and certainly not stoke it, as often seems to be the case, but to run a sensible and cost-effective criminal justice system which respects the rights of all involved (and does not, for example, simply lock up large numbers of people and throw away the key). There is very little evidence that the use of prison on this scale has much effect on crime rates, and considerable evidence to suggest that it brutalises many of those involved and scars the lives of both them and their families for much longer than the length of the sentence.