Truth in Crime Stats
The Government spin line on law & order is that it is not an issue, nothing to worry about, because the crime rate has gone down under Labour.
This is sort of true, but what they and the media never point out is that it is a meaningless statistic. The total crime rate means almost nothing because it counts every murder or rape as equal to every under age drinking conviction. One could have a 50% increase in violent crimes and and a mere 8% decrease in dishonesty offences, and this would make the total crime rate go down.
As an example in 2,000 the numebr of sale of liquor offences dropped by 3,000 yet the number of violent crimes went up by 2,000, and Labour trumpet this as successfully lowering the crime rate.
So to talk intelligently on the subject, one needs to look at the breakdown. One can do this by individual offence category or by major groupings of violence, sexual, drugs, dishonesty, property and administrative.
Now almost everyone would agree violent crimes (murders, assaults, armed robberies) and sexual crimes (rapes, sexual assaults) are what most people want to see a lot less of.
Well in the last year of National violent crimes dropped by 2%. Since 1999 they have increased by 15%. Annual increases of 5%, 6%, 2% and 2%.
And sexual crimes dropped in 1999 by 8%. Then increased by 7% since 1999.
Also even if one does count the total number of crimes (as meaningless as that is), they dropped by 5% in 1999 and have gone up by 1% since 1999.
This is why you hear the Government refer to the total crime rate which is number of crimes per 10,000 population. Now it can be useful to use a population adjustment, but I would suggest a better measurement is the crime rate per 10,000 persons aged from 12 to 60 which covers almost all criminal offending. This segment has grown less than the overall population.
But even if one does use the meaningless total crime rate, let’s look at the trends. Was going down under National – dropped 5.6% in 1999. This slowed to 2.9% in 2000 and 1.1% in 2001. And then up in 2002 by 1.6% and down again by 1.2% in 2003. So a strong downwards trend has slowed and then basically stalled.
But they key thing is the overall crime numbers or rates are almost meaningless. The more serious violent and sexual crimes have increased both in absolute numbers and proportional to population, since 1999.
July 6th, 2004 at 10:24 am
What happened to them 1994-1999?
That’s a five year period comparable to 1999-2004.
July 6th, 2004 at 11:04 am
Not quite the real issue. The real issue is that we are talking about 1 or 2 or 5 perecentage points at a time when rosy economic conditions and forensic developments, ought really to have produced reductions of tens and twenties and fifties of percentage points. LbW
July 6th, 2004 at 11:09 am
And, and, and … .. Just when do we think we might actually see some return on our investments that went by names such as “fiscal envelope”, “closing the gaps” “positive discrimination” “hip hop tours”
July 6th, 2004 at 11:41 am
Neither the editor of the Harold nor anyone in the Labour Party seems to have read Rudi Giuliani’s account of zero tolerance to crime in New York city. The account is full of statistics and documents a staggering reduction in violent crime over a relatively short period. The book is called “Leadership” and clearly Little Donny has read it.
The claims coming from the gibbering Left in themselves amount to criminal negligence and simply confirm their makers’ moral bankruptcy.
July 6th, 2004 at 2:36 pm
Those wanting to take a slightly longer-term view can see the last 15 years here:
http://pages.quicksilver.net.nz/mfn-0056/crimestats.xls
It’s compiled from the historical data in the 2000 and 2003 reports. Unfortunately, it didn’t include historical data for all categories.
LBW: there have been significant reductions in burglaries, car thefts, and dishonesty offences in general – which are exactly the sort you’d expect to decline in good economic conditions. However, it’s not quite that simple. Rates of violent crime, for example, appear to _increase_ when economic times are good. More on that when I’ve done more research…
July 6th, 2004 at 4:49 pm
I/S listening, thanks
DF, your blog, mind if it is borrowed? Care to comment? Am I barking up the wrong tree? Is this “as good as it gets” in the remaining third of my lifetime?
July 6th, 2004 at 6:27 pm
This is one of those ‘damned lies and statistics’ issues. The thing about the crime stats is that they are *reported* crime, not all crime.
What is happening in the crime stats is that serious crime really is reducing (levels of reporting don’t really change over time – a murder is a murder) whereas the reporting of more minor offences (violence, threats, intimidation, civil disorder) are increasing. Calls to Police have increased by 10% a year for at least the last five years and it is mostly been driven by such things as the proliferation of cell phones (it’s easier to report things and one accident will get lots of calls).
In addition there has been a lot of effective targetting of at risk groups where offending didn’t lead to complaints in the past for a variety of reasons (eg, some people believing that domestic violence was just one of those things you put up with, or that the downside of reporting some crimes was greater than the upside). These groups now report offending more than was the case in the past.
Overall, I think the reported crime stats need to be read carefully and the numbers not taken at face value.
July 6th, 2004 at 10:12 pm
Jordan – the police website doesn’t have any pre 1998 stats on it – I was keen to go back further. They also no longer post their stats on the site before giving them to the Minister
Generally crime rose quite a bit in early 1990s but was dropping significantly in late 1990s. That rveresed or stalled in last few years.
Chris – yes actual rather than recoirded crime would be nice but we have to make do with what we have. Unless we can put big brother sensors everywhere we can only talk about recorded crime.
I agree a focus on serious rather than all crime is more useful.
July 6th, 2004 at 11:53 pm
David: if you bothered looking past the first few pages of the reports, you’d see that each one has historical trend data on both the overall crime rate and some specific offence types. You can get a 15-year trend if you paste it together. There are some issues with the differing population estimates used to extract per-capita stats, but they’re not particularly significant, and the data is more than good enough to do a quick n’dirty analysis.
July 7th, 2004 at 7:09 am
Thanks Idiot. The stats site URL in your blog was useful also.
September 21st, 2004 at 8:12 pm
The offical police stats show a very small and unrealistic picture of “crime”. They are fickle, and easily influenced by changes in reporting ie the increased popularity of cell phones, changes in law, police influencing “zero tolerance” policies, media interest. Such as, which do people lose more per year, burglaries or corporate fraud? which is greater the murder rate or work place deaths?
A truer picture of “crime” can be seen by looking at victim surveys one was conducted here (NZ) in 2003 i think.
I just felt like a rant.