Friday, 12 July, 2002, 09:07 GMT 10:07 UK
Street robberies soar by 28%

The number of robberies soared 28% last year according to the latest statistics which show a reversal in the long-term trend of falling crime in England and Wales.
The rise in street crime prompted Home Secretary David Blunkett to vow to make this "significant" problem a "high priority".

There were 5.52m crimes recorded by police in 2001/02, 356,239 more than the previous year - an increase of 7%.

The Home Office says the rise has been inflated by a new method of recording crimes, which accounts for about 5% of the increase.

[url]http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/newsid_2122000/2122794.stm[/url]

What !!!! How can this be? Everybody knows that having less guns around makes everyone safer.

Wait a second...you mean criminals arent following the rules? How can this be! There should be laws against that.

(sarcasm off)

I especially like the part about the inflation being due to a new way the crimes are reported. WTF?!?!?!?

The Home Office says the rise has been inflated by a new method of recording crimes, which accounts for the increase.

The government argues that crime levels are stable. It cites as evidence the British Crime Survey - also published on Friday - which shows the number of offences to be slightly down.


Ahhhhhhhhhhh!!!!! So, the ban on firearms is actually working.  [:P]

This is just classic:  Here are the numbers.  Now ignore the numbers and believe us when we tell you that crime is falling.  "These are not the droids you're looking for..."   "These are not the droids we're looking for..."

In research I've done in the past, I discovered that Scotland Yard indeed would record a grand theft auto used for a bank robbery where  the perp shot an innocent bystander as a SINGLE crime. In the US its reported as THREE SEPERATE crimes.

PUTTING THE LIE to the claim that Britain has less crime that the US.

But on the flip side, this rise in crime MAY INDEED be due to changes to more HONEST methods of reporting crime statistics.

Actually, there are many places in the USA that do the same. I am a software dev for court systems. There's a tremendous amount of disparity between court jurisdictions and how cases are handled. In many courts, there will be a single case ID entry for a series of crimes committed in the same incident, where in each separate offense becomes a line item entry within the single case ID. In other courts, they will create a case ID for each separate offense with a reference to each of the individual IDs for the complete incident. The statistics get reported to each State Supreme Court straight from these individual county and muni systems as is. Therefore, we probably have a similar discrepancy here in the USA. The feds have been trying to establish a standard court XML schema but the local and state courts don't have to adopt the standard. They have discreet jurisdiction and even in some states, the state cannot tell a local court how to conduct business.

Then I guess it all comes down to how the FBI Crime Reporting Bureau grabs and collates that data from the various jurisdictions, right????


Geez, there is no end to the wealth of knowledge represented here. [:D]

We deserve a Presidential Citation for how we benefit society. [clapping for us]



Interesting stuff.

Sorry to burst your court bubble, but.. most cases never make it to court. Police Departments report crime statistic to the feds via the UCR (Uniform Crime Report). If you relied on court cases to tally up crimes, you'd leave out more then 80% of all crimes committed in the United States. Hence the PDs using the Feds UCR. If the PDs don't use or screw up the UCR, they loose federal funding, so, they have a good incentive to do it correctly.

Would this mean individual crimes get reported individually???? (see my scenario above)

My understanding is that a BIG part of the disparity between England's and the US crime rates is that we report crimes individually, and they lump them together.

For instance, SCotland Yard records a rash of B&E's as a single crime - we report them individually.

Police Departments have been caught cheating on these reports to down play criminal activity, or type of activity. For example, take a robbery, that's forceable (or the threat of force) taking of property from a person. Some departments get creative and turn those into larcenies to downplay the amount of robberies they report. As far as if one was assaulted during that robbery as well, if that would be counted as 2 crimes reported, it would not. As robbery entails the use of force in the first place, as long as it was all still from the same incident.

Let me add to this, if that same guy did a few robberies in a row. Like one on front of a bar, then down the block in front of a 7-eleven, then another at an atm. Of course these would be reported as 3 crimes.