Police crime stats? fiction?

Its a scenario straight out of the American crime fiction TV series ‘The Wire’.

In this article in The Telegraph back in 2009 a former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police complained that comparing police statistics between Baltimore and London was unhelpful (mostly true in our opinion) – and that it wasn’t like The Wire in London.

There is one similarity however between the antics of the fictional police in Baltimore and the real police in London – they both fiddle their stats.

While giving evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee at Westminster – Tom Winsor, the Chief Inspector of Constabulary said that rather than asking whether fiddling crime statistics was happening at all, the question was “where, how much, how severe”.

He also directly challenged testimony from the Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, who told the Public Administration Select Committee earlier this month that inspectors had commended his force’s crime data as “competent and reliable”.

Winsor was unconvinced and in a letter  to  Hogan-Howe expressed “some cause for some concern” over the Met’s recording of crime statistics, he said:

“I’ve written to Sir Bernard about this because what HMIC in fact said was that it looked at ‘244 incidents logged by the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), 30 had been wrongly closed without a crime being raised, while in overall terms the MPS continues to improve its crime and incident data quality, this indicates that crime and ASB (anti-social behaviour) data recorded in London gives some cause for concern’.

“So there is a big difference between ‘some cause of concern’ and ‘competent and reliable’. I have not yet received Sir Bernard’s response.”

One gets the impression that Mr Winsor is covering himself in case a public scandal breaks about how the police fiddle their stats on a routine basis.

In evidence to the Public Administration Sub-Committee last month Met officer James Patrick, retired Met detective chief inspector Dr Rodger Patrick and former Met deputy assistant commissioner David Gilbertson all said that crime statistics were being manipulated on a regular basis.

Patrick told the committee that serious offences, including rape and child sex abuse, were being recorded as “crime-related incidents” or “no crimes”

Anyone surprised? The kind of things the real British police get up to these days would be scarcely credible as plot lines in The Wire, after all who would imagine that the police would use the identities of dead children so they can sleep with activists…

…and never in The Wire did the police recruit people to spy on innocent students that might have the temerity to demonstrate about something.

Crime statistics are a deeply political matter – and if there is anything we have learned about The Met in particular its that they are all too easily deployed in pursuit of political objectives – like the smear campaign and covert surveillance of the supporters and friends of the family of Stephen Lawrence.

Our only surprise is that in a very limited way that they are being found out – if some of them are breaking ranks to say in public what many of us suspected in private – this may mean that a major scandal is bubbling beneath the surface.

Perhaps David Simon creator of The Wire can be tempted to run a crime drama based in London?

The Haze will monitor developments.