Say Anything Blog

The UK has the second highest overall crime rate in the EU.

It has a higher homicide rate than most of our western European neighbours, including France, Germany, Italy and Spain.
The UK has the fifth highest robbery rate in the EU.

It has the fourth highest burglary rate and the highest absolute number of burglaries in the EU, with double the number of offences than recorded in Germany and France.

But it is the naming of Britain as the most violent country in the EU that is most shocking. The analysis is based on the number of crimes per 100,000 residents.

In the UK, there are 2,034 offences per 100,000 people, way ahead of second-placed Austria with a rate of 1,677.

Just before midnight on January 12, 2006, Tom ap Rhys Pryce, a 31-year-old lawyer, left a London party and telephoned his fiancée to say that he was on his way home. He emerged from the tube station at Kensal Green about 20 minutes later and began walking toward their apartment. That was when two teenage gang members attacked him. Donnel Carty kicked Pryce in the back, sending him flying to the ground, and Delano Brown kicked him in the face. When Pryce tried to defend himself, the attackers stabbed him in the legs, hands, face, and heart. Then they took his cell phone and public-transportation pass, the only valuables in his possession, and ran off, leaving him dying on the ground. The paramedics who strove unsuccessfully to revive him found his wedding vows strewn on the pavement.

The British press, particularly the tabloid press, carries stories like this nearly every day—lurid accounts of drunken vandals, teenage murderers, child abuse, knifings, and gang violence. “After bingeing on lager, vodka and cocaine, twisted Jobson launched a frenzied attack, stabbing Samantha TEN times with an eight-inch blade,” the Sun reported this past November 26. drunken yob who left teenager with part of his skull missing after party attack gets just one year’s detention, cried the Daily Mail on the same day—about a different incident. Collectively, these reports paint a portrait of a nation terrorized by vomit-spewing, tattooed thugs. And according to polls, British citizens also consider crime an exceedingly grave problem.

To understand why the dark figure of crime escapes exact measurement, realize that for a crime to be officially recorded, three things must happen: someone must be aware that a crime has been committed; someone must report that crime; and the police must accept that a law has been violated. But each link in the chain is easily broken. People may be unaware that a crime has been committed because they view it as normal or trivial behavior: in some neighborhoods, it would seem perfectly natural to settle a dispute with a good brawl, while in others, this would be seen as assault. Other crimes may go unrecognized because the victims are unaware that they have been victimized—either because of the nature of the crime, such as fraud, or because the victims are drunk, mentally ill, or otherwise incapable of understanding what has happened.

Even when victims recognize that a crime has been committed, they may not report it. Think of children, or of immigrants who don’t speak the language well enough to explain what happened to them. Rapes can go unreported because the victims are ashamed. So-called victimless crimes involving sex and drugs also go unreported, of course, because the criminals have no motivation to inform the police that they are hiring prostitutes or shooting up. Crimes can also go unreported because victims fear reprisals. Above all, crimes can go unreported because victims feel no confidence in the police and see reporting a crime as pointless.

Even if a crime is reported, it will not necessarily be added to the official statistics. The police may conclude, for example, that there is insufficient evidence to believe the report. Moreover, poorly performing police departments have an incentive to stop recording crimes: it makes them look more successful than they are. For these reasons and many more, criminologists commonly posit that the dark figure of crime is far larger than the official figure—perhaps by as much as an order of magnitude. And there is good reason to believe that in Britain, the dark figure is unusually high.

The British government derives its rosy estimates of the falling crime rate from two separate sets of statistics. The first, Police Recorded Crime, does indeed show a recent fall in the total number of crimes recorded in England and Wales—from 6.01 million in 2004 to 4.95 million in 2008. But the long-term trend is quite different. It shows just 2.69 million crimes recorded in 1980, a number that rose steadily until 1992, when it reached 5.59 million. After a decline in the nineties, it began rising again, until 2004, when it hit that all-time high of just over 6 million. While the recent drop to 4.95 million may be welcome, it is still high by anyone’s standards: to find the last year that the British police recorded fewer than that, you have to go back to 1999.

Defenders of the statistics counter that changes in crime-counting rules kicked in during 1998, pushing the number of recorded crimes up. Perhaps—but that doesn’t account for the even grimmer picture painted by police records of violent crime. Sure enough, when the rules changed in 1998, the total number of violent crimes recorded jumped from 231,000 to 503,000. But then, even after the switch, it continued to rise sharply, hitting a peak of 1.06 million in 2006. That number has since declined only slightly: in 2008, the number of police-recorded violent crimes stood at 961,000. When it comes to violence, in other words, Police Recorded Crime actually confirms the public’s general view.

Further, the recent decline to 4.95 million total crimes recorded could well mean that the public has lost faith in the criminal-justice system and no longer believes that reporting crimes will result in the punishment of the perpetrators. Support for this hypothesis comes from a British Federation of Small Businesses poll indicating that 60 percent of businesses in London had been victims of crime in the past year. But proprietors reported to the police only half of the burglaries, vehicle thefts, and assaults that they suffered—and not a single case of arson. They didn’t think that the offenders would be caught and punished, they explained. Going to the police just wasn’t worth their time.

A typical comment on the website of the Daily Mail makes the same point: “A few years back I saw someone slash 4 tyres on a car. I did not report it to the police. I am a female, living alone in a rather isolated location. I knew that tyre slashing would probably warrant no more than the police having a word with the perpetrator and leaving it at that, maybe a fine, while the perpetrator would most likely have taken a more robust approach to me.” Another writer to the website says: “I had my car broken into in the Palmers Green area of London. I called the police to obtain a ‘crime number’ but was asked to call back a week later as they were inundated with such requests. When my car was broken into again the following year I didn’t bother reporting it.” If this attitude is widespread enough, the dark figure of crime fades to black.

Police-recorded crime statistics are an imperfect guide for another reason. Perhaps the number of muggings in a particular district really has gone down. But could it be because citizens no longer venture out of their homes at night for fear of being mugged? If someone needs to restrict his activities more severely and purchase more elaborate security equipment just to be as safe as he was ten years ago, his sense that crime is rising may be more significant than the bare fact that crime is falling. Even the murder rate may not be a particularly sound measure of criminality, because advances in medical technology have ensured that more victims of attempted murder survive.

Recognizing the limitations of police crime figures, governments have begun to supplement them with a second kind of statistic, the victimization survey—a poll that asks whether respondents have been the victims of crime. British government officials are fond of saying that the rigor of the British Crime Survey (BCS), an annual poll of about 50,000 homeowners in England and Wales, ensures that British crime statistics are the world’s most reliable. The BCS suggests that the dark figure of crime is extremely high: last year, for example, it indicated that some 10 million crimes had been committed, far more than the police-recorded 4.95 million. Still, the government points triumphantly to the 16–18 million annual crimes that the BCS indicated in the mid-1990s. Since then, officials say, the figures have come down steadily.

But the BCS suffers from shortcomings, too. Crime sampling is a classic problem in epidemiology and resembles, in many respects, efforts to track the spread of HIV. You won’t necessarily gain a useful sense of the percentage of the population that, say, shares needles by calling 100 households at random and asking whether the respondents have recently shared a needle, for the people most likely to share needles are those least likely to have a household. Similarly, victims of crime are more likely than average members of society to be poor, homeless, mentally ill, or distrustful of officious bureaucrats who call to ask complicated, intrusive questions. Indeed, those most fearful of crime are those least likely to open their doors to pollsters. Criminologist Marian Fitzgerald argues that the survey doesn’t capture the extent of violent crime in Britain because of information-gathering problems: “The people who are most at risk of crime and serious violent crime are young men in inner cities. For the last decade social surveys have found it difficult to get into these areas.” And even if you can locate crime victims and ask them questions, they are likelier than average members of society to lie when they answer—since they are likelier, by the mere fact of being victims, to be related to criminals or otherwise associated with them.

Note, too, that the BCS polls homeowners, not renters. This immediately skews the results by deflecting attention from poorer neighborhoods, which are the areas likely to have the highest crime rates. And the pollsters have only been sampling children under 16 since January 2009, so crimes against youths haven’t been recorded. If you read the British press, you will see that youth crime is what has the public most concerned. A 2007 Freedom of Information request to Britain’s police forces found that 40 percent of all muggings were committed by kids under 16, many doubtless against other children. In January 2008, the Daily Telegraph obtained figures from the Ministry of Justice indicating that in the three years prior, violent crime committed by youths, measured by convictions in court and the issuance of formal police warnings, had increased by 37 percent; robberies committed by youths had risen by 43 percent. Of course, a rise in convictions does not necessarily indicate a rise in crime; it may indicate instead that the government is cracking down on crime, and indeed this is how the government explains these figures. But it is suggestive that there has been no commensurate rise in adult convictions and warnings. The most plausible explanation for this is that the government has been cracking down on youth crime disproportionately because it is rising disproportionately.

Nor does the BCS poll the victims of sex crimes, drug crimes, crimes against commercial premises, or (obviously) murder. In 2003, David Green of the think tank Civitas attempted to calculate the number of crimes in some of those missing categories. The BCS that year estimated that about 13 million crimes had been committed, but using the Home Office’s seldom-publicized estimates of police underrecording of significant crimes, Green concluded that the true number was nearly twice that.

The BCS has other weaknesses. If a respondent claims to have been the victim of a particular crime more than five times in the past year, the pollsters are instructed to enter the number as five. For instance, if a homeowner in a high-crime area reports that feral youths vandalize his property every week, his report will enter the database as five crimes, not 52. In 2007, researchers Graham Farrell and Ken Pease concluded that if one refrained from “truncating the long statistical ‘tail’ of victimization,” the overall number of BCS crimes would be at least 3 million higher.

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As for the downward trend in the BCS, as with Police Recorded Crime, it may reflect a real shift—in this case, a drop in victimization among homeowners who have grown cautious and more aware of crime—while completely missing a huge spike in youth crime and repeat crime in certain disorderly urban areas. Victimization studies also show that the crime rate in Britain is far higher than in most other European countries. Comparative analyses show England and Wales at the very top of the European crime leagues—and well above the U.S. as well.

Upon close inspection, the official crime statistics hardly suggest that the concerns of the public and press should be dismissed. I propose a counterhypothesis: the media’s treatment of crime, while obviously no perfect measurement, may well be a better guide to what’s really happening in Britain, or at least an equally valid one. The media, unlike the government, are responding in real time to market demand. The market in Britain for stories about ultraviolent juvenile delinquents is insatiable; perhaps the people who buy these newspapers are, in effect, responding to a better-designed survey than criminologists have been able yet to construct.

Why might Britain be suffering such high levels of crime? It isn’t hard to guess. Officials at every level of the British criminal-justice system—detectives, judges, prison officials, probation officers—complain that too few criminals are caught and that those who are caught rarely receive sentences that will function as a deterrent. Lack of resources and a massive bureaucracy hamper police efforts: the average time to process an arrest in London is over ten hours, and the number of forms that must be filled out averages about 35, according to various analyses. Home Office figures released in 2007 show that police officers in England and Wales spend only about 13 percent of their time on patrol—and 20 percent on paperwork.

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Perhaps as a consequence, more than two-thirds of burglaries reported to the London police are never investigated, according to police figures released under the Freedom of Information Act and obtained by the Daily Telegraph. Under 10 percent result in an arrest. And even if an arrest leads to a conviction, it’s unlikely to include real punishment. The London policeman adds that it’s common for a burglar to be arrested 30 times a year, taken to court 20 times a year, and punished with nothing more than a fine—“which is meaningless, because they can’t pay. There’s no chance that with minor-level crimes you’ll go to prison.” A London magistrate clarifies: “It’s not that they can’t pay, it’s that they won’t—and the system doesn’t push the point.” Theodore Dalrymple, a contributing editor of City Journal and a former prison doctor, tells me that he recently met a burglar on his 57th conviction. The burglar was fined 50 pounds, to be paid in five-pound installments—considerably less than someone in a legitimate business, making a comparable amount of money, would pay in taxes.

Juvenile criminals can be particularly confident that if they commit a crime, it is unlikely to carry any serious consequences. During the seventies and eighties, the government passed legislation making it much harder to impose long custodial sentences on minors. The London policeman mentions a schoolgirl in his borough who was recently arrested and found guilty of committing “grievous bodily harm”—which means that “bones were broken, someone’s life was seriously affected; usually GBH implies surgical follow-up.” She received a 12-month supervision order. “Essentially, just reporting in for a year. Kids see this and say, ‘What the hell, what can you do to me?’ ”


Also during the seventies and eighties, the government introduced new forms of noncustodial sentencing, including community service and early-release schemes even for career criminals. In 2008, figures from the Ministry of Justice indicated that some 5,000 criminals who had already served more than ten jail sentences had received noncustodial sentences. Not surprisingly, a third of prosecutions in London collapse because witnesses won’t testify: they know all too well that even if convicted, the criminals will be walking the streets terrifyingly soon.

The situation in Britain, then, resembles that of 1980s New York, whose crime problems were routinely called insoluble. What the British government fails to understand is that the majority of serious crimes are committed by a small cadre of criminals, who are also, disproportionately, the authors of minor crimes. If you lock these criminals up—reliably, and for a long time—crime will drop precipitously. The reason Broken Windows policing works is not that it is inherently important to jail every petty thug who breaks a window; it is that the window-breakers tend to be muggers, rapists, burglars, and murderers as well. If you get them off the streets, the rate of serious crime will fall. To dismiss as “true but trivial” the finding that “an astronomical amount of crime is committed” in Britain is only half right. The British people know this full well, even if their government does not.