Stop juggling figures, start fighting crime

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Tomorrow you will read headlines to scare you witless. They will claim that London crime in the year to April rose by more than six per cent. Street muggings will be "up by 38 per cent". Other headlines will indicate that "true" crime is even higher, rising 20 per cent, 30 per cent, even 40 per cent.

Meanwhile, another set of figures will be issued from the same Home Office. These will be completely different. They will say that crime is not rising at all but is on a steady downward trend. The Home Secretary will protest that there is no cause for alarm. He will come near to rubbishing the first set of figures.

These are the statistics of the madhouse. The two figures being released by the Home Office have nothing in common. The alarmist figures record police activity. They go up and down in response to Home Office instructions on how and what to record.

The second, reassuring figures have nothing to do with the police. They are taken from a poll of 33,000 households and are called the British Crime Survey (BCS). They are based on the experiences of ordinary people, crimes whose victims may, or more often may not, report them to the police. There will be far more of them, but they are not going up.

What is the point of having two contradictory sets of "crime" figures, except to bamboozle the public? David Blunkett knows this is a nonsense. He knows that the British Crime Survey is the only reasonably reliable evidence he has on crime. He even knows, because he has admitted in print, that the more police he employs the more crimes they will report.

The quickest way to get the police figures down is to sack policemen. Yet he cannot bring himself to abandon the police figures because they are his way of allocating money, drawing up league tables and exercising control over local chief constables. They feed his control freakery.

Let me illustrate the problem. Walk out of your front door and head down to the local shops. You may notice a couple of cars broken into and their windows smashed. A neighbour will mention a burglary down the road. A schoolboy will complain that his mobile phone has been stolen. A shop alarm is blaring. Five youths in hooded sweatshirts are lurking in a corner exchanging something.

A vandal has daubed the Post Office wall. A car has knocked over a Keep Left sign.

All these are probably crimes, but few of them are known to the police. Were the police to trawl every West End club for drugs each night or breathalyse ever car driver at 11pm, I am sure London could post the highest "recorded crime rate" in the world. These spurious rates do not measure criminality, only how many people are doing the counting.

The Home Office sometimestries to marry the police figures with the survey ones, but it is comparing chalk with cheese.

Mr Blunkett would like to standardise the police figures but this, too, is a hopeless task. The police record only a tiny proportion of man's inhumanity to man - and woman.

What happens between a police officer and a member of the public cannot be squeezed into one of Mr Blunkett's neat categories. He is proposing, for instance, that from next year the police should record a pub punch-up not as an affray but as a multiple of individual assaults. The figures will probably show that in 2002 the entire nation suddenly went berserk. So what?

Londoners do not want to know how much crime there is in the metropolis. They know there is too much. What they want to know is whether it is going up or down and what is being done about it. Yet that is no easier to answer.

I repeat, the police figures are useless. Every change in insurance rates yields a change in requests to police stations for a crime number. The latest clampdown on muggings by increasing foot patrols may yield a brief fall in muggings, or it may shift them (unrecorded) elsewhere.

Next year London recorded crime will surge because Mr Blunkett wants the police to suppress bad neighbours and "social nuisances". Under new legislation, thousands of new crimes arising from antisocial behaviour will go into the books.

These shifts in the concept of criminality achieve little beyond pushing up police figures. They do not tell us whether London is really becoming a better or worse place to live, a safer or less safe one.

I would stop collating police figures and rely on the British Crime Survey. It is at least reasonably reliable over time. It "discovers" more crime than do the police, but that is because there is more crime than the police can ever find. It is also mostly good news, showing a steady decline in criminality over recent years. The reason is boring. We are getting richer. There are fewer young men of criminal age in the population and property is better protected.

Nobody can really measure crime because nobody can agree on what it is. What we can do is fight it, and that we are not doing.

I still find it a mystery that, since Ken Livingstone took over the London police, traffic and parking in my neighbourhood is policed with a ruth lessness worthy of Alcatraz. Uniformed wardens patrol the pavement without ceasing. Cameras monitor every vehicle movement. Fines pour forth from electronic equipment.

Yet 10ft back from the same kerb lies a complete contrast. There is a perception that burglars, thieves, muggers and vandals roam scotfree. A policeman is never seen. London seems to be getting like Al Capone's Chicago.

As the gangster told his friend, the mayor: "You stick to parking tickets; crime is my business."