No Believing The Police On Knife Crime
HOW fast can you read? Study if you will the Sun’s headline: “By the time you’ve read this page anther person will be a knife victim.”
Were it not for the associated news that it’s “4 MINS UNTIL NEXT CRIME”, readers may not bother to finish the words and thereby prevent another stabbing.
The story is one of fact piled upon fact:
“The new crime statistics showed 130,000 people were wounded or threatened with a blade last year”; “Police recorded 22,151 offences involving blades in England and Wales in the year ending March 2008, included 231 attempted murders, 14,000 robberies and more than 8,000 woundings”.
That’s one crime every 23 minutes.
But the Sun prefers to use figures gleaned from the British Crime Survey (BCS) “the Government’s preferred way of measuring crime”.
The BCS is run by the Home Office, and works by asking a sample of householders about their experiences of crime.
You do not have to take part if asked by letter.
Sadly, there are no statistics to say if a person who has been the victim of crime is more likely to respond to the survey than one who has not, nor if a victim is more or less likely to bin a letter marked “crime survey”.
By using the statistics the Sun gets it’s 130,000 knife crimes, and the Government gets a bigger target to tackle.
Posted: 18th, July 2008 | In: Politicians, Tabloids Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
