According to Peter Fahy, the chief constable of Greater Manchester Police: <\/em><\/span><\/p>\n \u2018The Home Office rules are clear and we follow them in a consistent way. <\/em><\/span>We had more than 1,000 people involved in the disorder but that does not equate to 1,000 crimes. <\/em>If four people break into your house then it is recorded as one crime in the same way as if one person had broken in. <\/em>On the other hand if one person breaks into a house which is sub-divided into four flats then it is recorded as four crimes’.<\/em><\/p>\n Now I understand why, when I look at Northcote<\/a>, the neighbourhood that contains Clapham Junction that was allegedly turned into some kind of post-apocolyptic war zone, all we see is a modest rise in Crime and ASB from 192 for July to 231 for August.<\/p>\n I can’t really see how this is a true and fair representation of what has happened<\/strong>.<\/p>\n And it raises all sorts of other questions like;<\/p>\n 1) How many of the reported crimes are registered under this method, shouldn’t we know which ones and does it not under-represent the impact of gang crime?<\/p>\n 2) Over time, does this not lead to a compound distortion and bias in regional crime figures, towards crimes committed by individuals?<\/p>\n 3) Would it not conceivably create a lesser incentive for Police to investigate a scene of multiple criminal offences by a group when it is only recorded and shown to the public as a single crime?<\/p>\n 4) Is it really so hard to report crime as one crime per criminal rather than one crime per group of criminals engaged in the same act? After all, they are charged, tried and sentenced separately on an individual basis according to the offences they’ve committed. So how do you feed that back into a clear-up rate?<\/p>\n 5) Now that the crime data is a public good, isn’t it time to ask why do these rules exist in the first place, what is the public’s impression of them and isn’t it time for a review?<\/p>\n Comments as always most welcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Just over a week ago, we uploaded the August data with some anticipation, not least because this is a time-consuming and difficult job. So thanks again to our Chief Data Architect for doing it so quickly. \u00a0We now have 9 … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"http:\/\/img.metro.co.uk\/i\/pix\/2011\/08\/09\/article-1312878654740-0D5B8A4600000578-99467_636x410.jpg\" "\\"Debenhams")
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