Politicalog - Fighting the Spin: Hidden Crime

The last serious post I made before swanning off to EuroDisney was all about confusing and conflicting crime statistics. My tongue in cheek pop at New Labour's preference for using the British Crime Survey as an authoratitive source of crime statistics solicited the following comment from Phil:

Obviously the anecdotal evidence from a random survey is much more accurate than official crime statistics.

Actually, yes, it is. The British Crime Survey interviews a sample of 40,000 people, weighted to give a cross-section of the public; the survey asks the same questions, with the same wording, year after year. Police recorded crime data, by contrast, is highly responsive to political pressure, both in how it's recorded - count this as a crime and dismiss that as an 'incident' - and in how it's gathered in the first place: put a few dozen coppers in the centre of town at chucking-out time and you'll end up with a lot more 'violent offences' recorded than you did before. The British Crime Survey isn't perfect, but it's much more trustworthy than police figures - ask any criminologist.

Here is a part of my reply:

The BCS may be a useful long term trend indicator but at the end of the day 40000 people represents about 0.07% of the population. It does not account for crimes against businesses, crimes against under 16 year olds, crimes where there is 'no direct victim' (ie: drug dealing - morally dubious that one if you ask me) and finally (and this is a belter), crimes that have involved deaths (like homicide)... because, to directly quote the Home Office - 'as the victims cannot be interviewed'

In summary, the Home Office conveniently ignores drug dealing, vandalism, crimes against children, shop lifting and murder when it presents its authoratitive crime figures.

So today, I stumble upon this article on Sky:

Around three out of five small business have been burgled, robbed, or been hit by other crime, according to a new survey.
And most small business owners do not bother to report crime to the police because they do not believe the offenders will be caught, the Federation Of Small Businesses poll said.

A survey of 18,000 businessmen and women showed that fewer than half would contact police if they became a victim of crime.

As you can see though, it would make no difference to the crime statistics whatsoever if 100% of those small business owners affected by crime contacted the police: