FactCheck: is someone assaulted every four hours in Glasgow?
Updated on 23 July 2008
"Someone is the victim of a serious assault every four hours", claim the Conservatives. FactCheck looks at the numbers.
The claim
"Here in Labour's Glasgow someone is the victim of a serious assault every four hours, rape, attempted rape or indecent assault every twenty hours, vandalism every thirty minutes, and a drug crime is committed every hour."
Leaflet produced for Davena Rankin, Scottish Conservative parliamentary candidate, Glasgow East by-election, July 2008
The background
Numbers are a politician's best - and worst - friend. As regular FactCheck readers will know, Gordon Brown is able to make repeated boasts about the record number of employed people in Britain.
But he doesn't point out that, because the population of the country is increasing as well, the employment rate is the same as it was in 1971.
On the other hand, listing numbers of crimes can make a big city sound like a pretty dangerous place.
In a leaflet titled Labour's criminal record, issued before this month's Glasgow East by-election, the Conservatives painted a pretty grim picture of the Glasgow under Labour as a place where a serious assault is carried out every four hours, and vandalism every half hour.
But did they get the numbers right? And what do they tell us about crime rates in Glasgow?
The analysis
The Scottish Conservatives told FactCheck the claims were based on recorded crime data for the Glasgow City Council area for 2006-07.
Recorded crime statistics do just what they say on the tin: measure crimes recorded by the police, so they don't take into account unreported crimes.
Still, they're the most sensible way to get official information on crime in a reasonably small geographical area.
To bear out the claims on the leaflet, Glasgow would need to have seen around 1,460 serious assaults, 438 rapes, attempted rapes and indecent assaults, 17,520 acts of vandalism, and 8,760 drug offences.
So how do the figures really stack up?
The Scottish Government publishes a wealth of recorded crime statistics, some of which are broken down by council area.
According to these, we know there were 75,387 recorded crimes in the Glasgow City area in 2006-07. This is a decrease by almost 10,000 since 2001, although it's always worth being cautious about changes in crime stats over time.
For example, the Scottish Crime Recording Standard, introduced in 2004, meant numbers of some crimes, including vandalism, appeared to increase because of changes to the way in which they were now measured.
There were 1,159 crimes of indecency in 2006-07. This includes the likes of indecent exposure and prostitution-related offences, rather than just the crimes referred to in the Tories' leaflet. It also includes 18,883 fire-raising and vandalism offences, which includes malicious mischief and reckless conduct with firearms.
We cross-checked these with the detailed Lanarkshire Police Force breakdowns for 2007. In 13 police subdivisions covering the Glasgow area, there were 8,863 drug possession and supply crimes, 1,994 serious assaults and 161 rapes and attempted rapes and 625 indecent assaults.
So the Conservatives' claims do give an accurate reflection of the official figures for Glasgow; in fact, their rape, attempted rape and indecent assault statistic appears to be an underestimate.
What about Labour's role in all of this? The party has been running the UK since 1997. The city's MPs have been almost entirely Labour for the past decade, the exception being former Glasgow Kelvin MP George Galloway, who held on to his seat until 2005, after being expelled from the party in 2003.
The Scottish parliament was held by a Labour-Lib Dem coalition until 2007, when the SNP took power. The first ministers and majority of the coalition cabinet were Labour.
The by-election is taking place in Glasgow East, just one part of Glasgow, hence in that smaller part of the city there would be fewer offences per time period cited on the leaflet.
The Tories aren't pretending any differently, but it's worth bearing in mind as this is by-election literature.
The verdict
The leaflet's claims are pretty consistent with the recorded crime stats for Glasgow - in fact, they tend to err on the side of caution.
The one factor missing is a measure of population - one assault an hour in a village of 500 people is far scarier than one an hour in a country of five million, for example.
If we look at the number of crimes per 10,000 people in the Glasgow City Council area in 2006-2007, it's 1,298, down from 1,398 in 2000.
Violent crime, crimes of dishonesty (theft, fraud etc) and crimes of indecency dropped, although vandalism and "other" crimes showed a slight increase.
FactCheck rating: 0.5
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Every time a FactCheck article is published we'll give it a rating from zero to five.
The lower end of the scale indicates that the claim in question largerly checks out, while the upper end of the scale suggests misrepresentation, exaggeration, a massaging of statistics and/or language.
In the unlikely event that we award a 5 out of 5, our factcheckers have concluded that the claim under examination has absolutely no basis in fact.
The sources
Davena Rankin
Recorded crime in Scotland 2006/07
Recorded crime in Scotland 2001
Strathclyde Police statistics
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