FactCheck: less crime in London?

The background

Crime - that perennial battleground for politicians needing to seem tough - comes with a wave of spinnable statistics.

Nowhere more so than in London, where the crime rate, and fear of crime, is higher than the rest of country.

In a mayoral debate this morning, Ken Livingstone made several boasts about his crime-busting record. His manifesto, launched last month, is littered with statistics about how much safer London is today.

Yesterday he claimed crime is falling by around six per cent, and that serious crimes are also down.

Not so, interjected Lib Dem candidate and former senior police officer Brian Paddick, who this week launched an election broadcast highlighting the 27 teenage murders that took place last year.

Can they both be right?

The analysis

Firstly, the statistics that Livingstone favours.

Recorded crimes in London in 2006-07 - the last complete year for which figures are available - are down six per cent on 2005-06, and violent offences down 8 per cent.

London's drop was the biggest of all the English regions and Wales. The national average was a two per cent fall in crime overall, and one per cent fall in violent crime.

Back a year to 2005-06, and London saw a three per cent drop on the previous year, although violent crime stayed stable, and burglary increased by two per cent.

The national picture saw a smaller overall year-on-year drop: 1 per cent, but an increase in violent crime (by two per cent) and a decrease in burglary (five per cent).

In 2004-05, recorded crimes dropped four per cent in London, compared with six per cent nationally.

And in 2003-04, they dropped by two per cent, compared to a one per cent national increase.

However, these figures - based on Home Office analysis of data supplied by the Met, which accounts for the vast majority of policing in London, and the tinier City of London force - only tell one story.

Recorded crime figures show the number of crimes people report to the police, which are recorded according to official definitions of crime.

So if you encourage more people to report crimes, it's possible that crime figures will appear to show an increase - but this doesn't necessarily mean there are more crimes.

The way crime is measured by the police changes over time, as well. New National Crime Reporting Standards came into force across the country in April 2002, and had the effect of increasing the number of some crimes recorded by the police.

There's another way of measuring crime: the British Crime Survey, which asks 50,000 people about their experiences of crime in the past year.

This is the method generally hailed as the more accurate representation of long-term trends, as it isn't affected by counting changes, and covers crimes that people may be reluctant to report to the police.

This isn't to say it's completely comprehensive; it doesn't include the likes of drug-dealing and taking, murder, fraud, and sexual offences, or cover the under-16s.

Still, according to the British Crime Survey, crime in London in 2006-07 stayed pretty stable, with little change to rates of violent crime, burglary and vehicle crime.

It was a similar picture the year before.

A note of caution before giving too much weight to individual offences measured by the BCS: only 11.8 per cent of the core sample - around 5,500 - comes from London, and not all of these people respond.

An independent review for the Home Office said that, at police force level, the BCS should only really be used for total household and personal crime, rather than being drilled down into individual crimes.

Still, the overall picture seems to have shown little change - which means Paddick can also be right in saying that crime has stayed pretty constant.

When sticking up for the recorded crime figures, Livingstone often singles out one offence which he reckons can't be under-recorded without having bodies lying around in the streets. Murder, he said this morning, has dropped by 28 per cent.

This is true - but only if you crunch the numbers since 2003, when murders in London peaked. In 2007, the Met recorded 160 homicides - a 28 per cent reduction on the peak of 222 in 2003. But compare them to the more useful, and lower, 2000 figure of 183, and you get a less-impressive 13 per cent drop since he actually came to power.

It's a similar picture with violent crime, although this was more susceptible to reporting changes in 2002.

FactCheck rating: 2.5

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

Mayoral debate, LBC 97.3FM, 10 April 2008
Crime in England and Wales 2006/07: London region
Crime in England and Wales 2005/06: London region
Crime in England and Wales 2004/05: London region
Crime in England and Wales 2003/04: London region
Crime in England and Wales 2002/03: London region
British Crime Survey Technical Report 2006-2007
Metropolitan police: 2007 annual crime stats
Crime Statistics: An independent Review
FactCheck: more police, less crime

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