Caught Red-Handed Cooking Crime Stats

Home office and police have been caught red-handed fiddling the crime figures to make them look good. Not content with using the discredited British Crime Survey to massage statistics, the home office has finally admitted police forces have been fixing figures for  serious violent crimes.

Policing minister Vernon Coaker said crime figures could still be trusted. The Orange Party wouldn't trust that statement as far as it could throw it.

Apparently some crimes that should have been classed as the very serious GBH were actually recorded as a minor assault.

So, while figures show overall violent crime keeps going down, the official total of most serious violent crime has actually gone up by 22%.

Home secretary Jacqui Smith, in a remarkable piece of New Labour gobbledegook said: 

"Let's be clear, this isn't crime that wasn't being recorded or wasn't being reported or wasn't being dealt with. It just wasn't being recorded in the category 'most serious violence. It's just that I wanted to focus particularly on most serious violence and therefore we needed to be sure that everybody in terms of categorising it was categorising it in the same way, so that we'd be able to track whether or not all the things that we're putting into place are making a difference."

New ways of counting were brought in by the home office as part of a focus on neighbourhood crime and as a way of pulling the wool over our eyes. 

And that opened the way for the shameful Orwellian publicity poster campaign which has been popping up all over the place, on buses and on patrol cars, trying to make us all feel safe, while streets erupt in violence. It can't be happening really because the posters say it isn't.

New Labour's much-favoured and totally meaningless British Crime Survey (BCS), a skewed and very limited survey which excludes youngsters, has been trotted out by the government for years to falsely justify their claim that they are cracking down on crime.

A meaningless survey is one thing, deliberately fixing the figures is quite another. Just blaming the police, who are forced to play the game with the government's obsession with targets and crime figures, is a cop-out. 

Blair's mantra "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" is still coming back to haunt the government. After politicising the police, it is still getting up to every trick in the book to spin its way out of a decade of half-backed policies which has created the monster on our streets.