Violent crime up 18% in England and Wales

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Pretty sobering statistics which, along with various threads on here, like the abuse gangs and (more recently) scooter thefts paint a disturbing picture:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-40665733

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Yep, statistics and bullst.

BBC said:

But the Crime Survey of England and Wales, based on people's experiences of crime, showed a 7% drop.

Read the article if you want to make sense of that one!

Ordinary people's perceptions are, IMHO< pretty key to the reality, and not the massaged and filleted 'reports' which, as we all know, are vigorously politicised by both the police and government to suit their own needs at the time. People, rightly, feel the law is neither effective nor efficient with regard to crimes that blight most of us; theft and burglary being key. The separate issue of sexual assaults seems, to any rational observer, to be one where recent, high profile cases prove there has been a chronic breakdown in the law.

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Regiment said:

You forgot the obvious, the "it's all the people who talk a bit foreign" doing it all. Sobering.

To an extent, it matters not who's "doing it", but rather that it is, clearly, sufficiently easy to so do that the figures have burgeoned so rapidly.

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Gandahar said:

Is it actually the people who talk foreign actually doing it?

I don't know, I don't particularly care either. Whoever is doing it ought to feel the full force of the law and, if and when they are caught, need to be put away so they cannot re-offend and blight yet more lives.

techiedave said:

Reading some of the other threads such as the travellers thread I think what irks people is the attitudes.
It seems to some people that if you take the piss you just get away with it.

Also, the attitude of the criminal classes that they have nothing to fear from the law.

As an example of how brazen and fearless thieves are, a friend had a new Audi RS6 - the C6 model with the lovely, loopy V10 engine - and within a year or so of having it had someone try three times on the same night to bust their (fortunately, extremely good quality) front door in to get the keys. This despite the fact the police actually attended the scene after the initial attempt, around 1am.

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La Liga said:

Recorded crime by the police is different from the CSEW.

The police have, to put it generously, not always recorded crime as well as they should have. Bigends is an expert in this area.

If you want to look at trends and by able to make more reliable comparisons the then the CSEW is, overall, better.

To be fair though, you have to admit the figures are like a football though - kicked around by both sides and used, manipulated and massaged to promote whatever agenda suits the proponent.

Probably more relevant that the dubious numbers are the specifics of cases and the experiences of both the public and police alike, with regard to how prolific recidivism and career crime is and also how little deterrent current sentencing provides.

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La Liga said:

I do stand behind the CSEW data as being a reliable indication of crime and thus allowing comparisons to different points in time. I've never seen anything which indicates it has been manipulated etc.

I doubt whether the raw data is manipulated, but what does tend to happen is entities quote selectively, in order to support whatever position they are arguing at any given time; higher "crime's worse" or "police are failing" or "government cuts are impacting the police" etc. etc.

Moreover, given the relatively small sample size, I definitely would question how representative it is.

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Mr GrimNasty said:

Frybywire said:

You mean 'poor people'?

No, organised violent and serious crime actually pays quite well.

Since UK is seen as a soft touch, easy pickings environment. So whilst I would dispute the idea that the crime increase is 'because of foreigners' there is, with our open borders, the unfortunate and seemingly unavoidable risk that those already involved in crime - often also already wanted by police in both their home nation and also other EU nations too - are arriving here with intent to engage in criminal activity.

However, we grow plenty enough of our own criminals and, it would seem, anomalies in the crime figures themselves make any year-on-year comparison meaningless anyway, the main issue has to be with the policing in general rather than the specifics of who does what IMHO.

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Absolutely no surprises there, whatsoever.

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Octoposse said:

One interesting point to note is that the long term trends (back to the 1960s) reflect improvements in medical care - stuff that is survivable now wasn't necessarily so a few years ago.

Scant consolation for the poor soul being kicked around their local town centre tonight like a rag doll because the local, violent recidivist is just out early from his most recent jail term.