The UK’s official crime statistics are an inaccurate reflection of our everyday experience
of crime, according to Dr Ziggy MacDonald of the University of Leicester, writing in the
latest issue of the Economic Journal. His research shows that forecasts of crime trends
fail to take proper account of what drives unreported crime. For example, someone who
is currently unemployed is 7% less likely to report a burglary than someone who is
currently in work, while someone on a relatively high income is 8% more likely to report
a burglary than someone on less than average income.
That official crime statistics are plagued by what criminologists call the ‘dark figure’ of
unreported or hidden crime is reasonably well known, both among academics and in
the wider community. What is not so well known is that under-reporting (or nonreporting)
of crime is influenced by some of the same factors that are known to exert
pressure on the amount of crime we actually experience in society. This is what
MacDonald’s study shows, and it has serious implications for Home Office and
academic forecasts based on economic models of crime.
The study shows that just as an increase in the unemployment rate is likely to lead to
an increase in property crime, individuals who are unemployed are less likely to report
being a victim of crime. The conclusion is that the forecasts of crime trends ought to
include a mechanism for correcting for reporting behaviour. Otherwise, they do little
more than predict what is happening to official crime statistics rather than what is
happening to affect people’s everyday lives.
MacDonald’s aim is to draw to the attention of economists some of the problems that
are likely to be encountered when using official crime statistics in their analysis of the
general crime problem. For example, data from the British Crime Survey reveal a
remarkable variation in the percentage of crimes being reported to the police, with only
13% of robberies being reported in 1983 but 46.3% being reported in 1987.
In addition to highlighting the general disparities between official crime statistics and the
public’s experience of crime, the study also draws attention to differential police
recording of crime, something that varies between police force areas and over time. For
example, recent Home Office research suggests that the recording by police of vehicle
thefts fell from 91% of reported incidents in 1981 to just 55% of incidents in 1995.
Having established that official crime statistics probably do not represent our
experience of crime, MacDonald then investigates what this means for economic
modelling of the crime problem. For some time, economists have tried to determine
which factors influence the aggregate crime rate in society. These models, which
typically focus on property crime, tend to show that in addition to being influenced by
changes in the criminal justice system – for example, police clear-up rates or average
sentence length - this type of crime increases when unemployment and the number of
young men increase, but it falls as National Income increases. Recently, this type of
analysis has been used by the Home Office as a basis for forecasting trends in crime.
What this study shows is that these forecasts have to be more sophisticated if they are
to be of any real value to policy-makers. Using data from the British Crime Survey,
MacDonald analyses the causes of under-reporting and shows that it is not necessarily
a random event. For example, an individual who is currently unemployed is 7% less
likely to report a burglary than someone who is currently in work, while an individual on
a relatively high income is 8% more likely to report a burglary than someone on less
than average income.
The overall conclusion of this analysis is that rather than fooling people all of the time
with official crime statistics, politicians ought to be more careful. A more sophisticated
public is becoming ever more aware that what really matters is what we experience in
our everyday lives, not what the politicians tell us is happening.
ENDS
Notes for Editors: ‘Official Crime Statistics: Their Use and Interpretation’ by Dr Ziggy
MacDonald is published in the February 2002 issue of the Economic Journal.
MacDonald is in the Department of Economics at the University of Leicester.
For Further Information: contact RES Media Consultant Romesh Vaitilingam on 0117-
983-9770 or 07768-661095 (email: romesh@compuserve.com); or Ziggy MacDonald
via email: ziggy.macdonald@le.ac.uk.