A Tangled Web: Why you can't believe crime statistics
By Rodger Patrick
December 2014
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Crime
is going down – officially. The trouble is that most people don’t believe it:
they feel that society is becoming more crime-ridden. So what could explain the
discrepancy between the claims made by politicians and the everyday experience
of citizens?
In
this hard-hitting exposé, Rodger Patrick, former Chief Inspector of West
Midlands Police, shows how this has come about. He unpacks the gaming behaviours
of police forces under pressure from central government to reduce crime rates
and increase detection rates by any means – including some that are unethical
and even criminal.
A
Tangled Web takes the reader into the arcane world of ‘cuffing’ – making crimes
disappear by refusing to believe the victims; ‘nodding’ – inducing suspects to
‘nod’ at locations where they can claim to have committed crimes that will be
‘taken into consideration’, sometimes in return for sex, drugs and alcohol;
‘stitching’, or fabricating evidence, which allows police forces to obtain
convictions without ever going to court; and ‘skewing’, or concentrating
resources on offences that are used as performance indicators, at the expense of
time-consuming investigations into more serious crime.
Rodger
Patrick cites the now considerable number of official inquiries into police
forces that have uncovered evidence of these practices on such a scale, and over
such a wide area, that they cannot be put down to a few ‘rotten apples’. He
argues that the problems are organisational, and result from making the career
prospects of police officers dependent on performance management techniques
originally devised for the commercial sector. Her Majesty's Inspectorate of
Constabulary has long taken a relaxed view of the problem, putting a generous
interpretation on evidence uncovered in its investigations, although in a small
number of cases officers have had to resign or even face criminal
charges.
About
the Author
Dr
Rodger Patrick is an ex-Chief Inspector of West Midlands Police. He served for
thirty years in the West Midlands Police before retiring in 2005. During his
career he carried out a variety of roles including training, personnel, CID,
community relations and public order. However his greatest operational challenge
was policing a large inner-city area including the Balsall Heath area of
Birmingham during the 1990s when community representatives came onto the streets
in large numbers to challenge the drug dealers, pimps, kerb crawlers and street
sex workers who, they maintained, were responsible for making the neighbourhood
unsafe for residents.
This
experience stimulated his academic interest in the relationship between police
governance, policing style and effectiveness and he completed a case study on
the Balsall Heath experience as part of an MSc (by research) at Aston Business
School. He carried out a further study, into the identification, categorisation
and measurement of ‘gaming’ practices and the implications for the governance
and regulation of the police, at the Institute of Local Government Studies
(INLOGOV), University of Birmingham.
In the Media:
Warning
over fiddling of crime figures The
Times
Crime
figures: true picture may be worse than feared, says think tank report The
Daily Telegraph
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