General Election fact watch: Is crime really rising under the Tories?

Labour claimed reproted crime is rising under the Conservatives
Rex
12 May 2017
WEST END FINAL

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Starting a new series examining claims made by politicians on the campaign trail.

Key quote:

“Reported crime is rising under the Tories… almost every police force in the country recorded an increase in crime over the last year.”

Labour party press release, 2 May 2017

Analysis:

We can’t be sure about what’s happened to crime over the past year but it looks like certain kinds of crime might have risen. That said, crime generally has been falling for the past few decades.

There are two main measures of crime in England and Wales: the Crime Survey and police recorded crime. Labour has specified crimes recorded by the police, which have risen nine per cent in the past year and been trending upward since 2014.

But just because the numbers are going up doesn’t mean that crime is doing the same in reality.

There are longstanding problems with these statistics, which have tended to tell us more about police recording practices than about trends in crime. They’re “not currently considered a reliable measure of trends in crime for most crime types”, according to the Office for National Statistics.

That said, the ONS say some of the recent rises are likely to be genuine, including in homicide (hard to miscount), knife crime, and theft offences.

And Professor Marian Fitzgerald of the University of Kent told the BBC recently that “any rises that we are seeing now are genuine. Improvements [to police recording practices] stabilised a long time ago.”

But the headline measure of crime is still the Crime Survey for England and Wales. This involves asking people if they’ve been the victim of a crime, whether or not they reported it to the police. It’s not perfect, but it picks up many more crimes.

Crime has been falling for more than two decades according to the Crime Survey. In the past year the figures are basically static.

The Crime Survey is best for long-term trends. It’s “less reliable for providing an indication of emerging trends” because of a time lag.

So it’s possible that it will show a rise in the years to come.

Even so, the big picture is that crime is much lower than in the Eighties and Nineties — as is the case in many developed countries.

Verdict:

Crimes recorded by the police have been rising since 2014, but that’s partly down to changes in recording practices. Crime in England and Wales is falling over the long term according to the more reliable Crime Survey.

Full Fact is the UK's independent fact-checking organisation. For sources and more fact checks go to fullfact.org

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