It was borne out of dissatisfaction with the comprehensiveness of statistics compiled from police records. Criminal Statistics, whilst producing a correct broad pattern of crime, nevertheless had anomalies, most notably shown by Farrington and Dowds in their study of Nottinghamshire study in 1985. Indeed, in a small unpublished study in one subdivision of a British city, Pepinksy showed how influential recording rates could be; he showed that almost half the year’s ‘increase in crime’ had been produced by the police recording every admission by a single offender who frequently stole milk bottles from doorsteps.
The BCS is useful in relation to the Criminal Statistics by not only acting as a supplement by helping to remedy some of the gaps in official statistics, but also in providing a useful check as either a confirmation or modification of views derived from the Criminal Statistics.
Although there are a number of crimes recorded by the police which the BCS does not cover, including drug offences, murder, fraud, and sexual offences, BCS shows more crime than the Criminal Statistics do; only 42% of crimes in the comparable subset of BCS offences were reported to the police in 2004-5, and BCS crime levels were three times higher than the recorded crime levels, although most of it is not very serious; unreported crimes generally involve much lower levels of financial loss, damage, and injury than those reported to the police; in 2004-5, 71% of the comparable subset of crimes were not reported because they were either considered too trivial, or there was no loss, or the police could not do anything about it.
The BCS can be seen to fit a general shift of focus in criminology towards the offence rather than the offender, and hence in the production of new forms of knowledge and data about crime. This is partly from a growing disillusionment among influential policy-makers with the idea that crime can be controlled solely, or even principally, through the actions of the police and criminal justice system, and thus the BCS is further complemented by a variety of local surveys as well as a periodic international survey
By using face-to-face interviews of approximately fifty minutes in length, much detail can be found out about the circumstances of offences and the details of their context. The BCS therefore helps identify those most at risk of different types of crime, which is used in designing and informing crime prevention programmes; the BCS has shown that risks of crime are highest for young people, the unemployed, single parents, private renters, those living in inner-city areas, and in areas of high physical disorder.
However, the current limitations of the BCS are indeed manifold, firstly with the limitation of coverage, defined by Elliott and Ellingworth as an error in the ‘operationalisation of the population’; children under 16 are excluded, almost completely cutting out both paedophile-related offences, and also all personal offences where young victims of crime are used as easy targets.
Commercial organisations are also excluded, due to the nature of the survey being based on private households; however, some other commercial victimisation studies have been done, including a national study in 1994, asking about crime in 1993; this showed much higher rates of victimisation, with 24% of manufacturers and 24% of retailers burgled in that year, compared with only 4% of households in that year, and thus shows that excluding commercial crime may be excluding a large proportion of overall crime.
Transient populations are also excluded; the BCS is not organised using the electoral register, but on a process called PAF based on postal addresses; therefore the homeless are completely excluded, whilst those people who move a lot and do not stay at one address for very long are unlikely to get cover. Although there is not a large number of homeless people, they nevertheless have a phenomenally high victimisation rate, and that is therefore omitted.
In addition, the sampling strategy employed with the BCS uses a constrained version of the PAF; addresses referring to institutional establishments, such as old peoples’ homes, are excluded, as their crime experience was felt to be substantially different from other addresses. Consequently then, even a population frame that purports to cover the population of England and Wales will by necessity miss some sections of that population.
The most recent BCS response rate was 75%; this is extraordinarily good by survey standards, but nevertheless 25% of people that the BCS has tried to contact are excluded; this does not matter if the people missing have exactly the same characteristics as the 75% who have been contracted, but it is very unlikely that the non-respondents have the same characteristics as the respondents.
Aye Maung, writing in 1995, showed that there are disproportionate numbers of non-respondents in inner-city areas, and in properties judged by interviewer to be in poor condition, which are areas with high crime rates, and thus the question of whether the sample is representative or not has to be questioned. There is also a possible differential approach to the same questions by different social groups, as different words mean different things to different groups; for example, the understanding of what constitutes a ‘gang’ would differ between middle class and working class groups.
Some problems also occur due to the retrospective nature of disclosing the crimes, including problems of recall, as revealed by ‘reverse record-checking’, and also of ‘forward-telescoping’, as well as problems of accurately counting multiple victimisations, as for example a doorman at a nightclub may not be able to count how often he had been assaulted during the last year. Indeed, Hazel Genn has noted that victim surveys have tended to use an approach which Skogan has termed ‘the events orientation’, which conceptualises crime as discrete incidents; she suggests that violent victimisation, such as prolonged and habitual domestic violence, may often be better conceptualised as a process, rather than as a series of discrete events.
There are additional problems of recall for crimes involving primarily persons other than the respondent in ‘household crimes’; furthermore, the person questioned may not have known about all the crimes in the household in the past year in the first place, for example if they do not spend much time at home. There is the possible unwillingness of respondents to mention certain kinds of crime, such as intra-family offences, especially if the perpetrator is in the building whilst the interview is taking place
Indeed, of the reasons for non-reporting in the comparable subset in 2004/5, 20% said that it was a private matter or they dealt with it themselves, 1% said it was a friend or relative’s fault, 2% said it was a common occurrence, whilst 3% reported it to other authorities. All four of these categories probably cover a significant amount of domestic crime, and, again, if the perpetrator is in the building while the interview is taking place, it is unlikely that many of these crimes will be reported to the BCS as well for the same reasons.
As well as attempting a comprehensive recording of crimes committed, the BCS assesses public confidence in the criminal justice system; public confidence in the criminal justice system is clearly an important prerequisite for an effective system, and the BCS is thus effective in this way in helping to shape policy decisions.
As well as people’s attitudes to crime and towards the criminal justice system, including the police and the courts, the BCS also investigates experiences of crime, both proprietary and personal, worries, fears about crime security, including neighbourhood watch, and home and vehicle security measures. Police recorded crime is very susceptible to changes in recording practice which can greatly affect the data, whereas the BCS has remained largely the same in this area for 20 years. For example, in April 1998 many new offences were added, including many less violent crimes, whilst the introduction of the National Crime Recording Standard (NCRS), in April 2002, requiring a more prima facie approach to crime recording, whilst no doubt creating no accurate data in the long run, had the effect of increasing recorded crime by almost 10% overnight, simply through a change in recording practices, thus increasing the difficulty of comparing past and present Criminal Statistics.
Police recorded data is also more susceptible to potential manipulation by affected parties, such as police officers or politicians behind recording policies; those interviewers carrying out the BCS survey have no alternative motive, unlike police officers who may have targets to meet For example, one HMIC report, ‘On the Record’, in 2000, found that in one force, allegations of serious sexual assault, and in other forces credit card fraud, were tending to be crime only when the offences had been detected; this ‘delayed reporting’, or ‘cuffing’, has been described as ‘unethical’ by the HMIC, but, although deliberately manipulative changes in police recorded crime are clearly not allowed, there are no checks on the political motives behind recording policies, so long as they are not ostensibly unethical in this way.
This prevention of political propaganda is especially important in light of the generally misinformed nature of the public; public perceptions of crime do not accord with published statistics. In 2004-5 BCS, 61% of respondents thought that crime had increased in the previous year nationally; 27% by ‘a lot’.
It is therefore submitted that, even if in 2003-4, only 26% of respondents had any victimisations to report, that this is not only a much higher and therefore more revealing figure than official police statistics, but the additional information procured by the BCS, coupled with its less partisan approach, makes the BCS an essential weapon against distortion of statistics for political gain.
From 1995 to around 2001, recorded crime decreased at a lower rate relative to reported and all BVC crime. This is consistent with an increase in the proportion of reported crimes being recorded. From 2001 to today, there had been a more marked increased in recorded crime due to the introduction of the NCRS. There has thus been an overall decrease in crime from 1995, including from 1997 when New Labour came into power.
The reasons for this are unclear. However, in the last two or three years, recorded violent offences have increased dramatically; in contrast, the BCS shows that there has been a recent levelling off of violent offences. Professor Bottoms says that serious crime is almost definitely now going up, notwithstanding an overall reduction in crime from 1997. However, the increase in less serious crime is probably artefactual because of the change in recording crimes that was introduced.
The violence debate, as to whether violent crime has really been going up or whether it merely appears to be because of recording practices, is particularly important, given the level of excitement that the media undergo because of the apparent rise in violent crime.
The BCS is not particularly reliable in relation to violence, because a lot of violent crimes are because of domestic violence, and interviewees for the BCS would be reluctant to talk about domestic violence in the context of a household interview, especially if the offender is in the next room of the house.
It is also interesting to look at public perceptions of trends in crime, and as to whether it is going up or down. According to BCS figures, in 2004, 5.61% of respondents thought that crime had increased in the previous year under the Labour Government nationally, and 27% thought that it had increased ‘a lot’. Also in 2004, 5.42% of respondents thought that crime had increased because of the Labour Government locally, and 16% thought that it had increased ‘a lot’.
In conclusion, it can be seen that under the Labour Government since 1997, crime seems to have decreased by using the more reliable BCS figures. However, the public perception is that crime has gone up a lot, and one must question why this is, and whether the Labour government are trying to create this impression in order to support their position of being ‘tough on crime’
by
bethdixon (student)
