Since 1981 there have been two ways of measuring crime in our communities.

First there is what the police record and second there is what is captured in the Crime Survey for England and Wales, commissioned by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The better measure – in my view – is the ONS Crime Survey. The Survey is carried out by a research organisation, called Kantar Public. They contact a large sample of people in England and Wales and ask them what their experience of crime has been over the previous twelve months. When they did this in 2020/2021 they were in touch with 50,000 households.

Crime statistics based on police recorded crime are just that – those crimes that are reported to the police and which the police record accurately. But we know that many crimes are not reported and so not recorded. Inevitably, therefore, police data is always going to miss a certain amount of crime because of under-reporting. We also know that some forces are better than others at recording crime. Our force is rated good for its crime recording. But some forces are less proficient at recording correctly or do not recognised some crimes in the first place – this can be true of hate crimes, for example.

The Survey, however, picks up not only the reported crime but also the crimes not reported and so not recorded and those not recorded correctly. This is why I prefer the results of the Crime Survey.

But are there some crimes that are likely to be missed more than others – and perhaps missed in both police data and the Survey statistics? What are the under-reported crimes?

We know that one is Domestic Abuse (DA). There was a time when people struggled to get the police to take DA as seriously as they should. I remember when police officers shrugged their shoulders and said, ‘It’s only a domestic’ – not real crime at all. Fortunately those times are gone and huge efforts have been made in more recent years to encourage people to report: they will be taken seriously. Police officers have been trained to recognise DA when they are called out to incidents and the definition of victim has broadened to include children in a household.

Nevertheless, many are still reluctant to talk to the police, especially where they fear the reactions of a partner or they worry that children might be taken from them by social services. And a  controlling partner may have raised fears that if they go to the police for help, and leave the home, they will be in immediate financial peril.

It was only after talking to someone who had been the victim of a coercive and controlling partner that I realised there might be a group of people who are even more unrecognised. The crimes against them might be going more unreported than others.

This person told me a little about how the relationship within their marriage eventually became quite toxic. They gradually realised that they were subject to a coercive and controlling partner with matters coming to a head when they were threatened by them with a knife.

They left the marriage, but did not report it to the police. Why not? Was it because the threatening person in this marriage was the wife, not the husband?

When we think of DA we tend to think of women trapped in a difficult or dangerous relationship. We assume the victim is female – and that is usually the case. But this person reminded me that it also happens the other way. And perhaps men find it even harder to admit to themselves or others, including the police, that they are a victim.

If DA is an under-reported crime, perhaps even more under-reported are those cases – admittedly rarer –  where the victim is male.

Under-reporting

Another area of under-reporting is anti-social behaviour (ASB). I have noted before this curious phenomenon that police data for ASB shows it falling while community meetings I go to, and emails I receive, suggest the opposite. This may be because people are just not reporting it, so the police are not recording it.  And one reason why people may not be reporting ASB is because they think there is little the police can do.

ASB is just as serious a matter as crime. It gets people down because of its relentlessness. A burglary is distressing, but it may also be a one-off event in someone’s life. But the gang of people who keep driving their quad bikes noisily down the lanes and across the fields, destroying crops and terrorising wildlife, are constantly doing it. They come back night after night, weekend after weekend. The repeated acts of spraying graffiti on shops and businesses makes town centres look run-down and depressed. Fly-tipping despoils the countryside.

I am pleased to say that the government seems to recognise this and has embarked on a new two-year strategy to combat it. This year a small number of PCCs will be given funding to pilot two new initiatives, and next year, these pilots will be rolled out nationwide. The pilots are around prevention and enforcement. We have been selected with nine other PCCs to pilot a proposal to identify ASB hotspot areas and to fund more high visibility patrolling by police and local authority officials for those times of day when ASB happens. We will receive £1.2m – and we are drawing up plans now.

The other pilot is around how we change the behaviour of (mainly) young people who keep committing acts of ASB? How can enforcement of the law make a difference? The government realises – to quote an American professor I heard speak last week – that justice often fails because the penalties for bad behaviour are so remote. If we say to a wayward teenager: ‘If you don’t clean your room there is a 40% chance that a month from now I’ll ground you for two years’, we should not be surprised if nothing much happens. Yet so much of the justice system seem like that.

So the government wants to pilot schemes for immediate justice. The idea is that people caught for acts of ASB will be dealt with speedily. Within 48 hours, the youth with the spray gun will have to start scrubbing the graffiti off the walls he has defaced.

In other words, justice has to be certain, swift and clear: if someone commits some act of ASB, he or she will know exactly what punishment will follow, and it will do so before you can say knife. We need to re-introduce into the justice system something that has been gradually eroded over time – an understanding that our bad behaviour really does have consequences, consequences in that part of the future which seems real to us; the relatively near future.

Upping one’s game

Congratulations to Sheffield United on their promotion to the Premier League. I am not a football fan, but even I couldn’t help but be affected by the exuberance of friends.

It will, of course, have implications for South Yorkshire Police (SYP). There will doubtless be capacity numbers at all matches in the coming year as all the great teams in English football make their appearance at Bramall Lane – and that may mean more police to ensure the safety of crowds. And every visiting team brings good and bad behaving supporters with it. The police will need to get the best intelligence they can in advance of every game if trouble is to be prevented.

So it’s not just the Blades that will have to up their game next season.

Stay safe