What is Crime? - notifiable offences?

I want to write about police recorded crime and notifiable offences. I wanted to give you a bit history to make it all a bit more interesting, otherwise it would have just been "police recorded crime is confined to notifiable offences. They are called notifiable offences because the Home Office requires all Home Office police forces to notify it of the numbers of these crimes that occur each year in their territorial jurisdiction based on Home Office counting rules". The current ones can be found here, which also includes a link to a list of notifiable offences.

You would think the reason why no one has apparently written a paper outlining how the system came about is because it is deadly boring and not worth the effort. I actually think it is a quite an interesting story if I have got the right end of the stick - my sole source is Hansard, the official record of parliamentary proceedings and therefore quite a good source; it is now helpfully on line from 1803 onward.

The first mention of crime in online Hansard is in 1824 in a debate about magistrates and the increased level of committals, convictions and executions. This was of course before the first police force was introduced - the Metropolitan Police in London in 1829. It is apparent from the debate that the moral health of the country was measured by these Crown Court statistics which had been collected for at least 15 years before the debate. In fact in 1828 it was these same source of statistics that was used by the Home Secretary Robert Peel to show that committals had increase by almost a third in the previous seven years to justify the introduction of the Metropolitan Police Service.

Possibly the most scathing attack on government statistics ever was made by Lord Brougham on 3rd of March 1856  (in the House of Lords) when he showed that the Judicial Statistics that had provided evidence for Government policies for at least the previous 40 years were worse than useless. Even more embarassing was the fact that the equivalent French statistics based on Guerry's work were almost perfect in comparison, at least according to Lord Brougham. The speech included the following;

Hitherto I have spoken of offences and offenders as recorded in the proceedings of courts, whether of trial or of police; but it is of the greatest importance to ascertain as far as possible the number of crimes which never reach any court: nothing can be more essential to the formation of an estimate touching the state of crimes in the community, and the action of the law in detecting and in preventing them.

His long speech came to an end with a very long list of judicial statistics that should be collected in the future including crimes that do not reach the courts - police recorded crime. In reply the Lord Chancellor said that Lord Brougham suggestions would be looked at seriously.

Exactly a week later on 10th March 1856 the Police (Counties and Boroughs) Bill was debated in the House of Commons. This became the Counties and Boroughs Police Act 1856 that made it compulsory for any County or Borough that did not already have a police force to introduce one. It also created what is now Her Majesties' Inspectorate of Constabularies to report regularly to the Home Secretary regarding the efficiency of each police force (see here). It is known that the first police recorded crime statistics were collected for the year 1856 so there seems to have been some co-ordination behind the scenes for the Home Office to draw up a list of notifiable offences.

What is crime? - recordable offences?

I know I am feeling better, because I have an urge to write something that probably is no interest to anyone but myself. I went on a short trip to Thailand and Vietnam just before Christmas and managed to get home just before the snowfall landed on Heathrow. Unfortunately I managed to eat something that upset my stomach quite dramatically and after that I picked up a virus from IBM. Not a computer virus - a man flu virus via my son in law who works for IBM. That slowed me down a bit but unlike the previous bug it did not stop me eating so I did enjoy Christmas, thanks for asking, but I have not felt up to doing the work I was planning. Thus the absence of posts.

Now what has got my mental juices flowing again? Its the problem of defining "crime".

The first thing to say that I am approaching this from my knowledge of the English and Wales legal system. There are many other legal systems out there...................

In our legal system there is a fundamental principle that is even more basic than "innocent till proven guilty" which is often misquoted and misunderstood -you are guilty the second you commit an offence but for the purposes of the criminal justice system you are regarded as innocent until due legal process proves you guilty beyond reasonable doubt. The principle I am referring to is that a crime has to be defined (usually) by legislation. The criminal law assumes everything is legal that is not specifically enshrine in Common Law, defined as a criminal offence by Act of Parliament,  or arguably a body permitted by Act of Parliament to create offences - thus local bylaws. Criminal Law has its own courts, rules and sanctions.

Travelling in parallel with Criminal Law but very much on its own tracks is Civil Law. Civil Law has all sorts of weird and wonderful things but it does not have offences and crimes. It can be said that criminal law deals with absolutes that if put into questions should have a yes or no answers. Civil Law on the other hand deals with gradations whose answers are more fuzzy - maybes and depends are better answers. And of course the burden of proof in civil cases is on the balance of probabilities that reflects these differences.

But I digress. What I am trying to show is that with a legal system such as the English and Wales one the broadest legal definition of crime is an offence under criminal law. This of course includes parking offences, speeding fines, littering, drunkeness in a public place and other offences that we generally regard as being committed by normal members of the public, not criminals.

To have a criminal record you have to have been convicted of a recordable offence. Once you have been convicted of a recordable offence you are allocated a unique number (and letter) which in the days when the record was a paper file in the Criminal Records Office at new Scotland Yard was known as a CRO number. That's why when you get charged with a recordable offence you have your fingerprints and photograph taken. Now in a more modern world the record is no longer paper it is computerised on the Police National Computer (PNC) and you are allocated with a PNCID instead of a CRO. There are of course still people with both. And nowadays DNA is also taken as an identification. Details of what are recordable offences are here. Recordable offences are basically offences that have a term of imprisonment as a sanction plus a number of specified offences.

Now this is the confusing bit; the official crime statistics - police recorded crime - is a system that is quite separate from the recordable offences discussed above and it is based on notifiable offences. But that is for the next post.

Shedding more light on the Dark Figure



This is yet another Venn diagram. I have been a little addicted  recently. This is taken from my 15 minute presentation entitled "Shedding more Light on the Dark Figure" which I gave on 7th December 2010 to the Crime Survey Uuser Group meeting. They have published it on the web along with the other presentations. They can be found here. Mine is the 2pm time slot.

Perceptions of Crime

I have been studying my Venn Diagram in the post one before the last decided that I can improve on it. This is not perfect but it is better. I actually like the diagram without the labels. Perhaps I should enter it for the Turner Prize entitled "Perceptions of Crime". OK.................. here it is with labels.

Linking Crime, Incident, BCS and Police Recorded Crime data sets

Posts to do with the the Metropolitan Police Service CAD and CRIS databases have been quite popular so I thought I would share a flow diagram that I have just created of how the data arrive in them. The other two data sets I am interested in - the British Crime Survey and Police Recorded Crime are also shown.

Overlapping Crime Domains

This is my latest Venn diagram trying to explain Crime: how it is measured/recorded and how it is perceived. I think it is reasonably self-explanatory. The interesting bits are the overlaps of the various domains. I am approaching this diagram from three different angles;

• Shedding more light on the "dark figure" a talk I am giving to the Crime Survey Users Group on Tuesday 7th December.
• Explaining the utility of police incident data in augmenting the other crime measures (BCS and police recorded crime) particularly regarding violent crime for a paper that I am writing, and
• My ongoing interest in describing the fear of crime.

The early history of crime maps with modern visualisation

I would like to draw your attention to a high quality paper (I have just discovered) that should be of interest to everyone interested in crime mapping. Its got it all, it has the history, the maps, the visualisation and a statistician who can write good English without feeling the necessity to resort to Ancient Greek lettering to make his point except where it is truly necessary.

This is an example of one of many maps within the paper. You will have to read it to find out what it is all about. The free .pdf can found here.