How violent crimes 'are made to vanish like a puff of smoke': Police chiefs tell MPs that stats are routinely fiddled

  • Officers tell Commons committee about how figures are manipulated
  • Serious offences including rape and robbery are disappearing, MPs told
  • About 300 burglaries vanished from Met Police data in just a few weeks
  • Tory MP Bernard Jenkin said he was 'shocked' by the evidence

By Chris Greenwood for the Daily Mail

Published: 12:10 EST, 19 November 2013 | Updated: 19:47 EST, 19 November 2013


Crime figures are routinely massaged by police desperate to show that they are making the streets safer, it was claimed yesterday.

Serious offences including rape, child sex abuse, robberies and burglary are disappearing in a ‘puff of smoke’, MPs were told.

Police are accused of downgrading crimes to less serious offences and even erasing them altogether by labelling them as accidents or errors.

Crime figures are routinely massaged by police desperate to show that they are making the streets safer, it was claimed (file picture)

One police analyst claimed that hundreds of burglaries ‘disappeared’ in a matter of weeks at the Met after managers intervened.

The claims were made at a hearing of Parliament’s Public Administration Committee.

Chairman Bernard Jenkin said he was ‘shocked’ by the evidence. ‘What we have heard is how there is a system of incentives in the police that has become inherently corrupting,’ he said.

Officers claim they are under pressure to record crimes as less controversial offences or even no crime at all.

Bernard Jenkin, chairman of the Commons committee, said he was shocked by the evidence

Pc James Patrick, who analyses crime figures for the Met, said he found robberies being logged as ‘theft snatch’ in order to get them ‘off the books’.

The officer, who faces disciplinary proceedings for gross misconduct after writing a blog about the impact of police reform, said burglary figures were also changed.

‘Burglary is an area where crimes are downgraded or moved into other brackets, such as criminal damage for attempted burglaries,’ he said.

Pc Patrick said an internal audit found that ‘as many as 300 burglaries’ vanished from official figures in just a few weeks.

‘Things were being reported as burglaries and you would then re-run the same report after there had been a human intervention, a management intervention, and these burglaries effectively disappeared in a puff of smoke,’ he said.

He claimed that in 80 per cent  of cases where an allegation of a serious sexual offence had been recorded as ‘no crime’, the label was incorrect.

Pc Patrick also said numerous other cases were incorrectly recorded as ‘crime-related incidents’, a category covering allegations made by third parties but not directly confirmed by the supposed victims.

He said pressure was put on victims to drop crimes by ‘attacking the allegation’ instead of investigating the crime.

He was supported by Peter Barron, a former Detective Chief Superintendent at the Met, who said victims are ‘harassed’ into scaling down the seriousness of incidents.

Around 300 burglaries disappeared from Met Police records in a few weeks, the Commons Public Administration Committee heard

They would be telephoned and repeatedly questioned on the circumstances of the crime.

‘Victims were putting the phone down in disgust, harassed by another call from someone trying to persuade them that they were mistaken about the level of force used,’ he added.

Mr Barron said the Met had been set a target of reducing crimes in several priority areas by 20 per cent. ‘That translates into “record 20 per cent fewer crimes” as far as senior officers are concerned,’ he said.

The Met said it has appointed a ‘force crime registrar’ to rule on disputed crimes and to ensure the correct policies are followed.