Violent crime figures 'missing'

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A former Home Office research expert said that across all types of crime, three million offences a year are excluded from the British Crime Survey (BCS).

The poll caps the number of times a victim can be targeted by an offender at five incidents a year.

If anyone interviewed for the survey says they have been targeted more than five times a year, the sixth incident and beyond are not included in the BCS. The authors of a report by think-tank Civitas said the five-crimes limit is "truly bizarre" and "misleading".

Professor Graham Farrell of Loughborough University and the former acting head of the Home Office's Police Research Group, Professor Ken Pease, calculated that if the cap is ignored, the overall number of BCS crimes is more than 14 million rather than the current 11 million a year estimate.

Violent crime is 82% higher at 4.4 million offences compared with 2.4 million in the BCS, the survey claims, including a 156% rise in "acquaintance violence" from 817,000 incidents to 2.1 million. Domestic violence is 140% higher, up from 357,000 incidents a year to 857,000, the authors said, while there are nearly three million common assaults a year rather than the 1.5 million estimated by the BCS, a rise of 98%.

Burglary is 20% higher than currently estimated, at 877,000 a year, and vandalism is 24% higher, the report calculated. Robbery is 7% up on the official estimates, or an extra 22,000 crimes bringing the yearly total to 333,000.

"If the people who say they suffered 10 incidents really did, it is capping the series at five that distorts the rate," the authors said.

"It is truly bizarre that the victimisation survey, based as it is on the assumption that people will by and large tell the truth about what happened to them, ... suddenly withdraws its trust in their honesty when what they are told does not chime with their own experience.

"Yet the reality is that some people are very frequently victimised, and that frequent victimisation is what they suffer rather than being an invention or exaggeration," they added.