FactCheck: more police, less crime?
Updated on 01 February 2008
Is this government the first since 1945 to see crime go down?
Is this government the first since 1945 to see crime go down?
"There are more police officers than ever before in the history of the country. We have more police officers and more community support officers. That is why, last week, crime was down. Crime is now down 30 per cent. We are the first government since 1945 to see crime down."
Gordon Brown, PMQs, 30 January 2008
The background
This week, the two main parties tried to out-tough each other on crime, with both Labour and the Conservatives announcing plans to give police souped-up stop and search powers.
In parliament, David Cameron got the Conservative crime guns blazing, claiming that people were not safe under Labour.
But according to Brown we have never had it so good - at least not since World War II. This is the first government, he claimed, to get crime down since 1945. And the reason, he suggested, is record numbers of police officers.
But in the murky world of crime statistics, there tend to be two figures behind for every claim. Let's check out the country's crime patterns since 1997 - and look at how much of this the government could reasonable take the credit (or blame).
The analysis
There are two main ways of measuring crime. The government's preferred measure is the British Crime Survey, which asks 50,000 people whether they have been a victim of crime in the past year.
This means it detects unreported crime, and isn't affected by changes in which official police figures are measured. Some notable crimes are left out, however, such as murders, rape and crimes affecting the under-16s.
The crime survey has only be around since 1981 - a useful amount of time, but not quite enough to bear out the post-1945 claim.
Alternatively, police-recorded crime does exactly what it says on the tin - it measures the crimes that the police record.
Although new ways of counting crimes have been introduced recently we can get an idea of crime rates going right back throughout the last century.
Recorded crime figures did increase reasonably steadily after the war, up to a peak in the early 90s, after which they started to drop.
But hang on a second - the peak was in 1992. This means the previous government in fact presided over the first sustained fall - at least in recorded crimes.
But hang on a second - the peak was in 1992. This means the previous government in fact presided over the first sustained fall - at least in recorded crimes.
Back to the BCS. This does show a fall in overall crime under Labour, with the picture stabilising recently. However, the fall started in 1995, two years before Labour took the reins.
So how much can Labour claim responsibility for?
Very little, according to Enver Solomon, deputy director of King's College London's Centre for Crime and Justice Studies which published an independent audit of 10 years of crime under Labour.
He points out that the fall in crime was greatest during Labour's first term. That's when spending on crime and policing was also the lowest as the government had stuck to Conservative spending plans.
"Governments could sit there and spend nothing and crime would go up and down because of wider economic, demographic, technological, socio-cultural factors," he said.
According to a recent Strategy Unit analysis, 80 per cent of the fall in crime was due to wider economic issues, rather than criminal justice actions.
This is something Tony Blair acknowledged all those years ago when he promised to be "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime".
So what about those police numbers? Labour is proud of its record force, up from 124,170 officers in 2000 to 140,514 in March 2007. But are they the source of all our safety?
The effects of extra police on crime are surprisingly slippery to measure, says Olivier Marie, an LSE Research Economist at the Centre for Economic Performance.
Some studies have even linked an increase in police to an increase in crime, partly because of the difficulty of isolating so many different factors.
You might get this impression from looking at historical police force numbers. These show a general pattern of increase through the 80s, under the last Tory government when recorded crime was also on the increase.
Marie's 2005 research into the effects of the street crime initiative - which increased police presence in certain parts of the country - provided pretty conclusive evidence that rates of robbery were reduced by around 14.8 per cent as a result of the extra police power.
It's wise to be cautious before applying this to crime more widely. Although feared by the public, robbery actually constitutes a very small proportion of the overall crime tally.
And Marie points out that it's often easier to reduce a high crime rate than a lower one - the relative impact of increased police may be reduced, the more of them they are.
"You can't say that, for example, more police decrease crime by 13 per cent, so twice as many police will decrease crime by 26 per cent," he said.
The verdict
The likelihood of being a victim of crime has decreased under Labour, but to say this is the only government that has seen a fall in crime since 1945 doesn't really stand up.
The Conservatives would have been justified in making a similar claim, based on the recorded crime rate, between 1992 and 1997.
Measuring the impact of extra police is trickier, but the evidence doesn't bear out the assertion that more police have been directly responsible for the fall in crime - wider social trends were in place before Labour came to power.
FactCheck rating: 3
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