Knife crime stats saga continues
Sometimes statistics are so meaningless one wonders why they were ever counted in the first place.
Today, in another convoluted twist to the long-running "dodgy knife-crime stats row", (the subject of numerous previous posts) we are treated to Research Report 18: Tackling Knives Action Programme (TKAP) Phase 1: Overview of key trends from a monitoring programme[pdf link].
Not a snappy title I grant you, but it has a certain dreary honesty.
The figures which follow, however, are as dodgy as an unshaven man in a striped shirt carrying a bag marked "swag". I know, because Research Report 18 says as much:
"There are some important limitations to the data: the lack of statistically robust comparison areas; the provisional nature of most of the data; the heterogeneity of the forces; and the domination of the overall trend by a handful of forces.
Notably, the sheer volume of offences in the Metropolitan Police area drives the overall trend and their decrease in teenage knife-related crime may have been influenced by other initiatives, such as Operation Blunt 2."
What this means, of course, is that we cannot tell whether a government programme which "aimed to reduce the carrying of knives, related homicides and serious stabbings among teenagers (aged 13-19)" did any such thing. It is impossible to identify cause and effect.
Quite how this data advances the science of countering violent crime is beyond me.
The conclusion tries hard to sound positive:
"The findings indicate an overall decline in recorded knife crime and hospital admissions in the target age group (19 and under). Provisional NHS admissions data suggest that the drop was more marked in the TKAP areas, though the start of this decrease does appear to predate implementation of the initiative."
The revelation that stab victim numbers were falling before the much-trumpeted initiative was first revealed, some may recall, by this blog.
The most valuable service Research Report 18 has done for Britain is to force senior police officers to admit what ministers should have said in the beginning.
"This is a long journey," said Chief Constable Keith Bristow, who is in charge of rolling out the second phase of the programme. "Success when you're dealing with these sort of problems might be measured in generations, not weeks or months."
Hear, hear.
I'm 
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Knife carrying and it's associated levels of crime are an indication of the social problems that prevail at present and as such no police initiative if likely to provide any sustained benefit.
Sure some focus on knife carrying may result in a dip but the not a change in culture. Only social change can do that, and that's a longer term issue that polititians cannot get to grips with in the quick fix society we live in.
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Bravo Mark, excellent post, finally recognising what some of us have been saying all along - that these statistics bring nothing to the table are in most cases cause even more problems.
The fact is that nobody would care less if "teenage-related-knife-crime" rose or fell by 3.2% or whatever so long as they felt safe on the streets and could see justice being done.
Unfortunately we are stuck with a government obsessed by presentation than actual action, hence why the country is in such a mess in every area.
The best way to lower "blade-related anti-social incidents" or whatever they want to call them this week is to lock up the offenders and keep them locked up. If they are in prison they can't stab people on the streets. This is not rocket science.
We could have a report telling us that "knife-crime" is down by 73% and it's as meaningless as a shampoo advert telling us it will result in 86% less breakage or 43% more shine. So long as thugs are let off by the CPS and the courts time and time again, things will only get worse. So long as criminals are serving 10-15% of their sentences before being let out, things will only get worse. So long as the rights of the criminals are considered more important than those of the victims, things will only get worse.
Personally it will be a great day when crime stats are abolished entirely so that the police are allowed to concentrate on actually fighting crime instead of filling in reports, ticking boxes, and working towards KPI targets.
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These statistical caveats are a hallmark of unwelcome news.
If the data showed a fall in knife crime then we wouldn't be treated to this long and detailed list of all the problems with the statistics. We'd just get the statement that government policy is proved to work.
You can be sure the statisticians spent many days and weeks trying to put a positive gloss on these numbers. The fact they couldn't find any way to spin it, and had to resort to denigrating their own research methodology, speaks volumes about this government's contempt for scientific evidence in setting policy.
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Many years ago I had a friend who went on a training course to become a candidate for one of the major political parties.
During this course he was told to quote statistics, percentages etc. which will support your argument.
When he queried this he was told "Who cares if the statistics are correct. No-one is going to check....are they?"
So, never believe politicians when they act as though they have accurate information.
Afterall there are 'Lies.....damn lies....and statistics'
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suspend free medical aid to any fool caught carrying a knife.
more draconian methods to deal with those who sell and hold knives.
heavy fines stiffer laws etc.
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Yet more proof that the current system simply does not work.
The aims of the legislation were not specific enough & the method of measuring its success is unworkable.
What we really need is a more intelligent approach to writing legislation, including the adoption of the scientific test model.
Every piece of legislation is just an experiment but without clearly defined boundaries it is impossible for anyone to see if the experiment has been a success or a failure.
Any new piece of legislation should have a clearly defined aim, in this case for example reducing knife crime by x% over y-time period.
The legislation should then include the method for implementation as well as a method for measuring its success.
There should then be a pre-set date for evaluating the results with pre-set definitions for success or failure.
In this case it could have been a 50% reduction in hospital admissions for knife related injuries over 3 years (for example).
At the end of the three years the statistics would be looked at and if there had been a 50% or more reduction then it would be considered a success, below 50% would be a failure.
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At my secondary school in Kent in the eighties a swiss army knife (4 inch blade) was part of the school uniform requirements and if you where involved with the cadets, on those days you worn the cadet uniform to school (at least one day a week) that uniform had a 7 or 8in blade army knife.
Yet the only knife related incident I can remember during my 7 years at the school was an accident in the woodworking area when a student used his penknife instead of a chissel.
OH how things have changed in 30 years!
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Mr Easton - u work for an arm of this Gvt - WHY should we believe anything u or this Govt tell us???????????????
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A lot of the posts seem to be suggesting locking people up for longer and more frequently to solve this problem.
unfortunately this comes with a great cost - once someone has been into prison once they are much more likely to re-offend as so many job opportunities will be closed to them. We've been locking people up for years and all it's done is provided a huge prison bill and a society filled with people who have no hope of achieving normality.
The only way to tackle this problem is at the root, and that means giving hope and purpose to the milions of inner city teenagers that their lives don't simply have to be dead ends.
Unfortunately society already seems to have decided to go along with the selfish ideals of the 80's and now it's reaping the rewards (or rather penalty) of that attitude.
Why don't the BBC conduct a survey of every teenager who has been convicted of knife crime and plot their family wealth against the mean? I think you'll find the correlation is very revealing.
It doesn't mean everyone who is poor ends up using knives, but very few offenders come from wealthy or average income families.
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I agree with Delminster. Why do I have to wait an insurmountable time in an emergency waiting room because a gang member is knifed or shot. If you choose that life then you choose the consequences. I abide by society's rules they don't. Where the justice in that?
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too bad they weren't watching bankers, maybe could have done some good. Bankers had much bigger knives and knew how to use them.
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@ Joan Olivares
How do you know the person being treated is a gang member ?
Do they all carry I.D. cards or some other form of proof of membership ?
Is it not far more likely that you're waiting longer because of all of the drunken adults being admitted to A&E on a daily basis ?
Quite often the victims of knife crime are innocent by-standers who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time so unless you've got some way of separating the gang members from those people who just happen to wear clothes you may regard as gang clothing then the idea of not treating knife or gun wound victims is just a silly sound bite.
The number of gun & knife injuries is also so relatively low that the idea of you waiting an insurmountable amount of time because the hospital staff are treating them is just ridiculous. There'd need to be tens of thousands of people admitted to hospital every year before it had any significant impact on the waiting times of our hospitals and this simply is not the case, at the most there are a few hundred hospital admissions a year caused by knife crime.
The problem may be bad but it is nowhere near as bad as some are making out, I live in a council estate in Merseyside and our area is supposed to be one of the nations knife crime hot-spots yet the situation on the streets is unrecognisable from the horror stories you read in the press. Our supposedly gang-infested estate is actually a nice place to live & I very rarely see or hear of any crime.
And as for the idea that anyone carrying a knife being a problem, this too is just sensationalist rubbish, I'm a computer engineer and I carry a knife around in my pocket & two more in my tool kit every day at work and also while commuting. I carry knives while camping, fishing and while doing other activities too.
Knives are not the problem, people attacking each other is the problem. Dealing with the symptoms is never going to rid us of it; we have to start dealing with the root causes.
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There was a good discussion last night on Radio 5 involving a magistrate, the father of a victim and an ex gang member. There was quite a bit of agreement. First of all they wanted the law to be carried out with clarity - no concessions like under 17 rarely get a custodial sentnce for a first offence (has to be more serious than simply posession of a knife). Secondly deterrent is more likely to work on those who are on the fringes of the knife culture and we should create a punishment regieme which returns them to society equiped to function in a socially acceptable way.
What was interesting was the father who was introduced as wanting a mandatory 6 months sentence for carrying a knife. When he explained it what became clear was that he had started thinking of a custodial sentence as having a blend of punishment and rehabilitation. He seemed to have taken the discredited 'short sharp shock' and added the rehabilitation element.
On the more general point about statsitics. There is a divergence between what people think is happening and what is actually happening. Statistics may be flawed and we can consider the effect of the errors on the figures but what people feel is happening depends on the level of reporting (what other news was there on the day)and a multitude of other influences. For instance, why does a death by knifing cause more outrage than someone beating their spouse to death or a drunken brawl outside a pub?
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"This is a long journey," said Chief Constable Keith Bristow, who is in charge of rolling out the second phase of the programme. "Success when you're dealing with these sort of problems might be measured in generations, not weeks or months."
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Thats the most sensible comment of heard on this issue, an island of realism in an ocean of quickfixes.
At the moment we have a situation where a strata of society ,young men from areas of extreeme social deprevation, have somehow managed to construct an artificial society around themselves, with completely different social rules.
They expect to be beaten or killed if they stray from their own territory and are expected to beat or kill rival gangmembers who stray into theirs.
This is the bit thats hard to get your head around -
At some level they have all tacitly agreed to participate in this culture, they have created these insane rules and they choose to live by them.
To even begin to address the issue of knife crime it is imperative to look at what drives these people to live like this.
Personally I beleive its ultimately down to social deprivation and a complete absence of hope for anything better, but whatever the cause deconstructing the level of society which creates such people and the world they operate in is indeed the work of generations, it may even be that this generation is ingrained in its violent habbits beyond redemption, but long term, i believe tackling issues of extreeme inequality would reduce violent crime dramatically.
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So since this initiative started there has been more deaths.
Ok initiative failing, so lets extend it to other areas,
So failing initiative more deaths something wrong hear.
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Yeh well lots of these kids feel unprotected in a society which the true culprits are not punished leaving kids to find some sort of security, deal with that and the knife crimes will fall, or is it asking too much for cops to do their job instead of counting how many crimes they have missed! Police need policing and made sure tehy do their job instead of using their job to vent their racism.
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This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
A meaningful statistic Mark - In total in the areas covered by TKAP there were 126 killings, seven more than in the same period a year earlier.
126 dead people.
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This is a research report produced by social researchers in the Home Office. It puts all the caveats it should on the data. I don't know why Mark seems to complain about this.
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Knife crime often leading to murder has boomed in the past 12 years under New Labour. However both New Labour and the holier than thou BBC tip toe around the issue because the vast majority is not perpetrated by indigenous English people. The BBC reports such crime as youth crime as does the Home Office. Yet when the culprits pictures are published they are invariably not English. This type of crime is usually gang based or drug based.
So long as the PC brigade is in charge of England, knife crime will continue to grow and as the vast majority of bloggers have pointed out, the only real solution is draconian punishment. However, jail sentences main little to modern criminals other than a taxpayer funded holiday with colour TV, games room, comfy beds etc. Non-English people who commit knife crime should be expelled from England and to hell with their civil rights. What about the civil rights of their victims and the victims families?
Of course if New Labour did do what the vast majority of English people want, they would lose the non-English vote. Staying in power in more important to New Labour than doing the right thing - they are clearly prepared to accept the casualties of knife crime. As for the BBC, well that once great organization has been run by PC zealots for longer than New Labour has been in power. Anything which puts their sacred cows in a bad light will be suppressed and not reported unless it is already in the public domain. They too are prepared to accept casualties to ensure political correctness is preserved.
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This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
I am bit surprised with the removal of comment no 21.
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writingsonthewall
Why should coming from a poor family result in carry knives or any instrument of violenc? Thats just a cop out.
If you want to escape povery there are other routes, such as education which many seem to reject as uncool! It doesnt get 'respect' They want the rewards of without being prepared to put in the work.
I was brought up on a council estate where just about all my peers had 2 parents. If we failed at school at anything we were embarrassed and teased.
We all went to a comprehensive school and most of us went on to university.
The point is, it's not poverty that is responsible for the crime it's upbringing. Unfortunately there are many who are very prepared to have many kids (or conceive them) that they cant afford but much less prepared to care for them or educate them.
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Perhaps if all politicians were obliged to travel by foot or by public transport (plebeian class), they'd pay some attention to public safety, both real and perceived. Instead of second home allowances, give each politician a London base in a flat randomly selected from the inner London boroughs social housing stock. Until then the political class will be happy for us to endure the stresses, fears and risks. It does not matter if some of the fears are not justified by government statistics, spun or not. The fears of crime are still in a very real sense limiting the lives and liberty of many voters. MP's - do you have enough honour to resign if you prove to be ineffective in improving people's lives ? Why else are you there ?
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