Crime is down in Britain compared to what it was in 2010, and the headline news is that this wasn’t headline news. It slid past while we were dozing, or worrying about why the cat had been gone for over a week. Was it trapped in someone’s shed? 

How do I know what we were doing when it slid past? My research methods involve following (a) what goes on around our house and (b) what I see on the village Facebook page. 

The cat did come home, but considerably later, and it didn’t say where it had been or what it got up to, but I do have information on crime. According to the Crime Survey for England and Wales:

• The murder rate is down 20%
• Burglary is down 50%
• Vehicle-related thefts are down 50%
• Phone thefts are down 50%

Sexual offences are up, but as the survey says, “Police recorded sexual offences are not a good indicator of trends over time. Improvements in police recording practices, the introduction of new offences, and increased reporting by victims have contributed to the level of offences in recent years.” I’d love to give you a neat, round number for how much they’ve gone up but what I found wasn’t neat and wasn’t round. It was complicated and I fled. But that does tell you something about the survey: where it doesn’t think the numbers are a fair reflection of the real world, it says so. 

What we believe 

As interesting as the results themselves–maybe more interesting–is the mismatch between what we think we know about crime and what the statistics tell us. Eight in ten people in the country are convinced crime’s rising. That’s what (depending on where we get our news) we read. It’s what we tell each other. It’s in the air. It’s in the salt shakers down at the pub. It walks down the street waving banners. It’s what we just know.

And we’re wrong. Two out of three people are sure the murder rate’s gone up or at best stayed the same. Eight out of ten think mobile phone thefts have gone up and six in ten believe the same about burglary and vehicle-related thefts.

Where immigration and sexual offenses meet, belief and reality move so far apart they can barely yell insults at each other. Or more accurately, they can yell but they can barely hear each other. The average guess is that 30% of the people cautioned or convicted of sexual offenses are foreign nationals. Supporters of Reform UK (an anti-immigrant populist party) guess it’s 50%. In fact, it’s 15%. 

I’d love to explain what average means there and how anyone arrived at it, but that’s how the numbers were presented and I don’t want to cross the line between quoting and making stuff up.

So what can any sane politician (or the local know-it-all, for that matter) do when the numbers don’t support his or her conclusions? Attack the source, of course. Nigel Farage, the personality Reform coalesces around, has said the crime survey isn’t fit for purpose. The Office for Statistics Regulation, though, calls it a robust source.

I’m struggling to keep my fingers from turning that into the Office for Regular Strangulation, but in spite of that I’ll put my faith in them before I put it in Nigel Farage.

 

Translations and explanations

For the sake of non-British readers, let me give you a few definitions and a comment on statistics: 

• If you accept a police caution, you admit you’re guilty of some offense or other. That keeps you out of court and keeps you from getting a prison sentence, but you will have acquired, free of charge and at no physical risk to yourself, a criminal record. You might also be fined and might have to follow certain rules. 
• A mobile phone is what Americans call a cell phone. 
• Something that’s fit for purpose is–. Oh, hell, that kind of defines itself, doesn’t it? Why am I bothering you with it? 
• As for the comment, any British newspaper or report will cheerily mix percentages, fractions, and any other way of reporting statistics that you can find in the back of your closet, leaving the hapless reader trying to compare two-thirds with 43% with 12 out of 40. It’s enough to drive a retired and mathematically incompetent copyeditor to distraction, even though she’s no longer entirely sure where distraction is. When I can do it safely, which isn’t often, I shift everything into a single system, but where I’m likely to do more damage than good, I sneak quietly out of the paragraph, humming a lullabye and closing the door behind me. If I’m careful, no one even knows I was there. 

You will, of course, do whatever you like with the numbers. Just don’t tell me about it. 

But we were talking about crime statistics.

 

Fraud

The number of bank and credit card scams went up 19% in–if I’m reading this correctly, which isn’t guaranteed–the previous year. To balance that out, the total number of frauds stayed pretty much the same and the “other fraud” category was down 40%. All told, there were 3.1 million incidents and 2.3 million of the victims were fully reimbursed.

But since we base our beliefs about the world at least in part on our experience of it, I was convinced the number of frauds had gone through the roof, taking part of our insulation with it. I’ve got scamsters on my phone. I’ve got them in my inbox. Come December they’ll be coming down the chimney claiming to be Santa Claus.

I can’t be the only person thinking they’ve torn have a hole in their roof, because when the government sent a group of people a letter saying something along the lines of, “You’re entitled to a refund,” it launched a full-scale PR campaign explaining that the letter wasn’t a scam and that recipients did need to respond but should only respond through official channels. Because someone out there is surely sharpening their talons and setting up copycat websites so they can move that money to their own bank accounts.

So no, statistically speaking fraud hasn’t gone up, it only feels like it has. 

 

Booking.com rentals

The weirdly named consumer group Which? considers Booking.com so scam-ridden that it tested its security by listing 10 Downing Street, the prime minister’s residence, on it. “‘1 bedroom apartment in the heart of London. . . .’” the listing said. “‘10 Downing Street, London,’ alongside a photo of the most famous front door in Britain. Just four minutes on foot to the Houses of Parliament, it promised.” 

It was such an obvious fake that they didn’t expect to get away with it, but the site took bookings. 

“Creating the listing took about 15 minutes,” Which? wrote. “At no point were we asked to prove that we owned the property, or indeed that I was a real person. . . . It took a full 18 months until Booking.com asked us for photo ID and a valid National Insurance number to prove our identity. When we didn’t provide this, the listing was finally blocked – 20 months after it was first set up”–and that was in response to a new law.

“Immediately, it was a big hit. We ensured nobody could book without being approved, but a startling 14 people asked about its availability in the first 20 minutes. If you live abroad, you may have no clue this is the Prime Minister’s home – it’s just a bargain in central London.

“Worse, Booking.com made no attempt to prevent us paying for a week’s stay at 10 Downing Street. We’re still not sure if we will get all our money back. Despite us telling Booking.com that the listing is fraudulent, it wasn’t until 31 August that it cancelled the stay and we received an email about a refund. It’s not clear from the email whether we will receive a full refund, or if Booking.com will retain a fee or commission for the booking. 

“Even if it pays us back in full, it’s happily held on to the money for two months – and presumably earned interest on it. Some of its multi-billion-dollar revenue this year will – unbelievably – come from the money we paid it for a phoney week’s stay at the home of the Prime Minister. . . . 

“Bizarrely, Booking.com didn’t take the listing down – even when we told it what we’d done. We then went one step further and wrote a fake review of our fake stay. ‘It was unbelievable that Booking.com let us stay at 10 Downing Street – the home of the UK PM!’ we enthused in a 10/10 review.

“To make sure Booking.com’s review moderators knew it was a joke, we added that our favourite part of the stay was ‘Hanging out with Larry The Cat’.

“But although the platform said that the review would be ‘checked by our moderation team’ before being posted, it was published within minutes. Our 10/10 score meant that 10 Downing Street was now officially rated by Booking.com as ‘exceptional’. Booking.com finally deleted the account on 27 August – around two months after it was set up.”

There’s more but I’ll leave you to follow the link if you want to enjoy the full tale. 

That’s not really related to crime statistics but I couldn’t resist throwing it in.

 

Immigration

In September, in response to immigrants who’d tried to cross the Channel in a small boat, been rescued by the RNLI–the Royal National Lifeboat Institution–and brought ashore at Dover, anti-immigrant demonstrators blocked roads for several hours. They dressed in black, wore balaclavas, chanted “Christ is king,” and called themselves Christian patriots. They were well organized, disciplined, and militaristic.They’d been called together by something called Patriot Platform.

Not long afterward, the Portsmouth Patriots held a rally in–you guessed it–Portsmouth, describing immigration as a “national emergency of migrant-driven crime, particularly against women and children.” (I’m quoting from the Observer there, not the group itself. If the article’s behind a paywall, I apologize but I swear I’m not the one who put it there.) 

The article quotes one participant as saying, “None of the crime figures really are truly being broadcast. The police don’t let the data out. So consequently–this is the trouble, isn’t it?–nobody knows.”

In other words, if the figures aren’t the ones I believe in, they either don’t exist or have been fiddled with.

In Poole, demonstrators handed women rape alarms as protection against those hoards of immigrant men. 

Somehow these guys just love thinking about women being raped. 

If you’re looking for protection, the head of the Patriot Platform, Daniel Thomas, called Danny Tommo, might not be your obvious choice. He served time for an attempted kidnap. Apparently, he and some other men claimed someone had stolen £10,000 worth of drugs from them, so they tried to kidnap him at knifepoint, as any sane, rational adult would. 

The judge described the attempt as both “extraordinarily frightening” and “stupid.” According to Wikipedia, the claim that the man had stolen the drugs was false.

The organization doesn’t have seem to have much in the way of a program but has been good at mobilizing people and managing its social media. So far. Having raised a fair bit of money for Patriot Platform, Thomas shifted to raising money for his mother, who he claimed had to move because the Daily Mail had–

Okay, he doesn’t say they printed her address but that based on what they had printed people would be able to figure out where she lived. So he showed up at the Mail’s office with a dozen masked men wearing black shorts and hoodies and livestreamed himself “threatening that unless the newspaper organised his mother a new home within 48 hours, he would be back again with a larger contingent of men.” 

On a Wednesday, he went online asking for donations to help his mother move. She was living “a state of absolute fear. . . . It would be right for the country to rally together and help her in this time of need.” By Friday afternoon, he had more than £62,000.

How well that’ll play with the wider public is anyone’s guess.

 

So who are they angry at?

It took no time at all for the definition of bad guys to widen. This seems to be driven by some previously unknown law of physics. Think of Trump’s anti-immigrant drive. He starting out saying that he was going to deport not all immigrants but “the worst of the worst,” then before you had time to sneeze and throw away your kleenex he had got masked men (also dressed in black; they have a thing about black) pulling random brown people out of cars and off the street when they walk their kids to the shool bus. 

How many of the people who’ve been snatched even have criminal records, never mind being the worst of the worst? According to the Cato Institute, a conservative thinktank, 5% have convictions for violent crimes; 73% have no criminal record at all. 

Some entered the country legally and were arrested at routine immigration hearings. The occasional citizen gets picked up, shouting “But I’m a citizen” and is–I believe although I can’t swear to that–eventually realized. 

That sounds like it’s off the subject, but it’s not. Once anti-immigrant rhetoric dominates the national conversation, its target expands. 

So who else did Britain’s anti-immigrant crew decide were the bad guys back in September? The RNLI for one. For some time, it had been under pressure not to rescue migrants, and it stood its ground, saying its lifeboats would rescue anyone at sea whose life was in danger. Following the Dover incident, volunteers (the RNLI isn’t a government body and relies heavily on volunteers) reported being harassed and threatened online and in person. 

The Portsmouth RNLI station is temporarily closed.  On the positive side, the RNLI reported a “significant” rise in donations since they came under attack. On the other hand, money’s also said to be rolling into Patriot Platform.

 

Mission creep

Who else became a target? Well, someone in Portsmouth saw a busload of young brown guys arriving in a bus and being dropped off at a hotel. Some 40 demonstrators gathered outside, some wearing masks or balaclavas (there’s a run on balaclavas lately; you might want to stock up). One or two of them got into the hotel and ran through, knocking on doors, trying, I assume, to roust out the good-for-nothing asylum seekers.

Who’d been on the bus? Pakistan’s under-19 cricket team. 

The incident was defused, but I make no promises about the next one.

 

British migrants

Meanwhile, in the wake of Brexit, Sweden’s been ejecting hundreds of British immigrants  –Britons who’d moved to Sweden. Some of them lived in Sweden for decades and have families there. Some of them are old and ill. Some are demented. All of them are guaranteed to spark compassion.

Since I started this post by talking about the gap between perception and what’s measurable, I should say that it’s beyond me to compare the way this story’s been covered with the way migration to Britain and deportations from Britain have been. But I am left with an impression: that the stories humanize British deportees from Sweden. They’re presented as people with stories and losses and lives they’ve had to leave behind. The people coming to Britain or being deported from it? With rare exceptions, they’re at best a blur and at worst a threat.