Mark Easton has surely been abducted by Tory Central Office and replaced with someone more willing to sing to their tune.
First he betrayed the BBC narrative and admitted that The Big Society, in some respects, may actually be working, encouraging communities to become active and to work together towards a common goal rather than have the dead hand of government tell them what they need.
Now he has really gone and done it, he’s blown his left wing credibility right out of the water and revealed that police numbers and unemployment statistics bare little relation to crime rate figures. So there.
He says ‘Something really interesting is going on’ (21 mins)….not just in the UK but across the developed world….irrespective of criminal justice practice and police numbers, crime has been going down for 20 years….not only that but it is also irrespective of employment levels and the economy…crime rising/falling whether we are in a boom or a downturn.
Actually he has said all this before in 2008 but clearly his colleagues in the BBC have completely ignored his conclusions and continued to berate Tory ministers for daring to reduce police numbers.
Home Office Minister Tony McNulty described it as “a statement of the blindingly obvious”. But is it “obvious” that when an economy turns down, crime inevitably turns up?
Broadly crime in Britain rose inexorably for 50 years – from 1945 to 1995 – and then started to fall. Crime rose fastest in the late 1950s and early 1960s, just as the economy was starting to boom. Indeed, throughout the swinging 60s, police and the courts had never been busier.
During the roller-coaster ride of the British economy in the 70s and 80s, crime went up and up. Recession or growth, boom or bust, crime continued to rise regardless.
There is little correlation between joblessness and crime – for almost the entire period from 1945 to 1970 the British unemployment rate was less than 3% of the workforce. And yet crime exploded during this period.
For the past 12 years in Britain and most of the developed world, crime has been falling. It is a drop which coincides with a sustained period of economic growth.
I haven’t done any real digging for figures but this graph from the US does seem to agree that when unemployment is at its highest for 20 years the crime rate is at its lowest….there is a definite trend of falling crime however it does show that as unemployment rises there are small rises in crime…apart from 2008-09.
All that is fascinating, if true…as it destroys the Left’s case…firstly concerning police numbers but more tellingly….the recent riots….which they blame on socio-economic factors…..Easton’s analysis suggests that isn’t the case ……I would take that view personally….the riots were started by a group of criminally intentioned people who would be criminal regardless of high employment levels and a booming economy.
Which all begs the question…if that is true then aren’t all the proposed ‘solutions’ to ‘disaffected youth’ so much hokum?
Sometimes the solution is that there is no solution….they get their friendships, excitement and money from crime….and prison is accepted as an occupational hazard…..why work frying burgers or stacking shelves when you can live on the ‘edge’ and have some ‘respect’….from those whom you think count?
And if so why waste enormous sums of money ‘saving’ them from themselves when they don’t want to be saved?
Crime rates were at their lowest in Britain between the two World Wars when there was an almost continuous economic depression and unemployment rates varied between 10% & 20% nationally with regional variations that were much higher.
Could that be because a quite a few young men were killed in the First World War? There would then be fewer young men in the 20’s and 30’s accounting for the lack of crime?
Or is that sexist?
I often assumed that the reason for low crime figures then was due to the fact that there was less to steal due to the depression.
But…but…but…that denies the “known fact” that poverty drives crime. Surely if more people are poor there will be more crime….Narratives not adding up….does not compute….need BBC script…..
Ah, “known facts”. Don’t you just love ’em.
I thought crime was all Thatcher’s fault?
Everything is Fatcher’s fault!
Or the “Zionists” !
There’s a certain irony here. Unlike *certain communities*, when it comes to poverty and crime, it really is a tiny minority of poor people who commit crime, despite what the BBC tries to tell you.
It’s just that the ones who do commit crime, tend to commit a hell of a lot of crime. Hence the BBC’s non-shocking revelation. Yes, unemployment doesn’t really affect crime – these guys already have a career, it’s just a criminal one.
So if we locked up that tiny minority for extended periods of time crime would be notably lower?
Craze-ee!!!
When it came to the riots and the bleeding heart liberals blaming poverty in run down inner city areas, It begged the question, What DID labour do for the run-down inner cities in their 13 years in office?
Funnily enough, I never ever heard anyone on the BBC even got close to that question. They were too happy to blame tory cuts, which interestingly enough, had not even been implemented at the time of the riots.
So either the hundreds of millions of pounds that labour pumped into run-down areas was a complete waste of money, or labour’s relentless attack on the “independent, self reliant nuclear family” had been allowing the neglect of poor sections of society to build for such a long time that it all boiled over into unacceptable, mindless criminality, when the police turned a politically correct blind eye to it for almost a week.
Probably just a blip. I’m sure Mr Easton will be over his reality illness soon.
I must admit, I’m rather sceptical of these latest crime figures. What about the August riots? ( Or rather the “protests” as the BBC called them ) ? Surely there must have been more incidents of criminal damage, assault, burglary and arson during August than during the whole preceding year? Or do all those offences just count as one incident?
I don’t know what to think.
I have a strong impression that incivility and behaviour that falls just below the definition of “crime” is increasing but I cannot prove it because, by definition, it is not criminal so there are no figures.
The prison population has gone up – has this contributed to the decrease or are people being imprisoned unnecessarily?
These are averages. Are some areas becoming safer and others worse?
What about other indicators? I seem to recall a previous report that violent crime had fallen being challenged by doctors and nurses working in A&E. Can’t find a reference though.
Questions questions.
You don’t know your Mark Easton – the incisive mind that cuts through this morning’s press releases for the purpose of highly researched churnalism.
He spoke yesterday of “a Minister four years ago” who said crime would rise in a recession.
Yes ‘a minister’. Not ‘a Labour minister.’ That would be asking too much of the lazy boy.
Mark’s meme is not that crime is falling but that fear of crime is a silly, middle class, Daily Mail obsession. Therefore falling crime levels only prove his point that it is something not worth worrying about.
Obviously he has escaped being mugged or burgled.
Well said. The crime statistics now bear as much relation to reality as the year on year increase in exam results-apparently we’re all becoming smarter as well as nicer- but these figures are uncritically trumpeted out as proof that the liberal agenda is working. Taking Easton’s argument to its logical end, we may as well scrap the police all together, then crime will be virtually non-existent.
But actually : overall crime is edging upwards again & the public’s concern is lessening in a time lag scenario. The bog no go area for the knee jerk BBC is of course hugely high immigrant crime – Poles and Romanians come top as do the costs of their translation needs … translation costing tens of millions in the SE annually ?? Yes .
The most effective crime prevention tool known is called a ‘thirtieth birthday’. If you take a curve of the number of births graph from 1959 to 1989 and superimpose it on the curve for crimes committed 1989 to 2009 there should be a close correlation. For some obscure reason, politicians prefer to attribute any drop to their own policies.