Who can you trust?
When I was a small boy, the most exciting thing in the world was a day trip to London with my father. I was brought up in a field in deepest Yorkshire. The big smoke was amazing. It had museums, skyscrapers, underground trains, toy shops, galleries and ice cream. Best of all was the ice cream. Where I came from all there was to look at was sheep.
Before we got off the train at Kings Cross, my father always gave me the same advice:
If you get lost find a policeman and ask him for help.
You can always trust a policeman ~ My Father
My father was wrong
In September 1996 Detective Superintendent Peter Coles resigned from Nottinghamshire Constabulary. He had blown the whistle on their crime recording practices. The Government had introduced two targets. One was to reduce levels of crime, the other to improve detection rates. Superintendent Coles accused his superiors of cheating to hit them both.
The subsequent enquiry found Nottinghamshire Constabulary guilty of “Cuffing” and “TICing”.
Cuffing
This is the art of making a crime disappear up the cuff of a policeman’s sleeve. The police split major crimes into minor ones. A burglary became a theft and an assault, both less emotive. Thefts of handbags became cases of lost property. The force also started adding a letter to the front of the crime numbers they reported. That way they didn’t show up in government statistics.
The month before Detective Superintendent Coles’ resignation, Nottinghamshire Chief Constable, Peter Green, claimed: “In the past 12 months burglary has fallen by 24 per cent, robbery by 25 per cent and car crime by 18 per cent”.
The investigation found that an annual reduction of 7,788 reported crimes was actually an increase of 1,387.
TICing
This is a simple way of improving detection rates. It involves persuading criminals to have other crimes “taken into consideration”.
On one occasion, the police persuaded an 11-year-old girl they had caught shoplifting to admit to another 80 offences. The investigation didn’t discover any evidence to support this. It also found one criminal who had admitted to committing 5 burglaries whilst he was in prison. Best of all it found a whole host of “detected crimes” that weren’t even “recorded crimes”. How is that for ingenuity?
Nottingham isn’t a bad place
I live there. Contrary to what you might read in the papers it isn’t “Shottingham” the gun crime capital of the UK. I prefer to think of it as “The Queen of the Midlands”.
In my home town’s defence it is worth telling the tale of Kent Constabulary. They police the “Garden of England”. Ten years before the Nottingham debacle, Constable Ron Walker went to Scotland Yard with allegations of corruption within Kent Constabulary.
He accused 60 of his colleagues of fabricating crime figures. Scotland Yard’s Serious Crime Squad raided 13 Kent Police Stations. By the time they arrived (and Kent is a good 30 miles from Scotland Yard) they found that all the documents they were looking for had been shredded. I can only assume the Sweeney forgot to use their sirens that day.
It isn’t just the British Bobby
If you google “police manipulate crime figures”, the target focused British Constabulary make a good showing, but they are not alone. There are hits for Milwaukee Wisconsin and Buckeye Arizona. You will also find stories from as far afield as Queensland and Johannesburg. Apparently you can’t trust a copper anywhere.
Mind you Doctors are notorious for fiddling their waiting times, and don’t trust a teacher with an exam result. As for accountants, remember the story of Arthur Andersen and Enron? It appears nobody is above a little cheating to hit a target. This is particularly true if there is a carrot or stick riding on it.
So who can you trust?
You can trust pretty much anybody to cheat. Maybe not everybody, but an alarmingly large number of people will fudge the figures to look good. Something that is worth remembering when you are busy handing out performance targets.
Be particularly careful if you are passing them down to somebody who looks respectable.
Fear invites wrong figures. Bearers of bad news fare badly. To keep his job, anyone may present to his boss only good news. ~ W. Edwards Deming
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Image by Dave Storm
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