Shropshire Star comment: Figures on crime just confusing
These days we are bombarded by statistics and then everybody debates what they mean.
Take the crime figures. In the West Mercia area which covers Shropshire, there has been an increase of almost 10,000 crimes, which means many thousands more victims.
Within this overall rise of 13 per cent there have been surges in particular categories. For instance there has been a 23 rise in recorded sexual offences, and a 16 per cent rise in violent crimes.
West Mercia's Police and Crime Commissioner John Campion says he is reassured that more people are coming forward to record crime.
That is one way of looking at it, although it has to be said that a lot of members of the public will not be reassured by a rise in recorded crime.
But if you are one of those, you don't have to look at these statistics. You can look elsewhere and find evidence that crime is much worse than the police figures, but has fallen. To explain how that can be possible, you have to accept what should be obvious, that the crimes reported to police and logged by them do not accurately represent the true level of crime, as it is estimated that 60 per cent of offences are never reported.
What we have ended up with is two sets of "rival" statistics which show different pictures. The crime data for England and Wales from the Office for National Statistics says there were 5.3 million crimes recorded by police, a rise of 14 per cent. Meanwhile, the Crime Survey for England and Wales says there were 10.6 million crimes, a fall of 10 per cent.
So crime is up. And crime is down.
Who and what do you believe? It may surprise you to learn that the survey, reflecting the real experiences of people, is considered more reliable for many types of offences.
Once you have got you head round that, you can spend some time poring over the latest secondary school league tables for Shropshire. Shropshire pupils do better in exams than the national average but do not progress as well as they should during their school years. Looking at the performances of individual schools, some seem to do better than others, but of course they do not all have the same pupils from the same circumstances, so how can you make a fair comparison?
All these pick-your-own statistics will inform the experts. But when the figures vary so wildly, can they truly be experts, or are they "experts" - ignorant people who speak with misplaced confidence?
