New ‘crime index’ used by police says burglary is twice as bad as child abduction – and bike theft is more serious than drug possession
The experimental list has sparked fears that cops will stop investigating less serious crimes
A CONTROVERSIAL new crime index ranks burglary twice as bad as child abduction and bike theft more serious than drug possession.
The experimental new Crime Harm Index has revealed that serious crime has been on the rise for the past two years despite officials claiming the country is becoming safer.
But its controversial ranking system has reportedly impacted on how officers focus their priorities - including putting more effort into deterring dangerous drivers and less into catching shoplifters.
The rankings are based on jail sentences handed out by a judge and views blackmail as slightly more serious than child abuse.
It also deems robbery to be twice as bad as child abduction because robbers could be handed a life sentence, while the maximum for child abduction is just seven years.
Experts now fear the system may tempt cops to fiddle the figures or even stop investigating less serious crimes.
Marian Fitzgerald, visiting professor of criminology at the University of Kent, said: "Large sections of the public will increasingly find that the police may record the crimes they report to them, but will not even go through the motions of following up these reports since they are now officially sanctioned not to take any action."
Michael Levi, professor of criminology at Cardiff University, said it was "deeply regrettable" that fraud is being left out of the first index, to be published in the autumn, even though it is now the most common crime reported to police, with some six million cases last year.
He added: "If you’ve got some categories that are excluded, they are automatically left out of the police’s priorities."
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Currently, the Office for National Statistics publishes two sets of crime statistics – one based on all offences recorded by police in England and Wales and another based on a survey of victims.
The latest figures published in July showed 4.5 million offences were recorded by police in the year ending March 2016 - an annual rise of eight per cent.
Part of the increase is believed to be down to a surge in reported sex offences dating back decades in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal, but homicides have also risen to a five-year high.
The credibility of crime figures has been undermined in recent years by growing evidence that police had grown skilled at fiddling them to meet targets.
The ONS is now preparing to publish the crime harm index alongside the traditional quarterly figures for the first time.
Preliminary results show the harm index rose 7.8 per cent between April 2013 and March 2015, while the traditional measure of recorded crime remained stable.
Forces are already looking at how their priorities change if they judge crime by seriousness rather than volume. Leicestershire’s new approach meant that the ‘top offender’ locally was no longer a shoplifter who had committed 89 shop thefts, but a mugger who had committed five robberies in two days.
Last night, Keith Vaz MP, chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, told The Mail on Sunday: ";Any new method of assessing crimes in order to give guidance to police priorities is welcome. "However, we should take care to ensure there should be no downgrading of the ratings of serious crimes."
Peter Neyroud, a former chief constable who has pioneered development of a harm index at Cambridge University’s Institute of Criminology, said: "A crime harm index will help us – police, politicians and citizens – to understand crime and the harm it causes to victims and communities better.
"It helps police to target serious crimes more effectively, exposing crimes like child sexual exploitation, rape and domestic violence more starkly.
"All crimes are not equal.
"We all know that a minor theft and a murder cause a different level of harm, yet our traditional crime recording systems count both as one crime."
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