to tell you violent crime in the UK is falling

[1diamondearing]

violence is falling, robbery is falling, gun crime is falling, knife crime and sex crime is not significantly falling or rising, fraud is rising, shoplifting is rising

There's always a spike in the summer months especially during heatwave.

Your stats are not much consolation to the people affected by violent crime though.

A real comfort to a murder victims family I'm sure.

I'm clearly talking about my personal experience no need to mock

This is exactly why stats - facts - are important. Feelings don't trump facts. What is really happening does not always match with how we feel, which is why it's important to understand the facts (stats) so we can act accordingly.

Example: I feel like summers where I live are getting stormier and less summery. This is my lived experience, it is a true representation of how I feel. I may be inclined to book as many plane rides as I possibly can and to question people who say the earth is warming.

Stats, facts, show us that the summers are in fact much hotter world wide, and that the earth IS warming. This is a fact, it is not a feeling.

Both of these conflicting positions may be important to me, but only one should be used to drive policy and decision making. That's why facts (stats) matter over feelings

But it is precisely because my personal experience differs from your personal experience that we need to collect data and acknowledge it! Otherwise we're both 'right' but no closer to understanding trends and the bigger picture!

This is the ONS crime survey, which is the best measure we have

We know, @1diamondearing, but in this case "the best we have" is useless since the ONS is funded by governments who have an obvious vested interest in pretending they're succeeding in driving down crime

There's little point in relying on police figures either since the best you'll get in too many cases is a crime number issued - and that's if you're not told "It's not a police matter" or some other excuse to avoid responding

DH is a senior police officer in a large town in the midlands. He said there is not a single woman, child or older person in the 53 migrant hotels

Because they are housed separately ...

So where are the women supposedly housed, @1diamondearing?
I too am in the midlands, with numerous centres and hotels in the city used for asylum seekers and I'm assured there are no women in any of those either

Women wouldn't be housed in the same places for obvious reasons, but if they really did represent 40% of the total wouldn't you expect to find at least a couple of places reserved just for them?

Is that you Yvette? There are lies, damned lies and statistics!

Knife crime in London has seen a significant increase, with a 58.5% rise in just three years between 2021 and 2024, which is a staggering increase, and in no way compensates for the fact that there has been no crime in Little Dribbling during the same period.

Then you have to add in all the times the CPS do nothing after a crime is reported.
Thefts and threats of violence against farmers has increased but they just don't bother reporting it any more because nothing is done. DH was assaulted, we had a witness and film of the attack and they said there wasn't enough evidence to proceed. They didn't even want to prosecute the men who attacked police at Manchester Airport until Reform threatened to bring a private prosecution against them.

We have reached the point where public faith in the state and its apparatus is at absolute rock bottom, and if you think posting stuff like this is going to convince anyone, you are sadly mistaken.

Our schools are getting locked down because of men with machetes outside. This isn’t my imagination.

Does that get recorded as a crime statistic, if no one was caught?
If I get threatened by a bloke with a machete, and sensibly keep my distance before ringing the police later, will that even show up? Because it will influence whether I feel safe.

Ours too. Twice since March. One on the school road, outside the gates, and once a month later, jumped the fence with a weapon. Mind you, we’ve had parents take knives into the reception here and threaten staff before, stunning place to live.

I am not sure what gets reported where to be honest, and where it will come under any statistics.

Good god, @myplace and @Mydogisatool - I thought my own city was increasinly a cesspit, but at least we've not had that speaks too soon

I probably won't want to know the answer to this, but how did they come to be outside the school in the first place?

That’s awful!

Because that’s just how it is here. No one is shocked by anything now.

my road (which the school is off) was closed for two days last month as there was a shooting in the middle of the night - two drug dealers, and yes, I know all the gruesome details, one of the dealers is a school dad. so there was a huge fight about it in the playground the next morning with parents lamping the shit out of each other over it, and everyone knows everything here. But that’s a regular occurrence at the school, there’s always a parent kicking off.

Another one of the school dads lost his fingers defending himself to a neighbor wielding a machete. They seem to be the weapon of choice here. My friends dog ran into the undergrowth in the local woods, came out with a bleeding foot where he had stepped on, what turned out to be a dumped one.

we probably can’t afford to move anywhere better, and houses take a long time to sell here. It’s a dump, but house prices have gone up so much that. 3 bed semi is 250-300k to live here, with shootings, stabbings, break ins. It seems like something happens every week now.

It’s not great when you get the alert saying the school has gone into lockdown, and as ever, with a small, gossipy town, somehow the word spreads before the school can send it out, so parents are up there, trying to bash down the gates, getting in the way. It’s fucking carnage.

It’s getting worse and worse, it’s utterly depressing.

I'm desperately sorry to hear all that, @Mydogisatool, but you can see why the ONS want to pretend everything's so much rosier than it is overall

After all it's vastly easier than actually trying to do anything about it ...

You're right. High quality reliable data is incredibly important. Precisely because it can arbitrate the competing subjective perceptions of various people and groups.

The problem is, nobody trusts the data, or the data collectors, or their methodologies anymore. Some might suggest that because opposing sides both see differing biases this would actually indicate neutrality, but that's simply not the case as the disputes are along different axes. People did trust the data, or rather, many more people once did, than they do now. It makes it impossible to settle any argument. And all that can win is power. Everyone loses. And I absolutely blame the institutions who had one job, to ensure objectivity as far as possible, but have been on a short sighted and suicidal mission to soil their credibility.

@Theolittle The ONS made a hash of the census because they claimed their staff might be upset on questions about sex and gender. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00380385241240441

Thanks for that

So the ONS made a mistake in the wording of the gender question of the 2021 census. It upset a few people but i don’t think it should have damaged the long term credibility of the ONS which is respected worldwide. It seems to be just an excuse for some to discount statistics they don’t like