In the Scotsman today, a retired police officer tells us:
‘There’s good news on crime rates but beware the sting in the tail, writes former Deputy Chief Constable Tom Wood. The latest published crime statistics were good news – overall crime down by an impressive 16 per cent since last year and, within that big picture, further good news that violent crime had reduced with only a tiny minority of us ever falling victim. Remarkably, recorded crime has fallen by over 40 per cent in the last ten years. Now there’s an important caveat in all this of course and that’s the fact that only reported crime can be recorded and only recorded crime counts.’
BUT we already have another reliable source dealing with the above concern in The Scottish Crime and Justice Survey (SCJS) which:
- Enables the Scottish population to tell us about their experiences of, and attitudes to, a range of issues related to crime, policing and the justice system; including crime not reported to the police;
- Provides a valid and reliable measure of adults’ experience of crime, including services provided to victims of crime.
The survey, though based on a sample, is very reliable and only those differences that are statistically significant at the 95% significance level are described as differences.
As in the police reported crime statistics, people’s experience of crime is down, massively:
Both violent AND property crime are falling:
Crime has fallen by more than 400 000 incidents in 10 years:
Also, far fewer of us experience crime:
Finally, people have experienced an even greater fall in crime than in the police statistics:
‘A comparable subset of crime is used to enable comparisons to be made between recorded crime and SCJS estimates, with both sources showing 7 marked decreases over the past decade. Between 2008/09 and 2017/18, police recorded crime in the comparable subset fell by 40%, whilst the estimated number of incidents in the SCJS comparable crime group decreased by 47%.’
Talking-up Scotland 
The Scotsman piece is a variation on the ‘tip of the iceberg’ argument. The corollary of this is that having debunked statistics the debunker then invents statistics, which are, of course, unquestionably TRUE, because Nomedia immediately publishes them.
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