Crime: Understanding its impact on society through data.

In this episode of Statistically Speaking Miles is helped with his enquiries by Meghan Elkin and Billy Gazard from the Office for National Statistics, as he investigates how we use data to get valuable insights into the impact of crime on modern society.

Along the way he debunks common misconceptions; learns how the nature of crime continues to evolve; and uncovers the work being done behind-the-scenes to make crime data more inclusive.

 

TRANSCRIPT

 

MILES FLETCHER 

Hello, and welcome again to ‘Statistically Speaking’ the Office for National Statistics podcast. I'm Miles Fletcher and in this episode, we're going to be investigating crime.  

What is the statistical evidence that despite the impression you might have got from the media, overall crime in England and Wales has actually been falling? Or is it the case that the nature of crime has simply changed and we're more likely these days to be targeted online than in the streets, and what in any case is the value of understanding the overall level of crime when that term captures such a wide and varied range of social ills and harms?  

Helping us with our enquiries today are Meghan Elkin, head of the ONS centre for crime and justice, and Billy Gazard head of acquisitive crime and stakeholder engagement.  

Meghan, so much to talk about in the many and varied crime figures that ONS produces, but let's focus first on where those numbers come from. In this case, there are two major data sets and the first and arguably the most significant of those, statistically at least, is a very large survey and it's not information gathered from the police or government. It's information that comes directly from people and their experience of crime. Tell us all about that.     MEGHAN ELKIN  That's correct. So the best source we have for measuring crime is the crime survey for England and Wales and this is a massive undertaking. We interview around 34,000 people aged 16 and over each year, and over 2000 children, and we really appreciate everyone who takes the time to respond to our survey as it helps us to produce these important figures. As you said, crime covers a wide range of offences and there's no perfect source, but the crime survey has had an established methodology over a long period of time, which really helps us to get a good idea of the trends and changes in society that people are experiencing.    MF Give us a sense of the scale of this operation. Is it one of the biggest surveys the ONS runs?    ME  It is, I would say that we are consistently speaking to 34,000 people each year and what's probably different to most surveys is that we have children as part of the response as well. So when we go to a household, we'll interview an adult, so someone aged 16 and over, to ask about their experiences. If there are children aged 10 to 15 in their household. We'll also ask if one of them would be able to complete our children's survey so that we get a picture of the crime that they're experiencing as well.    MF  And what is the particular value of speaking people to people face to face in their homes like that?    ME  I mean, the real value of the crime survey for measuring the trends is that it doesn't matter if people have reported what they've experienced to the police or not, so unlike police recorded crime, it doesn't have that impact. And so we can ask people about their experiences in the last 12 months. We'll also ask them questions about their attitudes towards crime related issues such as the police and amount of security that they have, and for the most sensitive questions rather than being asked by the interviewer directly, we'll give someone a tablet so that they can complete those questions privately themselves to ensure that confidentiality and confidence in telling us such sensitive information.    MF  That’s taken the survey into some quite new areas, hasn't it in recent years, would you like to talk about some of those developments? You talk about actually, and this is highly unusual, of course a very sensitive area, it's about the ability to actually speak to children as well. Tell us to what end that work has been directed...    ME  So for children in particular, we've been working closely with a number of stakeholders to understand what's most useful for us to ask children. So we do collect their general experiences of crime in the last 12 months, but we also ask them about their experiences online and that's provided some really useful data about children's lived experiences about being bullied and whether that's happening at school or online, but also the behaviours and activities that sometimes could be quite risky that they're taking part in online. And that's given some new information into that sector that we had just not understood before, and has been really useful in shaping policy and understanding how children can be better protected online.    MF  So this is quite an intensive encounter with the ONS data gatherer as they're sitting down for about 40 to 45 minutes or so. But how are the people selected? And how do you go about ensuring that they're a good representative sample and that we're not missing out important sections of the population, which, on a subject like this, of course, it's very important to get a really accurate picture of how people are experiencing crime at that grassroots level.    ME  So we use a postcode address file, basically a list of addresses to sample from, so households are chosen at random to ensure that we've got a representative sample for England and Wales. That's why it's really important and we really appreciate people responding to the survey because that's how we ensure good quality data, by getting that good, rounded sample.    MF  So there's a lot of rich data coming out of the crime survey, but by its nature, it doesn't cover some of the more serious offences does it?    ME  No that's true, particularly the higher harm but lower volume crimes, for example knife crime, those don't appear in the survey very often. And so we look to other data sources for those. It also excludes crimes that are often termed “victimless”, such as possession of drugs, which again, we then measure through different sources.    MF  And that is where the other major data source starts to become more relevant. We're looking at very serious offences particularly, including murder and rape. Those offences are covered by the police and their recording of crime. Tell us about the value of that data, and how that contributes to the wider understanding of crime.    ME  So the police record all the crimes that are reported to them and those are fed into us via the Home Office as a record of police recorded crime. And it has lots of advantages as a data source in that for some crime types, it is a good measure. And unlike the crime survey for those crime types, it can be very good at looking at short term trends. So particularly through the pandemic it was helpful for some of those crime types where we know that it's a better measure. But we also know that there are a lot of crimes that people don't report to the police and that's where that source of data struggles the most, particularly for really hidden crimes. Rape would be one of those crimes, where relatively few people do report that to the police so it doesn't appear in the numbers as much. But the police figures are subject to changes in recording practices. So when new offences are introduced that obviously changes how the count is put together, but also it’s impacted by police activity and how they record and that also will change the numbers. When you see increases in police recorded crime, for example, it doesn't necessarily mean that crime has gone up. And that's part of our work at ONS to unpick and understand what's going on there. But it does have benefits as you say, for some of the higher harm but lower volume crimes that we see, homicide it records very well, and for knife crime it's our best measure. So there's definitely a place for it as a data source still.    MF  So two major data sources contributing to this bigger picture. And what has that bigger picture been showing us these last few years?    ME  Well when we look across trends in general, actually, over time, crime has been decreasing since the mid 90s, and has been more flat in recent years. So the crime survey estimated around 20 million offences in 1995. And we've seen that decreasing over time and our latest data shows that it's around 5 million offences. And that's when you're using a comparable estimate. So the overall picture is very much if that crime sits much lower than it used to in the mid 90s. And that's not just a pattern that we've seen in England and Wales. It's a pattern that's reflected across other countries, across Europe and America. And it's something that lots of people have tried to understand what's really driven that long term change. More recently we have seen some decreases, some of them very much linked to the pandemic. But now as we look and compare before the pandemic to our most recent data, we have still seen some decreases. I think it's always important to point out that while total crime is a useful measure and reflection, it's only when you really start digging into the individual crime types that you can start seeing some trends that just get averaged out when you look at the total.    MF  Yes, you need to understand what kind of offences we're talking about. And if we talk about that long term picture, isn't it the case that we saw, coming out of the 1980s into the 1990s, turn of the century, violent crime decreasing, damage to property and so forth and theft from cars. Was that the broad trend that we saw?    ME  Yeah, so we've seen decreases in that time period across a number of crime types. One of the most popular explanations of the overall pattern there is the “security hypothesis”, which is very much built on the widespread improvements we've seen in security devices which have prevented crimes from happening and caused that decrease. So you mentioned there of vehicles, vehicle theft has decreased, most likely due to some things like improvements in central deadlocking systems and electric immobilisers, those security measures that have improved so much. But we have also seen decreases in violence across that time as well.     MF  Threat to property is one thing of course, but yes, personal safety and and our well-being on the streets, is of course a major factor as well. Talk us through the trends on that because if you rely entirely on the news media for your understanding of violent crime, you probably think that things are in a pretty desperate situation.    ME  So when we look back over that long term picture again, the estimate that we have from the crime survey for violence shows that there were around 4.5 million offences in 1995 And that compares to 1.2 million in the most recent data. Obviously, we've talked about the limitations to the crime survey data for understanding violence, but the more serious crimes within this type that we don't see in the crime survey are at much lower levels. They are lower volume, thankfully, and so we have seen some patterns there of variation during the pandemic.    MF  Another important development these last few years, of course, has been getting a much better understanding of the nature and extent of child abuse, an area of huge sensitivity and massive public concern. Can you talk a little about the work that's been going on in that area?    ME  So we've been conducting a feasibility study over the last few years to look at whether a measure of prevalence of child abuse could be estimated. A few years ago we put together a compendium of statistics on child abuse to help people understand the levels of child abuse and the nature of child abuse being experienced in our society. But the major gap in that evidence base is a prevalence level for what's being experienced now by children. We do in the crime survey for England and Wales ask people about the experiences they had as children. So we asked that of adults and that gives us some insight but it's still not helping policymakers understand what's actually happening in society today. So we've been conducting lots of research to understand the challenges, and how we might be able to overcome those of asking children such sensitive questions. And that work has been going really well, we're now at the stage of looking at what questions could actually be asked and the safeguarding that would need to wrap around that survey to look after the children completing it. So we're working very closely with DFE and Ofsted and schools to understand how that might best work going forward. So that's the next stage of that project.    MF  What has that experience and that engagement brought to this highly sensitive topic?    ME  We work very closely with the NSPCC, who have been extremely supportive of the project and how it's developing and helping us understand the safeguarding procedures that we might be able to use with a survey, and the support that we can give children and the different ways of doing that. There's a careful balance of helping children feel they are able to open up and tell us about experiences while also then safeguarding them and managing that challenge of confidentiality. And the NSPCC and others like them, obviously have great experience of being in this place and supporting children that we can then take on board to make sure that we do the survey in the best way possible.    MF  That's going to remain an important piece of work for the future. If there's one really important use of all this data, it is to understand the risks that any of us face of becoming the victim of crime at any given time. Billy, what are the numbers saying about that?    BILLY GAZARD  So I think it's quite a complicated picture. When we're talking about all the crime that the crime survey measures, for example, just under one in five people would have experienced a crime in the last 12 months according to the latest data, but obviously that varies across different crime types. So for example, fraud, about one in 12 people would have experienced fraud in the last 12 months, whereas offences such as violence, only about 2% of the population would have experienced a violent offence in the last 12 months.    MF  That overall is kind of reassuring, I guess, but nevertheless, those are significant sections of the population.    BG  Yes, I agree. That still translates into a lot of people experiencing that crime. So obviously, it's really important that we continue to monitor levels of violence moving forward to see how that changes over time.    MF  And if you break it down by geography, I guess of course, in some areas, those risks, particularly of violence and crimes against property are going to be much higher?    BG  This is looking at the national picture, but there will be variations at geographical levels, as well as by lots of different characteristics. For example, we know that younger people are at more risk of experiencing violence than older sections of the population.    MF  So that's the overall picture, but Meghan the risks might be rather different if you happen to be female.    MEGHAN ELKIN  There are some crime types that disproportionately affect women and girls compared to men and boys. Say for example, we estimate 1.6 million women aged 16 to 74 suffered domestic abuse in the last year and that one in three women over the age of 16 were subjected to at least one form of harassment in the last year. So there again, there is that variation in crime types that people are experiencing. And when we look at measures around domestic abuse, again, the crime survey for England and Wales is our most trusted measure. And as I reflected earlier, those are the crime types where we actually give respondents a tablet so that they can complete those questions confidentially. And actually, that posed us a particular challenge during the pandemic where our face-to-face interviewing had to stop and we moved to telephone interviews, and we managed to make that switch very quickly to be able to keep getting the crime estimates that were needed to understand society. But we did think there was a risk of asking people on the telephone those really sensitive questions about experiences of domestic abuse and sexual assault, but the concerns around confidentiality and respondent safeguarding were just too great for us to be able to ask those questions. So for a period of time, we weren't collecting that information when the survey returned to the field, though, we went back as early as we could so that we could start collecting those important topics again. And we now have the first data from those for domestic abuse since before the pandemic started. Now that we've started to get the face-to-face survey back into publication, some caution needs to be taken for interpreting those results. Because of how the surveys come back there are some challenges to quality and so again, we need to be a bit cautious in interpreting them, but it's so important that we've got those figures back. And actually what we see from the crime survey is that there's been no change in the prevalence of domestic abuse in the most recent data when compared to before the pandemic. But this is an opportunity to show how we use multiple data sources to really understand what might be going on in society and what people are experiencing. Because while the crime survey has now shown no change in the prevalence of domestic abuse, we have seen increases throughout that time in police recorded crime data. And we've also seen increases in data that we collect from charities. We work closely with a range of charities in the domestic abuse space to understand the changes that are happening to their services and the demand they're seeing, but also to help us understand the nature of abuse. So during lockdowns for example, we saw a 22% increase in calls to the National Domestic Abuse helpline for the year ending March 21, so there was definitely that increase in demand. But now combining that with the crime survey evidence that we haven't seen an increase in prevalence, actually that helps us understand that maybe that increase in demand from charities primarily came from a lack of other coping mechanisms and people reaching out in different ways to get the support they needed during that difficult time.    MF  And that would be seem to be a very valuable example of using other data sources than police recorded crime to get an accurate picture of what's going on, because of the simple reluctance that so many people have in reporting these experiences when they happen to them.    ME  Yes, that's true. I mean, the evidence we have is that one in five victims of partner abuse in the last year would have told the police, and that just shows how hidden these crime types are. And that's true when you look into sexual assault as well, where one in six tell us that they would have told the police about what happened to them. And that's an area where we haven't used charity data before to help us understand sexual assault, but it's something we're working on at the moment to be included in next year's publication.    MF  Are there other areas of offending where we could possibly get a better picture than we currently have at the moment?    ME  So harassment is also an area that in initial work on violence against women and girls, we found that actually there wasn't as much data as we thought there might be to help understand that situation. So we used some questions on the opinion survey last year to help us understand levels of harassment at a very basic level, for lack of a better description. But we've now introduced new questions on the crime survey as well to help us understand that topic. But again, I think that's going to be one where when that data becomes available to us to analyse we'll be able to start looking at other groups and organisations we'd like to work with to understand better that situation and support our efforts to make our statistics more inclusive. Working with stakeholders really helps us to look for these new data sources and new insights, to really understand the scale and nature of crime that people are experiencing.    MF  So Billy, just as the recording of crime evolves over time, so does what we consider to be a criminal offence. Tell us about the offences of the past, and what acts were regarded as criminal in their day and are no longer.    BILLY GAZARD  Yes I think it's important to remember that our laws are always changing to reflect the concerns of our society as it evolves. Something that was criminal hundreds of years ago might sound pretty absurd today. So for example, playing football used to be an offence in mediaeval times, there was punching the ball as well as kicking the ball and deaths were not uncommon.  

MF 

That's not a well-known fact!  

BG 

It actually became an offence in 1388 and wasn’t repealed until 1845.    MF  And were any people prosecuted? I think we know we know what the sentence was...    BG  The sentence for breaking this law was actually six days in prison. There are no stats on how many people were punished for breaking this law or how many people were put in prison for that. Another offence it seems absurd today, but we do have some stats on how many people actually were prosecuted for this is witchcraft. This actually became an offence in 1542 and it wasn't repealed until 1736 and during this time 500 witches were put on trial and over 100 of those were executed.    MF  Grisly stuff! History has moved on, and of course these days we're dealing with some very 21st century phenomenon, and that of course is the growth of online crime, cybercrime and and phishing scams. Tell us about the emergence of that type of offending. What has happened over the last few years and what is the position now?    BG  So what we've seen with fraud and computer misuse offences is very different to what we've seen with other types of offences. But unfortunately, we've only been starting to measure fraud and computer misuse offences on the crime survey since 2017. So we don't have the same long standing time series that we have for the other crime types, and this is obviously because a lot of online crime, this is a fairly new phenomenon, so we've taken our time to really develop those questions and now they are on the survey. What we have seen over the last five years since we started recording these offences is that those offences have stayed fairly flat over that time period. Over the pandemic however, we did see an increase in fraud and computer misuse offences during that period and we think that's probably to do with people spending more time at home and spending more time online. And what we did see in terms of fraud, we saw that the proportion of fraud incidents that were cyber related increased up to almost two thirds, from about 50% before the pandemic. So it suggests that actually, a lot of the rise in fraud offences that we did see were because of a rise in cyber related fraud rather than offline fraud.    MF  One popular conception is that it's mainly elderly people who are the targets of this online crime, but that's not actually the case is it?    BG  No. And definitely, when we look at our data, that's definitely not something that we're finding. Actually what we find is that adults aged 75 years or older are actually less likely to be victims of fraud. It's those in working age groups, adults aged 25 to 44 for example, who are more risk of receiving phishing messages, those employed and those living in less deprived areas are much more likely to receive those messages. And that might be to do with fraudsters targeting those groups because they know that they have more disposable money. So definitely older people are at less risk than the working population.    MF  So there is something in this argument perhaps that crime generally has moved online?    BG  I think there’s definitely an argument that a lot more crime is happening online, and we're definitely seeing that with fraud incidents. We have less data on other crime types, though obviously the internet and the act of being online can be used across many crime types. For example, harassment, stalking, these are other offenses that people can use online tools to commit. And that's something that we're always trying to improve on the crime survey, to introduce those types of questions so that we can get a better understanding of how online tools are being used to commit crimes.    MF  So online crime is a relatively recent development, but crime and offending of course, continues to develop unfortunately and go in different directions. Tell us about other developments that the ONS has got in hand. To try and either capture new types of offending or perhaps just get a better insight on more established patterns of crime and harm.    BG  In the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW), we ask people living in private households lots of questions about their experiences with crime so we can produce an estimation of how much crime that group of people is experiencing. That's about 98% of the population of England and Wales. But what the survey doesn't cover is people who do not live in private households. This covers, for example, people living in residential care settings, or homeless people, students living in student halls. So although this is only about 2% of the population, these groups have very different experiences of crime. And it's really important that we also try and capture their experiences so that we can provide information for policymakers to take action on the crime that those groups are experiencing. One of the things that we're trying to do is produce a publication looking at crimes experienced by non-household populations as well. So we're currently doing some work investigating what other data sources are available that we can use to shine the light on it at ONS and share that information alongside what we do with household populations. So we're going to be going out talking to various stakeholders, talking to different data holders to see how can we work together to bring a picture of all the data that we have and better understand what the risks are for these groups in terms of experiencing crime and how can we bring all of that together.    MF  So as crime continues to evolve you can count on one thing, the ONS will continue to measure it, and explore it, and hopefully contribute to solving it.  

Thanks very much to Meghan Elkin and Billy Gazard. I'm Miles Fletcher, and you've been listening to ‘Statistically Speaking’. You can subscribe to new episodes of the podcast on Spotify, Apple podcasts and all other major podcast platforms.  

Our producers at the ONS are Steve Milne and Alisha Arthur.  

Until next time, goodbye.