Petty Disputes Being Classed as Crime Are Distorting Figures: UK Police Chief

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson arrives with Home Secretary Priti Patel and Chief Constable David Thompson to speak to new graduates during a visit to the West Midlands Police Learning & Development Centre in Birmingham, England, on July 26, 2019. Jack Hill - WPA Pool/Getty Images

The head of one of Britain’s biggest police forces has said crime figures are being distorted by the necessity of recording petty disputes between neighbours or members of the same family.

Sir David Thompson, chief constable of West Midlands Police, told The Times of London that trivial arguments were being recorded as crimes following an order from the Home Office stipulating that every complaint about an individual must be recorded.

Thompson also claimed some forces were recording incidents differently, which made it appear that rates of “violence against the person” were higher in Cumbria, Norfolk, and Warwickshire than they were in London.

Thompson said the process was “completely mad” and was exaggerating people’s perception of crime.

He said: “We are recording colossal amounts of stuff in this violence category that makes the public think violence is going through the roof. But their actual experience of violence is going down.”

Thompson said: “Over the last couple of years, for the first time in history, the police recorded more crime and violence than the public say is happening in the official crime survey. They’re inverted and it’s not right.”

He said the fine line between crime and “incivility” was being blurred by the Home Office rules.

‘Incivility’ Is Not a Crime: West Midlands Police Chief

Thompson said: “We like to tell people to be polite and civil, but our job is about crime. Where somebody might wave a stick at you or come around and be rude about your children, that’s incivility. It shouldn’t be crime, but it’s getting really close to how we’re recording it.”

He used the NHS as an analogy and said if every person who visited a GP and said they feared they had cancer, was recorded as cancer, the statistics would be alarming and misleading.

The Home Office rule was put in place after police forces were accused of manipulating the figures in order to meet targets set by government or by elected police and crime commissioners.

In 2013 the Chief Constable of Derbyshire, Mick Creedon, said an “obsession” with reducing crime was leading to pressure on police to “manipulate” crime figures.

Creedon told a police chiefs’ conference, “Inadvertently we are putting pressure on officers to do all they can to manipulate to create crime reductions.”

The then-policing minister Damian Green promised a “robust” inquiry into recording practices and that led to the Home Office guidance which has now being criticised by Thompson.

The Office for National Statistics recorded a record 6.5 million crimes in the 12 months to June 2022.

The figure was up 12 percent since the previous year, when COVID-19 lockdown restrictions had reduced the numbers greatly.

PA Media contributed to this report.