Daily Mail
November 20, 2013
Crime figures are routinely massaged by police desperate to show that they are making the streets safer, it was claimed yesterday.
Serious offences including rape, child sex abuse, robberies and burglary are disappearing in a ‘puff of smoke’, MPs were told.
Police are accused of downgrading crimes to less serious offences and even erasing them altogether by labelling them as accidents or errors.
One police analyst claimed that hundreds of burglaries ‘disappeared’ in a matter of weeks at the Met after managers intervened.
The claims were made at a hearing of Parliament’s Public Administration Committee.
Chairman Bernard Jenkin said he was ‘shocked’ by the evidence. ‘What we have heard is how there is a system of incentives in the police that has become inherently corrupting,’ he said.
Officers claim they are under pressure to record crimes as less controversial offences or even no crime at all.
Pc James Patrick, who analyses crime figures for the Met, said he found robberies being logged as ‘theft snatch’ in order to get them ‘off the books’.
The officer, who faces disciplinary proceedings for gross misconduct after writing a blog about the impact of police reform, said burglary figures were also changed.