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Daily Mail
April 10, 2014
Police are failing to properly record crimes as serious as rape to hit performance targets, a damning report has revealed.
A target culture within policing has created ‘perverse incentives’ and driven officers up to the most senior level to ‘misrecord’ crime, MPs said.
The Public Administration select committee called for local Police and Crime Commissioners to abolish all targets to help restore public trust in crime figures.
They also called for an investigation into treatment of a police officer who blew the whistle on corrupt recording practices.
Former Metropolitan Police officer James Patrick described how massaging numbers to hit targets had become ‘an ingrained part of policing culture’.
He exposed how crimes were routinely downgraded, with robberies logged as theft and burglary reclassified as criminal damage – or even ‘no-crimed’ – to make them ‘disappear in a puff of smoke’.
He resigned last month after an investigation into misconduct was launched.
The report was published as a new YouGov poll for Channel 5 found 40 per cent of Britons think crime has gone up in the last decade. This is despite police figures and the national crime survey showing sharp falls in crime levels.
Bernard Jenkin, the committee chairman, said it was ‘depressing’ how the officer was treated by the Met and claimed most forces were ‘still in denial about the damage targets cause, both to data integrity and to standards of behaviour’.
The report found crime figures recorded by the police vastly exaggerated the extent of genuine decreases in recent years.
National targets for crime figures have been abolished by the Home Office. But the report found targets, and a target culture, remained at a local level, set by Police and Crime Commissioners or senior officers.
