Simplify the statistics

Dec 3 2009 Harrow Observer

HARROW may remain one of London's six safest boroughs but the stats don't lie.

Serious crimes like rape and gun crime have risen by more than 70 per cent in the year to October 2009 compared with the year to October 2008.

Fair enough, burglary - an accepted problem in the borough - robbery and car crime have gone down but everything else, including violence against the person and racist and homophobic crime, has gone up.

In absolute terms, the numbers are small, and that ought to mean that officers in Harrow have fewer incidents to tackle, leading to smaller workloads and more time to devote to solving them.

The Metropolitan Police does make crime volume easily accessible via its website so ordinary residents can scrutinise the force, but simply looking at the number of crimes committed does not give the whole picture.

Alongside the raw figures should be a similarly straightforward breakdown of detection rates because it may be the case that while more gun crime is occurring in Harrow, more could be solved - but the public would not know this with the current limited figures available.

Neither does it help that while borough-by-borough data is in absolute numbers, the ward-byward breakdown switches to 'offences per 1,000', so it is not easy to see how your neighbourhood fits into the bigger picture.

If the Metropolitan Police is coping as well as it would like Londoners to think it is, the force should be more forthcoming with the figures that back it up.