Fifth of crimes 'may be unrecorded'

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Belfast Telegraph

Fifth of crimes 'may be unrecorded'
01 May 2014

A fifth of crimes - equivalent to tens of thousands of offences - could be going unrecorded by police, a damning report has found.
An inspection of 13 forces found 14 rapes were among offences not recorded by officers, including an allegation made by a 13-year-old autistic boy written off as "sexual experimentation".

Another rape was not recorded due to "workload pressure" as recording the crime would "entail too much work", the report by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) said.

The police watchdog also found some offenders have been issued with out-of-court disposals, such as cautions, when they should have been prosecuted.

And inspectors said they could not rule out " discreditable or unethical behaviour" on the part of officers for the failure rate.

Home Secretary Theresa May said the report exposed "unacceptable failings by the police" and warned that once HMIC concludes its work in October, official figures may show a spike in police recorded crime.

HM chief inspector of constabulary Tom Winsor said: "The consequences of under-recording of crime are serious, and may mean victims and the community are failed because crimes are not investigated, the levels of crime will be wrongly under-stated, and police chiefs will lack the information they need to make sound decisions on the deployment of their resources."


Read more: http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/uk/fifth-of-crimes-may-be-unrecorded-30234456.html

[villager]

1. Certainly most of the corporate ones are

Regardless of which country we're talking about

[Hestia]

2. I've read where this is a huge problem in the US - no reporting of crimes show the crime rates have

dropped. Fudging of numbers that started with the Clinton administration.

[bemildred]

3. Well, "zero tolerance" doesn't work so well either.

The real central problem with our justice system is that it is monetized, it is about money, and hence it is very corrupt.

[L0oniX]

4. Get caught with a bag of weed and all hell will be recorded.

[liberalmike27]

5. I've Always Known

I'd never get anything back from burglaries anyway, but it makes me wonder if they even file the paperwork. And if they do, does my stuff, and all of the serial numbers I provided to them, get on a list, so if they do "stumble" onto the cache of burgled stuff, will they then make some attempt to return it to me?

I doubt it, and hold out no hope.

[The Straight Story]

6. I have done a little local research on this:

I have, as have others, called the cops often in my little hood. At one point it was once a week, give or take, for months on end as people would come in and go into abandoned/foreclosed homes to steal things.

Never, not once, was a report taken. So I used the website below to look at my hood to see what has been filed. A few property crimes and such, stolen car, fight. I went back 6 years to look at totals and in all 6 years it still did not equal even one year of calls me and my neighbors made.

What we should see is a list of calls on events to be able to compare reports to - but I don't think we will be seeing that anytime soon (though such data is probably available somewhere, I hope).


http://www.raidsonline.com/