Serious Crime - The Ethnic Dimension; Fact and Fantasy

The eye was drawn to a piece in the Daily Mail today which purports to shed new light on the serious crime hotspots in Britain, although in actuality the data presented covers only England and Wales.

The crime hotspot map where Britain’s most hardened criminals live

A map today reveals the ‘hotspots’ where Britain’s most hardened criminals live.

The research, compiled by the Conservatives, details for the first time the locations of the country’s 15,000 so-called ‘prolific and priority offenders’.
London and Manchester account for almost ten per cent of the total each.

Apart from tiny City of London, the area with the lowest number of regular offenders is Wiltshire with just 84.

This is close to 20 times fewer criminals than in Greater Manchester - the police force area which these figures suggest has the biggest persistent criminal problem.

…

The article includes this vividly-executed map which, according to the article is derived from research performed on behalf of the Conservative Party, although when I checked there was no mention of any such report on the party’s official website.

But be that as it may, the map and the accompanying data table stimulated my interest in poking further since, on the face of it, the information presented did not make a great of sense. In fact, the closer I looked, the less sense it made.

Although the general picture presented conforms to reality in a general sense – more persistent criminals are found in urban areas and especially those which have experienced vibrant enrichment – there are some very curious anomalies.

How is it, for example, that the Greater Manchester police force area accounts for more ‘priority criminals’ than does the Metropolitan police area, which covers a population more than three times larger, and has a far higher ethnic population as a percentage of the total (40% versus 12%). Why is it also that predominantly white areas such as the South Coast and, especially, Devon and Cornwall, appear to be accommodating so many criminals? And why didn’t other notorious areas such as the West Midlands, Bedfordshire, Nottinghamshire and West Yorkshire also figure as glowing-red hotspots on the map?

There are a number of plausible explanations of course but the place to start is to get an understanding of what is actually being measured. In the absence of the original data we have to rely on the perspicacity of the Mail’s hacks who unfortunately do not have an impressive track record when it comes to investigative journalism.

As it happens, a Conservative politician gives the game away:

… ‘It’s tempting to think of these serial offenders as the Mr. Bigs of crime. The reality is very different.

‘The most persistent offenders often come from the most challenging and deprived areas of our biggest cities and are frequently driven by drug addiction. It underlines how those areas are disproportionately affected by crime.’

So rather than focusing on the really serious criminal activity, such as the trade in narcotics, prostitution, gambling, arms running, counterfeiting, forgery, fraud and so on, which are well-known if not officially acknowledged to be controlled by ethnic gangs, the Conservatives have produced an irrelevant red herring which the Mail has swallowed wholesale. As the article itself notes, there is no national standard against which a ‘priority criminal’ need be measured, it is up to each police force to decide for itself who to pursue. One thing that is for sure, however, is that given the official scrutiny of the statistics concerning the ethnic composition of those who encounter the criminal justice system (the ‘Stop and Search’ statistics are pored over minutely by the EHRC) racial profiling is likely to play a very small part in that decision. And the numbers on the map don’t provide much additional illumination – they are absolute numbers of ‘prolific criminals’ identified on each force’s patch and so do not inform as to the actual extent of such criminality within that area. In fact, the reason why 98.8% white Devon and Cornwall scores so highly is simply a question of the number of people who fall within that force’s zone of operation. With its population of over 1.5 million, D&C is actually one of the largest in the country – not that far behind Greater Manchester’s 2.2 million. But Sussex, why on earth does bucolic Sussex – home of the Glyndebourne Opera – score up there with the likes of post-industrial vibrantly enriched West Yorkshire and Nottingham? We’ll return to that later.

Anyone searching for evidence of the scale of ethnic criminality in the Mail article (and by extension the in Tories’ perception of criminal ‘hotspots’) will be disappointed. In fact, the Mail cites the Assistant Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police who presents the force’s ‘poster boy’ in terms of ‘hardened criminality’.  No it’s not a gun-running Jamaican Yardie from Moss Side, nor a Pakistani or Turk overseeing the city-wide trade in heroin, nor a prominent member of a Chinese triad, but a serial burglar and joyrider by the name of Stuart McCormick. Now no doubt Stuart has a been a flaming nuisance and deserves to banged up but is this really the best that the GMP can come up with as an example of a hardened criminal? A pathetic deadleg and social misfit certainly, but Mr. Big he ain’t. And, of course, Stuart is white and therefore a safe enough target.

For enlightenment on really criminal hotspots, and especially with respect to an ethnic dimension, we have to look elsewhere. There has been no shortage of anecdotal reportage in recent years, such as this article in the Guardian (of all places) and this companion series in its sister journal, the Observer. More recently, there have been revelations like this one in the Mail, and even quasi-official nods and winks as in this recent Home Office Strategy Review, “Extending Our Reach”, detailing the efforts of the Serious Organised Crime Agency and others to “… Respond to the Roots of the Problem Overseas.”

… The harm caused by organised crime is felt in our local communities and on our streets. But nearly all organised crime originates abroad: both ‘old’ crimes, such as drug trafficking and immigration crime, and newer threats, such as e-crime. Organised crime also affects our wider interests in global stability and security.

The unspoken corollary is of course that, while the roots of modern criminality may lie overseas, the contemporary criminal infrastructure could not flourish without the presence here of immigrants who form the ‘community’ within which foreign-directed criminal enterprises can operate, often below the radar of the authorities. Especially when the authorities are legally constrained from taking a common-sense approach to dealing with ethnic crime and have to fall back on a so-celled ‘intelligence-based’ approach to avoid running afoul of the race relations industry and its legal supernumeraries.

So while there is a great general public unease about the problem – ethnic criminality being the proverbial elephant behind the sofa – how can we approach defining its scale in a credible and defensible manner when not even the Tory Party (we should probably drop the ‘not even’ these days given the terminal rot induced by the ‘modernisers’) is prepared to grapple honestly with the question?

Well, as it happens, there is a valuable resource which is hidden in plain view where even lazy MSM hacks and hackettes could stumble across it, if they were so inclined. Each spring the government publishes its annual report Statistics on Race and the Criminal Justice System. What follows is drawn from the most recent, April 2009, edition which provides statistics for the financial year 2007/8. This report has its origins in the Criminal Justice Act of 1991, and was originally intended to ward off criticism from the usual quarters that ethnic minorities were receiving a raw deal from the criminal justice system, and the report therefore dwells in great detail on matters such as street searches, arrests and sentencing.

Successive governments, especially recent Labour ones, must be relieved that this so-called Section 95 report is essentially ignored by the media, since the data it contains is really little short of explosive, and it would be extremely damaging if any serious anti-immigration or nationalist faction were to delve into it in any detail. There is raw data within which will demolish the myth that white people are over-represented as perpetrators of inter-racial crime, especially homicide, but that is not what I will focus on here.

Instead, I would like to use the S.95 statistics to place serious crime in general under the spotlight, and to highlight particularly the extent to which members of the black and ethnic minority (BME) community are over-represented in such crime. We all believe this is the case, so the objective here is to support that belief with hard data.

If you have turned up the report linked above, I will be focusing on the following sections:

• Table 6.4: Persons sentenced for indictable offences at the Crown Court by outcome and ethnic appearance, selected areas, 2007

• Table A1a: Estimated population aged 10 and over, by ethnicity origin and police force area, mid 2007

• Table A1b: Estimated population aged 10 and over, by self-identified ethnicity and police force area, mid 2007

• Table A2a: Estimated population aged 10 and over, percentage by ethnic origin and police force area

• Table A2b: Estimated population aged 10 and over, percentage by self-identified ethnicity and police force area

The key data is within Table 6.4, the rest is supportive. Table 6.4 details the outcomes of indictable cases heard in the Crown Courts. By their nature indictable offences, as opposed to summary offences which are tried in Magistrate’s Courts, are more serious matters than will usually entail a jail term if found guilty. During 2007, some 76,000 such cases were tried in England and Wales; contrast this figure with the 15,000 or so ‘prolific criminals’ which the Mail is currently on about. Of the 76,000-odd cases, Table 4 summarises the outcome of around 42,000, giving the breakdown of the numbers sentenced by broad ethnic category: White, black, Asian, other (= mixed)  and unknown. There are good reasons to assume that the last should be included in the general ethnic category but, since the official stats separate them out in this way, we will for our present purpose exclude them from the equation.

By reference to Table 6.4, we will take the national (that is, the English and Welsh) total of serious crime cases commited for sentence in Crown Courts as 76,650. Eliminating from this overall total the 14,468 cases for which ethnicity is unknown (actually, more likely unreported but non-white) we arrive at a total of 62,182 cases for ethnicity is definitely known. Of these 47,113 (75.7%) were white, 8,080 (13.0%) were black, 4,391 (7.1%) were Asian and 2,598 (4.2%) were Other, that is to say, of mixed ethnicity. Already we can see a pattern emerging: the 75.7% of perpetrators of serious crime who are white is much lower than the 91.3% as given by the white proportion of the general population (43.677 million of 47.384 million, as defined in Table A1a). It is also worth noting that white in this context includes not simply indigenous Britons, but also Irish persons resident in the UK, as well as everybody else considered in government parlance to be ‘white’, ranging from Australasians of British descent, to Poles, to persons hailing from the Near East and elsewhere.

Now we have the national picture, let’s look at one of the individual police force areas, in fact the first listed in Table 6.4, that is Bedfordshire. According to Table A1a this area has a population of 519K of which around 71K (13.7%) are non-white. Table 6.4 indicates that in 2007 there were a total of 607 serious crime cases in the Bedfordshire police force area for which the ethnicity of the perpetrator was reported, of which 361 (59%) of the defendants were white and 246 (41%) were non white.

If Bedfordshire had the same ethnic composition as the rest of the country then we should expect that 91.3% (554 out of 607) of the defendants in serious crime cases would be white. But since Table A1a indicates that not 91.3% but 86.3% of the population of this police force area are white, then we should expect 524 white defendants.

But the actual number of white defendants was 361, not 554 or even 524, so what does that tell us? Well, basically it tells us that 13.7% of the population of the Bedfordshire police force area (the non-white population) was responsible for 35.4% of the serious crime. In other words, the ethnic population was 35.4/13.7 or 2.6 times over-represented in the serious crime statistics.

That’s seems quite shocking doesn’t it, ethnics being two and a half times over-represented in the serious crime statistics? Surely Bedfordshire must be an aberration? Actually not. Bedfordshire is much better in that respect than the national picture. Referring again to Table 6.4, we see that of the 42,420 cases for which police authority ethnicity reports are given, 11,698 (28%) are ascribed to BME members on a national (England and Wales) level. Since non-white (ie BME) representation in the population is given as 8.7%, this amounts to 3.2 times over representation (Bedfordshire being a mere 2.6 times).

There must at least a few police authorities which report that BME representation in the serious crime statistics is less than their representation in the general population though right? Perhaps an area where only the more ‘desirable’ ethnics have clustered, say the East African Asians who fled the Africanisation in East Africa during the 1970s and who, together with their descendants, have settled in Leicestershire, predominantly. Well sad to say not. The Leicestershire police authority statistics confirm that although the BME population of the area stands at 14.7%, it account for 25.4% of the serious crime, an over-representation of 1.7 times.

So which then of the police areas which reported has the least presentable record as far as BME over-representation in serious crime is concerned? Well, surprisingly enough it is not London where BMEs are a mere 1.7 times over-represented nor the West Midlands at 1.8 times but, astonishingly enough, semi-rural Sussex. Its BME population stands at 3.5 % and yet ethnics were convicted in 24.5 % of the serious crime cases, an over-representation of 7 times. Perhaps Guessedworker can shed some light on this mystery, although the fact that 22% of the crimes were commited by blacks might indicate that many of the perps were not in fact local residents, but had come down from London on some mission or another.

Posted by Dan Dare on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 at 02:50 AM in
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