England violence stats, propaganda

The bogus headline of crime being worse in the UK than in South Africa has got quite a few people agitated. To think I'm almost didn't bother telling you about it because it was so ridiculous.

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Are Our South African Crime Stats Being Fudged?

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Those dodgy English crime figures were compiled by the Tories, writes Antony Altbeker

On the very day that I’d planned to write a piece for this fine newspaper [The Times (SA)] about a particularly ludicrous story that appeared in a newspaper in Sarah Palin’s home town — “Will the Antichrist be a homosexual?” — you guys went and topped it with your story on how England is about 25 percent more violent than South Africa.

In a way, it was a relief, because while I know next to nothing about the sexual preferences of The Adversary, I do know something about how the demon of unsound methods and unclean metrics befouls attempts to compare crime levels across international boundaries.

In addition to bad method and worse data, one might also mention the small matter of some patently dishonest analysis: did no one in your office notice that the figures they were reporting had been compiled by Britain’s Conservative Party? The same party that is presently trying to win back power after 10 years in the wilderness?

But to return to the questions of method and measurement.

According to the figures that were reported, for every 100000 people in Britain, there were 2034 incidents of violence per year. The figure for South Africa (which was third on the list after Austria) was a mere 1609.

To provide some colour, we were offered the views of some ex- pat South Africans who would have you believe that they were terribly worried about their safety in London. Particular mention was made of the spate of stabbings in recent years, with one person quoted as saying that she heard of these “on a weekly basis”.

Well, she’s probably under-informed: every year, about 250 to 300 people are stabbed to death in Britain and Wales, a hefty proportion of them in London.

Now, 300 stabbing murders sounds bad, but a programme of the Medical Research Council looking at the causes of non-natural death in South Africa, counted 4800 murders with sharp implements in 2007.

And that was for just Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and Tshwane. Stabbings in the rest of the country went uncounted.

You want another way of thinking about how bad our levels of lethal violence are? Think about Iraq. A war-ravaged, bitterly divided country with more than the usual quota of men and women willing to strap explosives to their bodies and blow up crowds of civilians.

It is a violent society which, if present levels persist for the next six months, will end the year with a per capita civilian death rate that is 60 percent lower than South Africa’s murder rate.

After 13 years of a nearly unbroken decline in our per capita murder rate, that is a measure of how far we still have to go.

Okay, murder, much less stabbing, is not the only form of violence in a society, and it is at least mathematically possible that one society might produce a per capita murder rate that is 25 times higher than another and still have so much less non-lethal violence that, overall, it is the less-murderous society that is the less violent.

But the chances of this are vanishingly small.

Much more likely is that the counting rules between the two societies are different, so that a wider range of incidents are being counted as “violent” in one than in the other. Another possibility is that the quality of official record- keeping differs.

Consider the crime of “common assault”. The legal definition of this crime covers a very wide range of acts, each of which is, by definition, a violent crime. This is so, even though many incidents include nothing more than a threat of violence.

The result is that the police are called out hundreds of thousands of times a year by people who have had a bad argument that has degenerated into a fight, but in which no damage of any significance has been done.

Now, I’ve spent quite a lot of time in police vans, and I can tell you that I’d be surprised if one in 20 of these kinds of incidents made it into police records.

Not that I think they should have opened all these cases since the criminal justice system is a blunt instrument whose functions can worsen relations between victim and offender.

Witness the thousands of withdrawn cases every year.

The point here is that the SAPS keeps no record of the majority of the incidents to which its members are called.

The British police, on the other hand, keep a record of everything, down to the race of the individuals they stop and search in the ordinary course of their patrol work.

If the police in the UK count every incident while the SAPS routinely “negatives” calls when a case is not opened, then that, rather than an underlying reality, would account for the “analysis” that purports to show that there is more violence in England than in South Africa.

# Antony Altbeker is the author of ‘A Country at War with Itself: South Africa’s crisis of crime’