What is crime? We can't measure it because we haven't defined it

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/16/what-is-crime-measure-definitions

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"Politics now, and the Office for National Statistics has today published the latest crime statistics for England and Wales, which show a marked decrease in the number of crime estimates. The home secretary welcomed the latest figures, saying: 'These statistics prove that while there is some crime in England and Wales there is definitely less crime now than there would have been had there been more crime. It just goes to show that we have had great success in ensuring the underlying trends on crime remain in keeping with changes that have definitely happened since this government came to power.' Now here's Tom with the weather."

It was always easy to make fun of crime statistics, even before the UK Statistics Authority announced this week that it was formally dropping police recorded crime figures as a gold standard measurement, citing repeated allegations that some of the quarterly published figures have been subject to "a degree of fiddling".

The decision is long overdue. Even if it were not the case that police use a variety of tricks to keep recorded crime figures low, this data would still represent an almost meaningless measure of the extent of crime in society, for the simple reason that a huge proportion of crimes (of almost all sorts) have always gone unreported.

The better measure of crime trends is the Crime Survey of England and Wales (CSEW), formerly the British Crime Survey. This public survey, of about 50,000 households, asks people whether they have experienced various types of behaviour over the past year, including violent assault, theft, burglary and other crimes.

Importantly, it counts offences even when they have not been reported to police and/or even if the victim didn't really think of them as crimes.

As has been widely noted, the CSEW has been showing significant declines in most forms of crime since the mid-1990s. Violent crime in particular would appear to have tumbled back to the rates of the early 1980s.

Unlike the police-reported crime figures, the CSEW is a serious and worthwhile data set. It provides useful information for policymakers and social scientists as to trends in certain behaviours. Ironically, however, the one thing it does not do is tell us how much crime is happening.

The sad truth is that most crime happens away from the prying eyes of the crime survey pollsters.

It happens to those living on the margins, the homeless, the mentally ill, those who are themselves in the criminal justice system. The crime survey does not address drugs crimes, so called vice crimes, financial fraud including benefit and tax crimes, crimes of negligence or financial exploitation. Other crimes happen online. The criminologist Marian Fitzgerald has pointed out the extent of online and plastic fraud, most of which goes unreported – to the police or surveys. When our computers are hacked and our financial details compromised, most of us tell our banks or credit card companies, or even internet provider, but rarely the police and few such crimes would be mentioned to CSEW researchers.

At the heart of this is a large and difficult question: what do we actually mean by crime? The reality is that crime is everywhere, and always has been. Few of us would question that a crime has been committed when a teenager walks out of HMV with a stolen CD in his or her bag, but what if the same teenager illegally downloads the same album from the internet? Are we calling the police?

Not many people rob banks at gunpoint these days, but how many rob them with a mouse and a spreadsheet? As a general rule, the poor have criminal records, the middle classes have skeletons in the closet and the rich have excellent accountants. Functional definitions of crime often fall back on social harm rather than mechanistic tallies of lawbreaking. By any such definition, those who skirt the rims of legality while playing roulette with the world's economy for personal gain have more blood and human misery on their hands than the entire population of Wormwood Scrubs put together. One of the great ironies of modern times is that the period of history characterised by Steven Pinker as demonstrating the better angels of our nature has coincided with a veritable wild west of grand larceny around corporate boardrooms of the world.

There is no such thing as a definitive measure of crime, because there is no such thing as a single definition of crime. It is important to know if interpersonal violence, muggings, burglary and so on are on the decline, because those are real crimes that have real impacts upon real people.

It is equally important to remember that those are not the only crimes that devastate lives.

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