UK police fiddle crime data: Watchdog

“Manipulation” is occurring in the recording of crime figures by British police officers, the force’s watchdog admits.

Appearing before the House of Commons’ Home Affairs Select Committee on Tuesday, Chief Inspector of Constabulary for England and Wales Tom Winsor said he is “almost certain that some manipulation is going on” in the registration of crime statistics by officers.

“The fact is in anything that gets measured, once those who are being measured, whose performances are being measured, work out how the system works, there’s an incentive, resisted by many, to manipulate the process as to make your own performance look good,” Winsor said.

He also told MPs that rather than asking whether fiddling crime data was happening at all, the question was “where, how much, how severe”.

Meanwhile, he disputed evidence of the chief of the Metropolitan Police, Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, who claimed earlier this month that inspectors had described his force’s crime figures as “competent and reliable”.

Winsor’s comments come a month after a Metropolitan Police whistleblower said forces across England and Wales are routinely fiddling crime statistics in order to meet targets and distort realities about police performance.

Police Constable James Patrick, who is currently awaiting disciplinary proceedings, told the Commons’ Public Administration Select Committee that rape and sexual offences were being under-reported by as much as a quarter.

The manipulation of crime statistics is the latest in a series of scandals to hit the British police.

Earlier in October, Britain’s most senior police officer admitted that undercover police officers in the UK might still be involved in intimate relationships with targets of their investigations.

The daily Guardian also reported in February that undercover police officers had stolen the identities of about 80 children who died at an early age.

The investigative report revealed that for three decades police have been using the identities of dead children, without informing or consulting their parents, through infiltrating protest groups.