“POLICE forces solve just over a QUARTER of the crimes they investigate - because officers are tied up with time-consuming paperwork.” News of the World, 15 May 2011

This week's Police Federation conference has brought to the fore the ongoing row between the sections of the police and the Government over impending budget cuts.

Chairman of the Federation, Paul McKeever has attacked the decision to protect international aid, but not law enforcement.

The Home Secretary, who addresses the conference today maintains that cuts need not shorten the long arm of the law.

The idea that we may be able to get more bobby for our buck was raised by the News of the World this weekend, suggesting bureaucracy was responsible for only 28 per cent of reported crimes being cleared.

But what does this statistic actually mean?

Analysis

Despite its name, the detection rate isn't the amount of crimes the police 'detect' being committed, but rather the number of reported crimes that are then cleared up by the police.

The figures quoted in the paper seem to sourced from an answer to a written parliamentary question tabled by Conservative MP David Ruffley.

The table breaks down the the detection rate by each force but giving a national total. The reporting of the figures checks out, but there are a few points of context.

Firstly, while the average stands at 28 per cent, the figures show it has stood at this level for the past three years.

Secondly, if anything, the sanction detection rate (now the preferred measure) went up in 2002/3 2007/8. However because of changes to the way crimes and detections are recorded, comparisons are problematic. Nevertheless, the graph included in the annual Home Office crime statistics gives a picture of longer term detection rate trends..



So what drives the fluctuations in rates? It seems natural to suppose that were it the case that a large contingent of desk-bound, pen-pushing police officers existed in every force, detection rates could potentially suffer.

However the Home Office crime statistics explain further factors. Firstly, different types of crimes tend to have different detection rates. For instance drug related crimes tend to have high detection rates – above 90 per cent – because possession crimes will be 'reported' in the course of a search conducted by a police officer that discovers the drugs. With the crime reported in this way it makes it much more likely that it will be cleared.

Vehicle crime on the other hand tends to be reported long after the incident making it much harder to track down and solve the crimes, as reflected in the lower detection rates.

Because of this the guidance explains that detection rates are “not a clear-cut measure of police investigative performance”.

The report continues: “Some of the offences with the highest detection rates are the offences most influenced, in terms of their recorded numbers, by proactive policing to apprehend offenders (e.g. drug offences and many of the offences in the ‘other offences’ category). This means that overall detection rates can be influenced by the extent to which police prioritise action against different types of offending,”

In addition, the introduction of Penalty Notices for Disorder (PNDs) in 2004/5 is also said to have had an impact on the rising trend. According to the figures, detections via PNDs contributed 4.4 percentage points out of the 27.8 per cent detection rate.

Government policy is also linked to changes in the rate. The report explains that the rise in the rate also “coincided with the greater emphasis by central government on raising the number of crimes detected and the setting of national targets.”

Conclusion

While it is perhaps unrealistic to expect a tabloid newspaper to go to such length explaining the figures, the presentation of the data still comes of as crude.

The array of factors given by the Home Office suggests it is not simply the scale of the paperwork that determines police detection rates. Also despite the concerns raised in the report, the data seems to suggest that the 'problem' has not been one that has necessarily got worse in recent years.