I listen to about half an hour of Today as I’m getting ready each morning. Occasionally, as yesterday morning, I end up shouting at the radio. In this case, it followed a report on whether or not Nottingham is the crime capital of the UK.
After some discussion about the statistics and where towns figured in the crime table*, John Humphrys asked (from memory): “But the Government say that crime is going down, don’t they?” What did that have to do with anything, I demanded from the stereo. The relative levels of crime in different places in a snapshot of time bears no relation at all to the change of crime frequency over time. The fact that you can produce a report calculating likelihood of being a victim of crime in different geographic locations says absolutely nothing at all about the overall crime rate apart from that there is some crime. Grr.
*The word “table” appears to be the 100,000th word on this blog. Woo.
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