Eyeblogging

Here's an interesting story from Private Eye (the website doesn't have the main stories on it, unfortunately):

Police raids on high street mobile phone shops as part of a clampdown on suspected insurance fraud have cast Britain's crime statistics in an interesting new light.

Inspector Knacker believes phone shop staff have been encouraging people falsely to report their phones stolen rather than lost in order to get insurance companies to fund a new one. In some cases the scam is simply to get an 'up-grade' courtesy of the insurer.

Police believe that up to 100,000 false reports of mobile phone thefts and robberies are made each year, inflating crime figures, raising fears of street crime and wasting police time.

However, Tony Blair and home secretary David Blunkett responded to the resulting wave of tabloid street crime hysteria by promising tougher penalties and to have street crime 'under control' in six months. With mobile phones believed to have been the trigger for half of all London street robberies, lord chief justice Lord Woolf joined in too and recommended minimum jail terms for even first-time phone robbers.

But as Simon Hughes, the Lib Dem shadow home secretary, points out: 'This extraordinary development could blow the government's multi-million pund street crime initiative out of the water.' There were 121,375 street robberies recorded in England and Wales for 2001/2, an increase of 28 percent. Given the claim that many of those may have been false, the huge street crime bulge which triggered the panic may have been an illusion.

'Instead of a calm and level-headed approach, ministers allowed themselves to be carried away by the hysteria,' says Hughes.

Indeed. Had they looked at the British Crime Survey, considered by most criminologists to be a far better indication of crime and crime patterns, instead of police records, they would have seen there was no such robbery upsurge.

It's a very good Eye this week - some interesting articles , and a collection of the best 'Dear Bill' letters in memory of Dennis Thatcher.

I've noticed recently that Private Eye might be paying attention to what's being written on blogs - some of the stories they run are ones I've seen on various blogs (especially some of the American ones) that don't make it into the major media. For instance, this week they feature the story on how Wesley Clark revealed the White House were trying to publically link Iraq to the 11th September without any evidence within hours of the attacks taking place.