Tricked by their own statistics

Sorry for all the “crime” related posts but it is an annoying topic.

The BBC has more articles on the recently released Crime Statistics and it highlights an interesting logical conundrum. For example, the BBC article begins with:

Police recorded the first fall in overall violence in eight years, but drug offences and robbery went up.

Seems like a pretty key point to make. The rest of the news item is about how the public don’t trust the statistics and how Government needs to increase understanding of how they are collected and how accurate they are.

Comically, the article ends with this comment:

Meanwhile, police chiefs have been criticised by a committee of MPs who concluded giving police forces extra cash had not helped reduce crime.

Now, this begs the question that if the reports are crime has gone down, how do the MPs conclude that the extra cash did not help? Or, as I suspect, do the MPs feel that crime has not gone down and therefore need the government to give them advice on understanding the BCS results?

Madness cubed. [tags]Crime,Government, Statistics, Survey, Madness, Idiots, Society, Logic[/tags]