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Police forces are routinely massaging crime figures to make hundreds of offences “disappear in a puff of smoke”, MPs have been told.
Official crime statistics are regularly skewed to make a police force’s performance appear far better than it is in reality, the House of Commons Public Administration Committee heard.
Retired and serving police officers gave evidence about techniques used to manipulate the figures - which they said were sanctioned by senior officers - such as downgrading offences to less serious crimes or persuading victims not to make a complaint.
In some cases crimes were only recorded if they were solved, and others were kept completely off the books if an offender could not be traced, the committee heard.
The disclosures will further undermine confidence in official Home Office statistics which claim crime is at its lowest level for more than 30 years.
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Bernard Jenkin, the committee chairman, said: “I think what we have heard is basically how there is a system of incentives in the police that has become inherently corrupting and I think that is a very shocking thing to hear.
“This is a really savage thing to say, that we can’t trust the leadership of our constabularies to measure their own performance.”
Peter Barron, a former Met detective chief superintendent, said: “Performance culture takes its toll and some boroughs have their performance capped.
“They can only afford to have X number of burglaries per day and X number of robberies per week.
“At the daily meeting, they will discuss individual crimes with a view to see what opportunities there are to count them as something other than a priority crime.”
He suggested some chief police officers were guilty of “fraud” for making sure their force met performance targets.
James Patrick - a Metropolitan Police constable who is currently awaiting disciplinary proceedings over a whistleblowing book - said he became concerned after joining the force in 2009 and finding robberies being logged as “snatch theft”, a less serious crime, in order to massage the figures.
“Burglary is an area where crimes are downgraded or moved into other brackets, such as criminal damage for attempted burglaries, or other types of thefts,” he said.
“Things were clearly being reported as burglaries and you would then re-run the same report after there had been a human intervention - a management intervention - and these burglaries effectively disappeared in a puff of smoke.”
Mr Patrick said he analysed the recording of serious sexual offences and found that in 80 per cent of cases recorded as “no crime”, the designation was “incorrect”.
He added that massaging statistics to hit performance targets had become “an engrained part of policing culture”.
Dr Rodger Patrick, a former West Midlands chief inspector, said: “This is my experience as well. You can see that in the investigations that are being carried out, victims are being pressurised.”
Senior officers would “marginalise” junior ranks who tried to record crimes accurately, he added.
Other police techniques revealed in the evidence session included:
• Multiple crimes in the same area being recorded as a single incident.
• Thefts being noted as “lost property”, burglaries as “theft from property” and attempted burglaries as “criminal damage”.
• Victims of street robbery being telephoned by officers in a bid to persuade them they were mistaken about violence was used, and stolen items “merely just slipped from their bag”.
• Collusion between offenders and police officers to improve detection rates, with criminals admitting offences they did not commit in exchange for inducements such as lower charges, or even “sex, alcohol or access to meals,” said Dr Patrick.
A Metropolitan Police spokesman said in a statement: “The Metropolitan Police Service is committed to ensuring crimes are accurately recorded and has put in place robust processes to ensure crimes are neither over- nor under-recorded.”
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