'Patchy' recording of yob behaviour

9 hours ago

Half the police forces in England and Wales are poor at compiling figures on anti-social behaviour in their areas, official watchdogs said.

A report by the Audit Commission and the Wales Audit Office rated only 12 police authorities and forces as good or excellent at recording anti-social behaviour. In all, 21 were rated as poor and 10 as fair, although individual forces were not identified.

The report said progress at bringing in new national standards at recording anti-social incidents had been "patchy", although it recognised the measures would take time to bed in.

Shadow home affairs minister James Brokenshire said: "Anti-social behaviour blights the lives of many people across the country, yet this report shows that we don't have reliable data on the scale of the problem. This weakness is compounded by the Government's failure to assess its numerous eye-catching initiatives and the reasons behind rising breach rates of anti-social behaviour orders.

"We are left with the absurd situation of having no reliable data on the extent of anti-social behaviour and no clear picture on the effectiveness of measures to combat it. The Government is failing to give this issue the respect it deserves."

The report also showed a fifth of forces had been rated poor at complying with rules on recording racial incidents, mainly because of technical problems. However, there was better performance in the way police record overall crime levels.

Of the 43 forces in England and Wales, 22 were rated excellent, 16 good and five fair, with none in the poor category.

But of the 20 forces rated excellent last year, seven slipped to good and one - Northamptonshire - slipped two categories to fair.

The authors stressed the importance of forces maintaining standards in recording crime data.

The figures included ratings of each force in nine areas of "incident investigation", including violent crime, firearms, burglary and racial incidents. Hampshire had the most poor ratings - four out of nine. Six forces were rated poor in two out of nine areas - Derbyshire, Gwent, the Met, Warwickshire, West Mercia and Wiltshire. Only two forces were rated excellent across the board in incident investigation and other categories of crime investigation and user satisfaction - Kent and Northumbria.

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