Though Cowards Flinch

The other day I posted a whimsical little number, pretending to be utterly outraged at the cost of Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs), as measured by the cost per crime detected, following the release of data showing it costs £1.2 m per crime detected by a PCSO.

The point was simple enough.  Using these statistics is wholly and utterly  misleading, because:

 a) crime detection is simply not part of a PCSO’s role; they are there for visible crime prevention, reassurance and more general community intelligence gathering; 

b) while the odd crime detection statistic might be recorded against a PCSO’s name, in general any such crime will be recorded against as a Police Officer detection; this avoids any double counting. Indeed, it is possible that the ‘crimes detected’ figure which actually does show up against PCSOs more or less  represents the on-the-spot fines that PCSOs are empowered to impose e.g. for littering.

This basic logic didn’t stop the stats being splashed across national newspapers, with the usual TPA rent-a-quote, and the Press Association being uncritically copied across dozens of local newspaper websites. 

The comments on the papers’ websites reflected the expected split of those whose prejudices about ‘plastic policemen’ were confirmed (prejudices started by those same newspapers in earlier coverage), and a smaller number who called the papers out for their ridiculous coverage e.g.:

It is very clear to me and other PCSOs that this is a puerile attempt to discredit all police forces and PCSOs. In relation to your financial research it is both inaccurate and has the senslesss ramblings of a struggling reporter. PCSOs are not employed to detect crime.  However, during the course of their duties they furnish the police with huge amounts of information to assist in the detection of crime. Police officers value their role as they take on the lower level problems. This allows them to deal with the more serious issues that papers like yours love nothing better than to rubbish the hard working police officers such as.

In my own whimsy piece I made use of the fact that, when the Daily Mail covered these statistics just two months ago, the cost per crime detected (from the statistics for only one police force area) was calculated at £156,000 crime, but that this had ‘risen’  eightfold to £1.2m when all force data was aggregated. 

The massive discrepancy, I suggested, might just be a clue to the fact that the data is wholly misleading, and the fact that the paper had not even cross-checked its own coverage from 8 weeks previously was indicative of tabloid journalism at its worst.

That was criticism of the Daily Mail, and valid enough.

But then there’s the Daily Express, which chose to run this ‘story’ as its front page headline yesterday. It gets the ‘public spending campaigner’ from the TPA in early to do its dirty work, and then gets on to this little gem:

The latest figures show that the cost of PCSOs per crime in Nottinghamshire rose from £354,000 in 2008-09, when they detected 19 crimes, to £6.7million in 2009-10.