Criticism
Professor Ken Pease, former acting head of the Home Office's police research group, and Professor Gary Farrell of Loughborough University, estimated in 2007 that the BCS was underreporting crime by about 3 million incidents per year due to its practice of arbitrarily capping the number of crimes one can be victimised by in a given year at five. If true the error means that violent crime might actually stand at 4.4 million incidents per year, an 82% increase over the 2.4 million previously thought. Since the five crimes per person cap has been consistent since the BCS began this might not affect the long-term trends, however it takes little account of crimes such as domestic violence, figures for which would allegedly be 140% higher without the cap. Police figures are also thought to seriously undercount repeat victimisation.
Lord de Mauley has said the BCS omits rape, assault, drug offences, fraud, forgery, crime against businesses and murder, while accepting that it "is accepted as a gold standard by most British academics and internationally".
The British Crime Survey has also been criticised for its exclusion of residents of communal establishments, e.g. hostels, nursing and care homes and university halls of residence, from its surveys, and for its inability to offer statistics for so-called "victimless" crimes, such as those concerning the abuse, possession and trafficking of drugs. The BCS also fails to record crimes against businesses, commercial premises and vehicles and (because it is a victim survey) instances of murder and manslaughter.
One criticism is that both the youth survey and the adult surveys do not distinguish between a) crimes not reported to the police because they thought the police would do nothing or b)crimes not reported to the police because the victim thought them too trivial.
Read more about this topic: British Crime Survey
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