Romanian crime, more or less

Because the BBC won't leave the subject alone, well, neither will I. (Well, that's my excuse anyway)...

For the second time this month Radio 4's often-excellent stats show More or Less led with a piece picking apart UKIP's use of stats. This time it was UKIP's use of crime stats vis-à-vis Romanians.

What follows is a transcription of that discussion...with added comments from yours truly. 

Tim Harford: But first, are Romanians responsible for a crime wave? 

In the run-up to the European elections, Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), got in some bother over comments he made, repeated here during an interview on LBC Radio.

Nigel Farage: I was asked a question, "If a group of Romanian men moved in next to you, would you be concerned?" and if you lived in London I think you would be.

Mr Farage has back-pedalled somewhat but he and other senior UKIP politicians have tried to make the case that there is a problem with Romanian crime and they've used statistics to do that.

The question is, 'Has UKIP got the facts right?'

UKIP put out a full-page advertisement in the 'Daily Telegraph' and that advert makes three statistical claims.

Now one of them's nearly true, one's a bit weird and the third is just wrong.

...which makes you think that UKIP must, by and large, be wrong here, doesn't it? 

But...

UKIP advert: "28,000 Romanians were arrested in the last five years in the Metropolitan Police area alone."

This statistic is nearly true. It's a couple of years out of date and when More or Less looked at it last year we realised that this was referring to 28,000 arrests not to 28,000 people being arrested, and the difference is we could be talking about a much smaller number of people getting in trouble with the police again and again.

But, basically, the claim is correct, although it's slightly context-free. The advertisement doesn't give us the sense whether 28,000 arrests is an unusually large number.

...but, as we mentioned on Wednesday here at Is the BBC Biased?, FoI requests have set that figure in context, showing that Romanians 'out-crim' Germans, Jamaicans and Somalians - something More or Less didn't mention...

But we'll come back to that.

...as indeed they did, though not by mentioning those FoI figures. 

Note that the programme conceded that UKIP's claim is "basically correct", even though it tried to cage that concession with caveats - and rather speculative caveats at that - and hint at contradictions to come that might undermine it [which didn't actually come]...

Now for the second claim. 

UKIP advert: "92% of all ATM crime in London is committed by Romanians".

Right, now this is the weird one, and Charlotte McDonald is here to help me puzzle it out. Hello Charlotte.

Charlotte McDonald: Hi Tim.

Tim Harford: Charlotte, what is an ATM crime? Is it stealing cash machines with a bulldozer, or is it illegal begging by an ATM, or is it mugging people at a cash machine? Or is it stealing pins? What is it?

Charlotte McDonald: I think you're right to ask because it's easy to misunderstand statistics when you made assumptions about what exactly they mean.

...which seems to be hinting that UKIP misunderstood these statistics because of the "assumptions they made...

Tim Harford: And what do they mean?

Charlotte McDonald: Well, not much really.

...so that seems to be it for this UKIP stat, but...

Charlotte McDonald: There's no criminal offence of 'ATM crime' and so there are no official statistics on the subject.

Tim Harford: So where do the numbers come from?

Charlotte McDonald: Well, UKIP were quite transparent about that...

...meaning they were completely transparent about that!...

It's something a police officer said a couple of years in an ITV documentary. Here's a transcript:

The fact is, 92% of all ATM fraud we see in this country is committed by Romanian nationals - very, very tight communities, very tight gangs.

We went to the police officer's team, the Dedicated Cheque and Plastic Crime Unit in London, who told us that this was "based on police intelligence at that time". 

...so that's the police backing up the police officer claim, which in turns backs up UKIP's use of that claim - not that More or Less put it that way!...

Tim Harford: So what does that mean?

Charlotte McDonald: We asked and weren't told they couldn't explain how they worked it out. The information was too sensitive to release. 

  

...which is fair enough, I'd say... 

Tim Harford: But presumably they do have something in mind though when they say 'ATM crime'?

Charlotte McDonald: They say it could mean any criminal activity that takes place at a cash machine, including stealing card details or even distraction theft.

...so when Tim and Charlotte said earlier, 

Tim Harford: And what do they mean?

Charlotte McDonald: Well, not much really. 

what they really mean't was:

Tim Harford: And what do they mean?

Charlotte McDonald: Any criminal activity that takes place at a cash machine, including stealing card details or even distraction theft.

which doesn't seem a preposterous, 'nothingy' answer to me...

Tim Harford: So what we know with certainty is: There's a specialist police unit and they are very worried about Romanians monopolising some kind of cash machine-related crime but they won't tell us more than that.

Right, well actually, that is weird!

...and UKIP's original claim therefore remains standing, backed up by the police themselves - even though More or Less seemed curiously unwilling to admit that fact.

Oddly, given what follows [which we'll come to], a Times article that More or Less later goes on to cite on another aspect of the story, gives a much clearer sense of what 'ATM crime' might mean and I'm at a loss to understand why More or Less ignored that part of the article:

Crime analysts at Europol estimate that Romanian and Bulgarian gangs are responsible for 90 per cent of all card-skimming crimes across Europe. The gangs appear to have divided Europe into two territories, along a rough line between Gdansk in Poland and Lisbon in Portugal with the Romanians taking the North West and the Bulgarians the South East.

So that's two ticks for UKIP's use of stats from the evidence More or Less presented. Next!...

Charlotte McDonald: On to the final statistic:

UKIP advert: "7% of all crime across the 28 EU member states was caused by 240 Romanian gangs".

Tim Harford: Wow! True? 

Charlotte McDonald: No, not true at all. 

...well, that's about as emphatic as emphatic can be: "No, not true at all". Remember that!...

Tim Harford: So where was this one plucked from?

...as if implying that the two previous "basically correct" statistics had also been "plucked" from somewhere, probably out of thin air...

Charlotte McDonald: OK, UKIP cites Europol, the EU's law enforcement agency, but UKIP mangled the statistics.

It's not that Romanian gangs commit 7% of all crime, it's that Europol counted out all the criminal networks they could find and they said that just under 7% of them were Romanian, or mostly Romanian.

...which does suggest that UKIP did mangle the stats in this case, though the stats, properly presented, would have served their purpose just as well - a fact that seems to have eluded More or Less for some strange reason! [Just think of it, around 7% of all criminal networks across the EU are 'basically' Romanian. That's a stat UKIP could use!]...

'Mangling' the stats doesn't necessarily mean that they got it 'dead wrong' or 'totally wrong' though. They got it partially wrong...

The Times newspaper in contrast got it right.

...which, of course, is the Times article I mentioned (and linked to) earlier...

Here's what they said:

About 240 organised crime groups from Romania have been identified by Europol, accounting for 6.7 per cent of the total number of criminal networks active in Europe.

And remember again, this is just a head count. We don't actually know whether the Romanian network are big and influential or just quite numerous.

...or, to put it another way [not the More or Less way obviously!], 'Are they a small number of mafia-like gangs causing considerable grief or are they a large number of pretty criminal gangs plaguing our streets and making life a misery for large numbers of people?' 

Now... 

Tim Harford: OK, so we've examined the UKIP claims. One of them is roughly true. 

...indeed...

One of them's totally wrong. 

...no, one of them is partially wrong....

And one of them - the one about ATM crime - points to a real issue...

...well done, UKIP, for pointing to a real issue then!...

...but it's oddly narrow, it's hard to define...

...how about 'Any criminal activity that takes place at a cash machine, including stealing card details or even distraction theft' or 'card-skimming'? They don't seem 'only narrow' or 'hard' definitions to me. Do they to you?....

and it's based on numbers the police won't share with us.

...for understandable reasons that don't necessarily cast doubt of their validity.

So that's actually a two-and-a-half out of three result for UKIP, stats-wise. Can it get any better for them? Here's Tim...

But I suppose the bigger question is, 'Taken as a whole, rather than zooming in on whatever poorly defined crime we choose...

...if it really is a 'poorly defined crime', and note the snide language used here...

...is there a problem with Romanian citizens and criminality? 

Charlotte McDonald: I submitted a Freedom of Information request to the Association of Chief Police Officers, which hold national police records, but - this won't surprise you - they couldn't give me the figures that I wanted.

Tim Harford: Why not?

Charlotte McDonald: The data on European foreign nationals is pretty patchy, but there are two things I can tell you. 

First of all, out of EU foreign nationals, Romanians have been convicted of more offences than any other nationality...

...back of the net, Nigel!...

...except Poles.

...er!...

There are seven times as many Poles in the UK than Romanians...

...thank you, Mr Blair!...

...so it's not unreasonable to say there's an issue here.

...back of the net, Nigel!...

I've also been able to work out the types of crimes for which Romanians are convicted.

Tim Harford: And what are they?

Charlotte McDonald: Theft. And by a large margin.

About three quarters of the offences for which Romanians were convicted related to theft and a smaller proportion for burglary...

...which is pretty much what most of feared anyhow...

 - and that's in the most recent year of data that I have available.

Tim Harford: So what are the trends? Is the situation getting worse or better?

Charlotte McDonald: Well, Romania's ambassador to the UK, Dr Ion Jinga, says crimes committed by Romanians is going down.

...well, he would say that, wouldn't he?...

He says police statistics show, in the first three months of 2014, the number of Romanians convicted in the UK was about 1500, compared to 1800 in the same period in 2013, which is a reduction of about 15%.

...but, remarkably, More or Less missed the obvious question here: Will the expected increase in the number of Romanians living here in the next few years (perhaps adding many tens - and possibly hundreds - of thousands of extra Romanians to our population) reverse that apparent trend?...

Tim Harford: And are the crimes in question serious?

...a return to the 'Are they a small number of mafia-like gangs causing considerable grief or are they a large number of pretty criminal gangs plaguing our streets and making life a misery for large numbers of people?' question...

Charlotte McDonald: You get an idea of that by looking at the numbers of Romanians in prison. 

We know that Romanians were convicted of an offence in London alone over 10,000 times over five years...

...crikey!!!...

 but there are only 588 in prison on the 31st of March this year. 

That suggests most of the convictions didn't result in long prison sentences. 

...i.e. that the answer to the question is, "a large number of pretty criminal gangs plaguing our streets and making life a misery for large numbers of people?" - just what those with concerns about mass Romanian immigration fear...

 Tim Harford: Thank you very much, Charlotte.

...and that you Tim. Thank you for proving that UKIP was pretty much right.