“Police ignore a third of violent crime” according to a headline in The Times. Happily, they don’t.

The story came from a report by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary, which looked at violent crimes that had been recorded by police forces as “no crime”. There can be a number of reasons for this: doubts about the incident or the reliability of witnesses or, possibly, pressure to meet targets by increasing the clear-up rate.
 
The report looked at 479 incidents classified as “no crime” and found that 35.7 per cent of them had been misclassified. They should have been treated as “most serious violence” or “assault with less serious injury.”
 
However, the study covered only those violent crimes that had been reclassified as “no crime” – 5.3 per cent of the total of violence against the person.
 
So the wrongly classified crimes amounted to 35.7 per cent of 5.3 per cent: that is, just 1.9 per cent of all violent crimes, not a third. Quite a difference.
 
   
 
This still amounts to thousands of crimes a year, as The Times accurately reported. But its headline will have left a lot of readers believing something much worse.