Mike Nellis: This snapshot gives us a very hazy picture of crime in Scotland today

Published on Tuesday 7 September 2010 19:00

The annual recorded crime statistics are always welcome, but you have to work at them a bit to understand what is going on. On the face of it, Scotland as a whole is a relatively safe place to live - some parts more than others - and getting safer, if the decline in most recorded crimes is to be believed.

Only 38 per cent of crime gets recorded, however. Domestic violence and sexual violence have notoriously low reporting rates, largely because of the shame involved and the victims' belief that going through the courts will be traumatic. For some men, assault is just a lifestyle hazard that has nothing to do with the police and can be avenged on one's own.

The overall clear-up rate is only 49 per cent - higher for some offences, lower for others. Even so, with so many more police officers in Scotland than a decade ago, one might expect a better clear-up rate than this. Maybe it's too many managers, but in some sorts of investigation, the backroom boys are more important than the thin blue line on the street.

There are marked regional variations in clear-up rates, with some local forces performing much higher than the national average, which will inevitably play into debates about a single Scottish force. Proposed cuts will reduce staffing to 1990 levels, leading police associations to warn of inevitable increases in crime. That does not necessarily follow. Sometimes smarter organisation is more important to efficiency than sheer numbers.

The report distinguishes non-sexual crimes of violence, which includes murder, attempted murder, death by dangerous driving and serious assault, but does not break this down. Rape and attempted rape get categorised as crimes of indecency, along with incest and prostitution, which rather obscures the fact that they are violent offences too. Various forms of assault are classified as offences rather than crimes. You have to aggregate all this to get a rounded picture of violence in today's Scotland, and you still don't know the exact number of murders or the prevalence of domestic violence.

You would never guess the respective balance of violent and property crime in Scotland from routine press reports. There might, indeed, be more violence than these statistics show, but there is no epidemic. In that sense, the statistics do enable one to keep a sense of proportion. This is not to say that some of the things that are just numbers here were not atrocious events which should never occur in a civilised society.

• Mike Nellis is professor of criminal and community justice at the University of Strathclyde.