What To Do When Your Nation Is In Decline And You Are In Charge? Lie.

This is from the U.K.

The Fiddling of Crime Figures

Another is my repeated suggestion that official crime figures, having become politically important, may not be wholly accurate. (the same problem, of course, affects exam results, school performance, unemployment and inflation figures. The state is now so all-encompassing that official statistics are now crucial to the state’s image machine. We have become similar to the USSR in the 1950s, when Soviet statistics were so politicised that those who read them described the manipulation as ‘The Bikini Effect’ – the figures were more interesting for what they conceal than for what they reveal.

I encounter fury and derision when I say this, and my attempts to back it up with the detailed work of qualified researchers are ignored by these scoffers.

So imagine my delight when the House of Commons Public Administration Committee decided to investigate the matter, calling a number of expert witnesses to do so, protected by Parliamentary privilege.

Here's what the government is up to:

'Burglary is an area where crimes are downgraded or moved into other brackets, such as criminal damage for attempted burglaries,' he said.



Pc Patrick said an internal audit found that 'as many as 300 burglaries' vanished from official figures in just a few weeks. 'Things were being reported as burglaries and you would then re-run the same report after there had been a human intervention, a management intervention, and these burglaries effectively disappeared in a puff of smoke,' he said.



He claimed that in 80 per cent of cases where an allegation of a serious sexual offence had been recorded as 'no crime', the label was incorrect.



Pc Patrick also said numerous other cases were incorrectly recorded as 'crime-related incidents', a category covering allegations made by third parties but not directly confirmed by the supposed victims.



He said pressure was put on victims to drop crimes by 'attacking the allegation' instead of investigating the crime.



He was supported by Peter Barron, a former Detective Chief Superintendent at the Met, who said victims are 'harassed' into scaling down the seriousness of incidents. They would telephoned and repeatedly questioned on the circumstances of the crime.



'Victims were putting the phone down in disgust, harassed by another call from someone trying to persuade them that they were mistaken about the level of force used,' he added.

Here's the U.S. version: Census Bureau: No systematic manipulation of jobs data

The U.S. Census Bureau said Tuesday it has asked its inspector general to look into a New York Post report that national employment data ahead of the 2012 election were manipulated.

The bureau says it does not believe any improper conduct was widespread or had any impact on the reported unemployment rate.

"We have no reason to believe that there was a systematic manipulation of the data described in media reports," Census said in a statement. "We carefully cross-check and verify the work of our staff to ensure the data's validity."

The story is that one person was faking data, but he no longer works at the Census. The point to focus on is not that Census would be manipulating the data so much as, like the police in the U.K., not doing their jobs. Instead of collecting all the data, according to the one source, he was told to make up data.