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Round up the Usual Suspects

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
AuthorDavid Kirk
Published date01 April 2009
Date01 April 2009
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1350/jcla.2009.73.2.552
Subject MatterOpinion
JCL 73(2) dockie..Opinion - Kirk .. Page115 OPINION
Round Up the Usual Suspects
David Kirk*
Director, Fraud Prosecution Service
In the late 1960s an Irish friend was photographed by a reporter in Rome
walking to his local corner shop carrying his two-year-old son on his
shoulders. The caption on the photograph that appeared in the next
day’s Corriere Della Sera read: ‘This giant Swede is walking round the
world with his daughter on his shoulders’. I was 18 at the time, and it
gave me a lasting distrust of anything I read in the media. I occasionally
know the real story behind a newspaper headline: it rarely bears much
relation to the truth.
So when I read newspaper reports suggesting that knife- and gun-
related murders are a daily occurrence and that, by inference, the
number of murders in the UK must have shot up in recent years, I turn
sceptical. And I am right to do so, because the statistics do not bear the
reports out. In the early 1980s I worked for the office of the Director of
Public Prosecutions, which dealt with all homicide cases in England and
Wales. Such cases sported pink files rather than the usual buff, and were
numbered sequentially throughout each year. The number of homicide
files always reached about 550 by the end of December each year. Of
these, the overwhelming majority were domestic, manslaughter or
infanticide. In any one year, the number of notorious murders was very
small (at that time it included a steady stream of IRA killings).
British Crime Survey statistics for the year ending March 2008
showed that there had been 784 murders in the UK as a whole (C. Ker-
shaw, S. Nicholas and A. Walker (eds), Crime in England and Wales
2007/08, Home Office Statistical Bulletin, July 2008 (Home Office)). The
highest figure in the last decade was 1,048 in 2003, of which 172 were
attributed to Dr Harold Shipman. The truth therefore is that the UK still
has a murder rate that is lower than that of most US cities.
Apart from reporting the prevalence of knife and gun crime, the
media are...

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