Crime Falls To Lowest Level In 33 Years Essay

The media article that I will be assessing in this essay is “Crime Falls to Lowest Level in 33 Years”. The article is written by Darren McCaffrey who is the politics reporter for Sky news. The article was published on Thursday 24th April 2014 by Sky news. The article includes several statistics which are taken from the Crime survey for England and Wales although the results are published by the Office for National Statistics. The statistics presented in the article claim that levels of crime have decreased by 15% compared with the previous year and that this is the lowest they have been in 30 years. It is also claimed that the levels of violence and vandalism have fallen by 20% and 15% respectively and that the levels of shoplifting and fraud have increased by 6% and 25% respectively. In this essay I will be assessing where the statistics originate from and how they were collected. I will also be looking to see if the statistics are valid and being

When looking at the figures, it states that 35,000 adults per year and 3,500 children per year make up the nationally representative sample; although there was only a 67% response rate for 2013 in comparison to 73% in 2012 (Crime in England and Wales, 2014, p4). If we look at these figures in relation to the population of England and Wales it can be proven that these figures are not “a sample that reflects the population accurately (Bryman 2008, p698)”. The estimated population, as stated in the Office for National Statistics population mid release report 2013, for England was 53.9 million people and for Wales was 3.1 million people, this totals to a population of 57 million people in England and Wales. Looking back at the sample for the crime survey for England and Wales we can now see that only 0.068% of the population is actually sampled and therefore cannot be a representative sample (Annual Mid-year Population Estimates,