<P> Other crime surveys include the Commercial Victimisation Survey, which covers small and medium - sized businesses, and the Offending, Crime and Justice Survey, with a particular focus on young people . </P> <P> The accuracy of police statistics is questionable . Crimes are under - reported, as victims may be reluctant to report them due to considering it too trivial, embarrassing, aversion to dealing with the police, or fear of repercussions by the perpetrators . The police also sometime fail to record correctly all crimes reported to them . The police may not accept a person's claim that they are a victim of crime . Suggested is that the police sometimes deliberately do not record a crime to save time or manipulate performance figures . </P> <P> In 2002, the Home Office introduced a National Crime Recording Standard in England and Wales, due to a lack of uniformity in how police forces recorded notifiable offences . One issue identified was no - criming, the practice of writing off reported notifiable offences from police force statistics . The National Crime Recording Standard was applied inconsistently across crimes and regions, frequently incorrectly, for instance, it varied significantly by area: in the year to March 2011, 2% of reported rapes in Gloucestershire were recorded as "no crime", while 30% of reported rapes in Kent were so classified, making accurate comparison difficult . This was sometimes due to pressure from performance and other factors . During the period November 2012--October 2013, an average of 19% of crimes reported to the police are not recorded, with one quarter of sexual crimes and one third of violent crimes not being recorded, with rape being particularly bad at 37% no - criming . Reporting is inconsistent across local forces: "In a few forces, crime - recording is very good, and shows that it can be done well and the statistics can be trusted . In some other forces, it is unacceptably bad ." The failure to properly record crime was called "inexcusably poor" and "indefensible" by Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary Tom Winsor . Twenty percent of reviewed decisions to cancel a report were found to be incorrect, and in about a quarter of cases there was no record of victims being informed that their report had been cancelled . </P> <P> Senior members of the policing establishment admit to long - term, widespread "fiddling" of figures, such as John Stevens, Baron Stevens of Kirkwhelpington, former head of the Metropolitan Police Service: </P>

Scottish crime rates compared to england and wales