by Mark Easton
Although the average age of a killer is almost identical for men and women, at around thirty-two years old, the average disguises an important clue. If a man is going to murder he is most likely to do it in his early twenties, with probability dropping as the years pass and maturity increases. Women, however, kill with almost consistent regularity from their twenties through to their mid-forties. The motives for women tend to be buried in the chronic tensions of domestic life. For men, the causes are more likely to be found in the conflicts of their social or work lives.
Most homicides, around 60 per cent, are ‘male on male’, often categorised as either ‘confrontational’ or ‘grudge/revenge’ killings. Analysis by the criminologist Dr Fiona Brookman demonstrated how confrontational homicides ‘generally arose from “honour contests” in response to relatively trivial disagreements’. Typically, we are talking about two booze-fuelled lads attempting to knock lumps out of each other over some perceived slight with neither intending, at least at the outset, to kill the other.
I think we get the picture when Dr Brookman writes, ‘The violence tends to occur in more public settings where an audience, often comprising other males, prevails and where alcohol is a characteristic feature of the social context.’ A cocktail of bravado and beer all too often results in another young man’s corpse in the mortuary and another miserable statistic in the official record (See ‘A is for Alcohol’).
As Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi described it in their book A General Theory of Crime: ‘The difference between homicide and assault may simply be the intervention of a bystander, the accuracy of a gun, the weight of a frying pan, the speed of an ambulance or the availability of a trauma centre.’
Grudge/revenge killings, on the other hand, are premeditated and purposeful. While the weapon in a confrontational murder is likely to be a fist, a boot or a bottle, in a grudge murder it is likely to have been pre-selected and carried to the scene — a gun, a knife or an iron bar. These homicides are often linked to gangs: a UK study of 10- to 19-year-olds found that 44 per cent of those who said they were in a gang had committed violence and 13 per cent had carried a knife in the previous twelve months. Among non-gang members of the same age the figures were 17 per cent and 4 per cent respectively.
James Gilligan’s studies inside the Massachusetts asylum attempted to unpick the psychological conditions that turn a young man into a cold-eyed gang killer. His conclusion was that for poor and often black American kids on the street, ‘nothing is more shameful than to feel ashamed.’ It is about a loss of self-respect — Gilligan describes it as the opposite of self-pride — which can only be restored through violent retribution.
Gang culture is founded on ideas of status and control. Rival gangs in the UK often ape their US peers and, employing Jamaican vernacular, choose ‘diss’ names for each other — alternative tags designed to disrespect or disparage. Many of the male on male homicides in British inner cities will have their origins in some incident deemed to have displayed impertinence or contempt.
‘You’re not being very fair to me are you, sir?’ Lewis seemed downcast and annoyed.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Morse.
‘You said the case was nearly over.’
‘It is over,’ said Morse.
It is time to gather in the library, to review the evidence and attempt to wrap up the case. The murder rate, it can be argued, offers a measure of the health or sickness of a civilised society. Most countries keep official homicide statistics, sometimes stretching back centuries into their past. To academics, such data are like a patient’s records clipped to the end of the hospital bed. Let us trace the line along Britain’s murder chart.
The first and most obvious point is that Britain’s homicide rate is a great deal healthier than it used to be. Back in the Middle Ages, according to analysis of English coroners’ records and ‘eyre rolls’ (accounts of visits by justice officials), the rate was around 35/100,000. This is equivalent to the homicide level in contemporary Colombia or the Congo.
From the middle of the sixteenth century, the homicide rate started to fall steeply, a dramatic reduction in risk that was maintained for two hundred years. Plenty has been written about why the situation improved so radically during this period — the development of a statutory justice system (see ‘J is for Justice’) is often cited — but it was also a period in which the aristocracy and professional class found alternative ways of dealing with dispute and discontent. The duel emerged as a controlled and respectable way of responding to an insult against one’s honour. Spontaneous violence became disreputable for gentlemen of standing, while personal discipline and restraint were seen as the marks of a civilised individual. This was, of course, in contrast to the vulgar and uncultured ways of the lower orders.
The murder rate continued to fall, if less steeply, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as state control and social policies increased. It was also partly a consequence of young men being given a substitute for interpersonal violence to demonstrate their masculinity: organised sport. Boxing, for example, developed from bare-knuckled no-holds-barred brawls to disciplined contests governed by a strict code and overseen by a referee. The Queensbury Rules, introduced into British boxing in 1867, became shorthand for sportsmanship and fair play. Society at all levels increasingly valued the virtue of self-control.
Close study of the vital signs of British society reveal a slight rise in the homicide rate over the past fifty years, but in historical terms the figures are still so low that a single appalling occurrence — a terrorist attack or the murderous activity of a serial killer like Dr Harold Shipman — can skew the data. In international terms, the UK is among the less likely spots to be murdered: our homicide rate is broadly in line with other European nations (a little higher than Germany but slightly lower than France) and roughly a quarter of the level in the United States. Home Office figures for England and Wales published in 2011 show the lowest rate since the early 1990s.
So how to solve this crime? Since the homicide rate is largely driven by the activities of relatively poor, frustrated young men, it is no surprise that this is the group upon which much attention has focused. When the World Health Organization looked at youth violence in Europe they found that 15,000 young people die from interpersonal violence in the region each year. (Britain, incidentally, had one of the lowest death rates for this age group — twenty-seven times lower than Russia and three times lower than Belgium, Ireland or Iceland.) ‘The mass media and society are quick to demonise violent young people,’ their report noted, pointing an accusatory finger at those who inspire juvenile aggression by their abuse or neglect of children and adolescents (see ‘Y is for Youth’). ‘Overall, good evidence indicates that violence among young people can be prevented through the organised efforts of society,’ they said. ‘The evidence base is much stronger for interventions that adopt a public health rather than criminal justice approach, and for those that reduce risk factors and strengthen protective factors among young people early in life than for measures that seek to reduce violent behaviour once it has already emerged.’
We cannot hope to solve all murders: killers are driven by a multitude of motives and inspired by countless causes. But the clues and the evidence add up to suggest that a great many of these tragedies stem from threads of intolerance and indifference that run through the fabric of our society. The true culprit is… all of us.
Morse turned off the light, locked his office door, and walked back along the darkened corridor. The last piece had clicked into place. The jigsaw was complete.
is for Numbers
When I was at school in the late 1960s, I remember my maths teacher standing proudly behind a very large cardboard box placed upon his desk. Slowly and with reverence, the box was opened and an extraordinary apparatus lifted into view. ‘Boys,’ he began, ‘this is… a calculator.’ A what? The word was new to us, but we instantly fell in love with the shiny, metal contraption — a cross between a
giant typewriter and an arcade slot-machine. There was magic in the box of tricks on the teacher’s desk.
My children laugh when I tell them this story. To me, as a youngster, the complexity and scale of mathematical problems were reflected in the complexity and scale of the device needed to solve them. Today, the most challenging calculations can be handled by a puny, mundane slice of plastic.
Technology has transformed our relationship with numbers. Where once we were in thrall to their mystique, we are now blasé. Common computer programs allow us to manipulate numerical data with ease: to sort, to rank, to engineer, to plot and to conclude. Statistical analysis used to be the province of the expert mathematical mind; now any fool thinks he can do it. Billions of numbers whizzing at light speed around cyberspace are routinely trapped, dissected and displayed as ‘proof’ of some theory or another. A political researcher with a bit of wit and a laptop can find and manoeuvre the figures to back up the policy idea.
In one sense, technology has democratised data. Statistics are now the potential servants of us all rather than the powerful allies of a few. But one consequence is that we respect them less and distrust them more: familiarity has bred a contempt that risks undermining reason and promoting prejudice. In Britain, a decisive battle has been raging for control of statistics, a clash with profound implications for our governance and our society.
The outbreak of the War of Numbers can be traced back to the early nineteenth century. Before that, there was a benign discipline, quaintly christened ‘political arithmetic’, which offered some scant numerical evidence about population, life expectancy and finance. But the novel idea that the state should routinely collect and publish ‘statistics’ blossomed in the Victorian spring and sparked a furious and protracted struggle for domination over data that continues to this day.
One of the forefathers of statistical science, Sir Francis Galton, regarded statistics as beautiful but combustible, warning that they should not be brutalised but delicately handled and warily interpreted. Benjamin Disraeli, however, was less enamoured. In 1847 he wrote of how delightful it would be to suppress their use and sack the imbecile who ran the Board of Trade’s statistical department. It is doubtful that Disraeli ever did use the phrase ‘lies, damned lies and statistics’, but what is certain is that there were those who wished to smother the infant science in its cradle. Nevertheless, guided by the principles of the Enlightenment and inspired by the belief that the solution to society’s problems lay in the hands of men, reformers saw statistics as the instrument for creating a better world. Britain witnessed a fevered, almost obsessive period of counting and categorising (see ‘J is for Justice’).
The Statistical Society of London, founded in 1834 and later becoming the Royal Statistical Society, had as its first emblem a wheat sheaf, representing a bundle of facts, bound by a ribbon with the motto ‘to be threshed by others’. Members were told to confine their attention rigorously to facts stated numerically and arranged in tables, carefully excluding all opinions. But it quickly became obvious that total immersion in the pure waters of numbers was an untenable position. The motto and the prohibition were dropped in 1857.
From this flowed a rather unseemly free-for-all in Whitehall, with statistical squabbles over methodology, accuracy and interpretation spreading between departments and across generations. It took a real war and a fat cigar to instil some order onto this bureaucratic chaos. In 1941, Sir Winston Churchill demanded a Central Statistical Office ‘to consolidate and make sure that agreed figures only are used’. Consolidation and agreement, however, would remain in short supply as the various departmental statistical branches competed to produce numerical justification for the experimental ideas that would shape post-war Britain.
Often their data proved to be unhelpful in justifying government’s policy ambitions. The ‘facts’ had an irritating habit of getting in the way of the ‘good stories’ ministers wanted to tell. It was Churchill again who famously told a prospective parliamentary candidate: ‘When I call for statistics about the rate of infant mortality, what I want is proof that fewer babies died when I was Prime Minister than when anyone else was Prime Minister. That is a political statistic.’
Harold Wilson had respect for data and those who assembled it. He had spent the war working as a statistician for the coal industry but, as Prime Minister, he too recognised the tension between statistics and politics. In a speech to the Royal Statistical Society in 1973 he said he had learned that, ‘while you can always get someone to find the answers to the questions, what you need in government is the man who knows the questions to the answers.’
The balance of power between elected ministers and qualified statisticians, between politicians and scientists, shifted palpably with the arrival of Margaret Thatcher. She wanted all her numbers to be political and invited an ideological soulmate, Sir Derek Rayner, the man from Marks & Spencer, to conduct a value-for-money review of the Central Statistical Office. He helpfully concluded that it was ‘too heavily committed to serving the public at large’. In Sir Derek’s view, ‘information should not be collected primarily for publication [but] primarily because government needs it for its own business.’ Overnight, troublesome number crunchers were stripped of their public responsibilities. Many lost their jobs as the government wiped out a quarter of its statistical service. Instead of providing ammo for voters, Whitehall stats departments would do what they were told by ministers. If this was a key battle in the War of Numbers, it was one which saw the boffins crushed.
At 4.30 on the afternoon of Wednesday, 10 June 1981, more than 200 statisticians gathered at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to lick their wounds and vent their frustrations. The discussion was described as forceful, the atmosphere electric. The collective noun for statisticians is ‘a variance’, but on this issue they were united and determined. The long fight back would be conducted neither in Whitehall nor Westminster. The statisticians would go global.
The collapse of the Soviet empire in the early 1990s had created newly independent states which, it was hoped, would abandon the corrupt centralised systems of the Communist era, including the control and manipulation of official numbers. Here was an opportunity for the statistical profession to regroup on the moral high ground. Under the auspices of the United Nations in Geneva, plans were set in motion for renegotiating the balance of power.
In 1994, the UN published what were called the Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics. Principle Number One was that official data were not the playthings of politicians. No, they were ‘an indispensable element in the information system of a democratic society’, to be ‘compiled and made available on an impartial basis by official statistical agencies to honour citizens’ entitlement to public information’. Other principles further empowered the statisticians. In order to retain public trust, the scientists would control everything and, should some uppity politician try to interfere, the agencies would have authority to comment on erroneous interpretation and misuse of statistics.
The UN statement was a direct challenge to governments. Statistics were too important to be left open to the potential abuses of elected representatives. A year later, at the headquarters of the Royal Statistical Society in north London, the shadow Home Secretary Jack Straw admitted that political control of numbers had deeply damaged the relationship between the governed and the governing class. ‘There can come a point where the cynicism goes so deep that it corrodes the foundations of our political system, leading to a wholesale lack of confidence in the system,’ he warned. ‘I believe that we are dangerously close to that position today.’
The Labour Party, frustrated particularly by the way unemployment figures had been ‘massaged’, was promising a new independence for those compiling government data. Statistics had become ‘the hard and brittle currency of politics,’ Straw conceded. Controlling the numbers had become key to the partisan battle for the hearts and minds of the electorate.
When Tony Blair an
d Gordon Brown moved into Downing Street in 1997, their luggage contained a promise of evidence-based policy. The idea that cold facts rather than hot passions should lead government was further encouragement for statisticians who looked forward to seeing their work and their influence increase. A year after entering office, the new Labour government published Statistics: A Matter of Trust, which admitted what the public had long assumed — politicians cannot be trusted with the data. ‘It is seldom suggested that ministers actively change the numbers, rather that there remains scope for statistics to be subjected to political influence in more subtle ways,’ the report acknowledged. However, New Labour was determined to control its message, and that meant they needed to control the numbers too. For all the rhetoric, ministers were very reluctant to allow some unelected swot to prize their sticky fingers from the official figures.
A decade later, in 2008, the rather toothless watchdog created ostensibly to restore faith in government data, The Statistics Commission, had to admit that the use of official numbers ‘continued to be driven largely by departmental requirements’. It also noted that government was able to spin the statistics because it often controlled both the release of the data and the ministerial reaction to it.
I witnessed the game being played at the Home Office when the crime figures were published. Journalists would be invited to a ‘lock-in’ at the department, quite literally. The press would be ushered into a windowless room and instructed to turn off all telephones. The doors would be shut as a news release was thrust into our hands, proclaiming the good news of falling crime and delighted ministers. Then the assembled hacks would thumb through the ‘official’ stats, searching for what they regarded as the real story. Buried in the pages of numbers and charts would be some narrow category of crime which was still increasing, evidence that equated with voters’ settled view: crime was out of control and politicians were deceitful toads. Upon being freed from our enforced purdah, that is the story we would tell. The more ministers struggled to convince the public that overall crime was falling, the less the electorate trusted them. In seeking to spin the numbers, they destroyed the reputation of government statistics and themselves. What was particularly galling for both politicians and statisticians in the Home Office was that the figures really did show that crime was falling. Quite a lot. And in almost every category.