British riots vanish off the map

Looters rampaged amid flames, but crime stats don't show it

They were the worst riots to hit British cities in a generation. Thousands took to the streets, burning, looting and causing hundreds of millions of pounds of damage.

But according to the August crime figures published on Government internet crime maps, it is as if the violence in some of the worst-hit areas never happened.

The number of incidents shown as happening in parts of London, Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol, Nottingham and Birmingham fell, stayed the same or rose slightly between July and August when the riots took place.

Peter Fahy, Chief Constable of Manchester, where hundreds of officers had to deal with some of the worst trouble, denied trying to "airbrush" the riots from the force's crime statistics, and said the figures showed crime trends needed to be analysed in the long term.

"It is plain silly to try to assess the impact of the riots in terms of the number of individual crimes that were committed," he said.

Under guidelines for the figures, a crime by 10 people against one business is recorded as a single incident.

In Manchester's St Ann's Square, scene of some of the worst violence, the police.co.uk website map shows the lowest level of crime for four months, with 21 incidents. While overall the city centre recorded a rise in August, the figure of 1828 street-level offences was only 10 above April and 12 more than in February.

In Birmingham, where more than 100 people were arrested, the site records 1489 street-level crimes - down 40 on July. And while witnesses likened rioting in Bristol to an "end-of-the-world movie", the number of offences recorded was static at 2014. It is the same in Toxteth, Liverpool.

According to the Metropolitan Police's crime mapping site, offences fell by one in the Reeves Corner area of Croydon, where a furniture shop was set alight. Tottenham Hale retail park, which was another target for rioters, recorded seven more crimes - although Tottenham High Street, where the trouble began, recorded a rise from 83 to 149. Fahy said his force had recorded 242 crimes in the city centre and 139 in Salford linked to the disorder.

- Independent