WE ARE constantly told that the “crime figures are down”, so we should be pleased.

However I think there are very strong grounds for scepticism, crime is changing, burglary and robbery might be less, but that may be because the method of stealing has changed. Fraud is huge: how many of us spend a day at home without a scam phone call? If we had caught someone trying the back door, we’d probably report it, but reporting the endless fake phone calls from the ‘we believe that you have had a recent car accident’, or ‘I am calling from the technical department of Microsoft’, seems a pointless activity. Is anyone going to follow it up, will there be any conviction?

Likewise the ‘we can offer you a free pension consultation’, most of us appreciate that these are all attempts to steal from us, in many cases the objective is our whole life savings, but do these huge attempted thefts ever make their way onto the crime figures?

I found the following on one website: ‘We chose to exclude from our figures shoplifting and financial crime such as fraud, as they have very little negative impact, if any, on the residents’ safety and comfort.

‘We have also excluded drug-related crime due to it being inconsistently reported and thus potentially impacting on the overall crime rate in certain areas.’ I hope the person who wrote that is never a victim of financial crime.

The problem is that as most of us never report the scam, nobody knows the full scale of scam crime and thus it is difficult to address, I suspect if we all reported each incident then the forces of law and order would give it more weight and deal with it in a resolute fashion.

So crime is down providing one doesn’t count the serious property stuff that could take all of our assets in one fell swoop.

Oh and we haven’t even mentioned consumer crime, the unscrupulous tradespeople who prey on the old (not a reflection on the vast majority of tradespeople who do good jobs at a fair rate), the banks that unfairly charge exorbitant rates, etc.

White collar crime seems to be below the legal radar.

Lee Dalton

Fairview Road

Weymouth