THEFT IN IND1USTRY
Snt,—Mr. R. H. Cecil's thesis is, in part, 'that the official Criminal Statistics "are quite valudless as a guide to the incidence of larceny" and provide us with no conception of our criminal problem as a whole. He commits, however, a very elementary instance of the very distortion which he so roundly condemns when he quotes the Statistics for 1947 as showing a total of 111,456 convictions for breaking-and-entering. A glance at page xvi of the Statistics will show that this figure relates not to convictions but to "crimes known to the police." The actual number of
convictions for the some group of offences during the same period was 20,291; 52 per cent, of these convictions were of persons under the age of 17 years.
It is no part of the function of Criminal Statistics to provide sociological surveys of the kind initiated by Liverpool University ; surely the true function of any statistics is simply "to count heads," so long as it is done systematically, as a basis for further enquiry ? Mr. Cecil is on firmer ground when he condemns the often dogmatic and misleading classifica- tion of crimes which robs the Statistics of much of their value, although I think he overestimates the simplicity of distinguishing either legally or morally, between his "plain downright thefts" and other economic
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