Please stop inventing stories

Posted by Luke Williams on September 28, 2009 in general thoughts | 0 comments

Please can we stop journalists from making up non-stories, without proper justification. There just seem so many “we’re all doomed” stories, twisted from reality.

According to our beloved Echo there is a crime wave happening to local businesses because of the recession.

27 crimes in 2007

38 crimes in 2008

20 crimes in 6 months of 2009

Really? Thats quite a leap of faith – how exactly can that be linked to the recession?

If you could show that there were approx 18 crimes in the first 8 months of 2008  and then a jump in the last 4 months to 20… continuing at that level for the first 6 months would of been 30 reported crimes not 20 in 2009.

That could be argued to demonstrate a trend, the fact that these 6 months seem consistent with the last 4 months of 2008  (Remembering that 8 months of 2008 were NOT in a recession).

You could also argue that the crime levels should still be rising as the effect to the “man on the street” happens after the point at which we technically enter a recession – redundancies didn’t really start till the beginning of 2009 so really, it would need to show a more significant rise as of this year than in 2008 at all.

Pah.