Ok, let's start with that Telegraph article which is the only source of any figures that anyone's provided so far.
I don't recall making any statements!
I told you where the figures were published; I find it surprising that you couldn't find them.
But, here are the conviction figures, which are sourced from the ACPO.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/8439117/EU-migrants-commit-500-crimes-a-week-in-UK.html
I think that report is wrong, and confusing number of convictions with number of criminals. The figures roughly correlate with here (see under column 246W):
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmhansrd/cm110905/text/110905w0009.htm
which are for number of crime notifications, not number of people charged with a criminal offence.
Anyway, the best source I can find is here:
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2011-09-14b.71206.h
I think that can be taken as a reliable source. So, I have added up all the convictions for 2010 for people from Eastern European countries. I make that
22,552 criminal convictions for Eastern European nationals in the UK in 2010
Now let's see how many criminal convictions there are per year in the UK. From
here, I get 1,391,646 criminal convictions in England and Wales in the 12 months up to mid-2010. England and Wales make up about 90% of the population of the UK - to account for the remaining 10%, I'm going to extrapolate 1,391,646 + 10% = 1,530,810 convictions.
So let's say
1,530,000 criminal convictions in the UK in 2010
22,552 / 1,530,000 = 0.0147 =
1.47% of criminal convictions in the UK in 2010 were against Eastern Europeans.
To find out how many Eastern Europeans are living in the UK I took my figures from
here. I added up for all the Eastern European countries to get an estimate of
905,000 Eastern Europeans resident in the UK.
Population of the UK is about 60 million, so 905,000 / 60000000 = 0.0151 =
Eastern Europeans make up about 1.5% of the UK population.
Just to repeat those last two figures:
1.47% of criminal convictions in the UK in 2010 were against Eastern Europeans.
Eastern Europeans make up about 1.5% of the UK population.
What that tells me is that the amount of crime committed by Eastern Europeans in the UK is broadly proportionate to their prevalence in the population.
And that's before we even start to think of things like, for example, the probability that much of this migrant population falls within the age bracket that is most likely to receive criminal convictions regardless of nationality.
Therefore to suggest that Eastern Europeans are more likely to be criminals than the UK population at large is
NOT TRUE, unless I have made a mistake with my numbers.
This is also in agreement with the ACPO report I linked to earlier.
Anyone care to comment?
