The furor over the Philadelphia police encounter with a would-be carjacker and cop-killer isn't the only public-relations nightmare facing the city's police department. Two thousand reported sex crimes went "uninvestigated" by Philadelphia police between 1995 and 1997 because of "pressure to keep the department's crime numbers low," reported ABC News on July 11. Earlier this  year, the department admitted "misreporting" thousands of sexual assaults during the past decade "to make the city appear safer than it was."
   Actually, Philadelphia is not the only city to underreport crime in recent years. The 1994 Clinton/ Schumer crime bill has resulted in lots of federal dollars for local police departments — and also lots of pressure  to get crime statistics down so that the federal government can announce the success of its policy of federalizing crime control.
   But when it comes to fudging crime statistics, even the finest Philadelphia number-rearranger can't  compare to our British cousins.
   During the nineteenth century, and most of the twentieth, Britain enjoyed a well-deserved reputation as an unusually safe and crime-free nation, compared to the United States or continental Europe. No longer.
   To the great consternation of British authorities concerned about tourism revenue, a June CBS News report proclaimed Great Britain "one of the most violent urban societies in the Western world."  Declared Dan Rather: "This summer, thousands of Americans will travel to Britain expecting a civilized island free from crime and ugliness...[But now] the U.K. has a crime problem....worse than ours."
   A headline in the London Daily Telegraph back on April 1, 1996, said  it all: "Crime Figures a Sham, Say Police."  The story noted that "pressure to convince the public that police were winning the fight against crime had resulted in a long list of ruses to 'massage' statistics," and "the recorded crime level bore no resemblance to the  actual amount of crime being committed."
   For example, where a series of homes was burgled, they were regularly recorded as one crime. If a burglar hit 15 or 20 flats, only one crime was added to the statistics.
   A brand-new report from the Inspectorate of Constabulary charges Britain's 43 police departments with systemic under-classification of crime—for example, by recording burglary as "vandalism." The report
lays much of the blame on the police's desire to avoid the extra paperwork associated with more serious crimes.
   Britain's justice officials have also kept crime totals down by being careful about what to count. American homicide data are based on arrests, but British data are based on final dispositions.  Suppose that three men kill a woman during an argument outside a bar.  They are arrested for murder, but because of problems with identification (the main witness is dead), charges are eventually dropped. In American crime statistics, the event counts as a three-person homicide, but in British statistics it counts as nothing at  all.
   Another "common practice," according to one retired Scotland Yard senior officer, is "falsifying clear-up rates by gaining false confessions from criminals already in prison." (Britain has far fewer protections against abusive police interrogations than does the United States.) As a result, thousands of crimes in Great Britain have been "solved" by bribing or coercing prisoners to confess to crimes they never committed.
   Explaining away the disparity between crime reported by victims and the official figures became so difficult that, in April 1998, the British Home Office was forced to change its method of reporting crime, and a somewhat more accurate picture began to emerge.
   This past January, official street-crime rates in London were more than double the official rate from the year before.
   So what's a British politician to do when elections coincide with an out-of control crime wave?  Calling for "reasonable" gun laws is no longer an option. Handguns have been confiscated, and long guns are very tightly restricted. So anti-gun demagoguery, while still popular, can't carry the whole load.
   Conversely, the government would not find it acceptable to allow its subjects to possess any type of gun (even a licensed, registered .22 rifle) for home protection. Defensive gun ownership is entirely illegal,  and considered an insult to the government, since it implies that the government cannot keep the peace. Thus, in one recent notorious case, an elderly man who had been repeatedly burglarized, and had received no meaningful assistance from the police, shot a pair of career burglars who had broken into the man's home. The man was sentenced to life in prison.
   The British authorities warn the public incessantly about the dangers of following the American path on gun policy. for a much loweBut the Daily Telegraph (June 29, 2000) points out that "the main reason your burglary rate in America is householders' propensity to shoot intruders. They do so without fear of being dragged before courts and jailed for life."
   So what's the government going to do to make voters safer? One solution came from the Home Office in April 1999 in the form of "Anti-Social Behaviour Orders" — special court orders intended to deal  with people who cannot be proven to have committed a crime, but  whom the police want to restrict anyway. Behaviour Orders can, among other things, prohibit a person from visiting a particular street or premises, set a curfew, or lead to a person's eviction from his home.  Violation of a Behaviour Order can carry a prison sentence of up to five years.
   Prime Minister Tony Blair is now proposing that the government be allowed to confine people proactively, based on fears of their potential dangerousness.
   American anti-gun lobbyists have long argued that if America followed Britain's lead in severely restricting firearms possession and self-defense, then American crime rates would eventually  match Britain's. The lobbyists have also argued that if guns were restricted in America, civil liberties in the U.S. would have the same degree of protection that they have in Britain. The lobbyists are absolutely right.