So today’s ‘One out of every five killers is an immigrant‘ looks a little out of place. That may be because it takes three weeks to get a reply from the police to an FOI request and the hack who wrote it was anticipating rather different immigration figures to be published when he made the request.

Whatever the reason for the story, it’s an example of a very common and very misleading tactic that the Mail (along with the Express) engages in when it wants to make us frightened of foreign criminals. You can see the same tactic used in ‘One in six rapes committed by foreign attackers, shock police figures reveal‘ from April this year (although that story was churned directly from the Daily Express) and ‘Foreigners carry out one in every five killings in Britain, police figures reveal‘ from April 2008. You’ll notice that the last article there reveals that the ‘one in five’ figure isn’t actually news, since it was reported over a year ago.

Here’s how the tactic works.

First, the paper contacts every police force in England & Wales and asks for stats showing how many of one crime or another has been committed by foreigners. Then the paper then calculates how this translates into percentages across the UK.

Here’s why the tactic is misleading.

1. Police forces don’t have completely reliable figures for how many foreigners commit crime. All they have is a box for ‘nationality’ on arrest forms, which are voluntary and never checked.

2. Not every police force responds, but the Metropolitan Police always does. The Metropolitan Police arrests more people – and more people who enter something other than British into the ‘nationality’ box on their arrest form than any other force. The current Mail article talks about there being 371 individuals accused of murder or manslaughter last year, with 233 of them being in the Metropolitan Police area. This will completely skew the numbers for the rest of the country, even if they’re proportionate for the London area.

3. The paper does not compare the number of arrests of people who enter something other than British into the ‘nationality’ box on their arrest from in the responses they get to the number of people born overseas in the areas they have replies from. Instead, they compare it with the whole country.

To illustrate this with an extreme hypothetical example – London has an immigrant population of around 30% and arrests more people for murder or manslaughter than any other police force. Let’s say that in one year, the number of homicides in London that people who enter a non-British nationality in their arrest form are completely proportionate to the number of people born overseas in the area – 30%. In that same year, there are no homicides anywhere else in England & Wales. We now have a scary ‘Foreigners commit a third of killings in the UK but only make up 10% of the poplulation’ story. The trouble is – that’s completely proportionate in the actual area those killings took place.

Now, the paper does state that “In London, almost 40 per cent of those in such cases in the past year were from overseas, or of unknown origin,” which would be disproportionate were it not for the fact that the paper has decided to add everyone who didn’t enter anything into the ‘nationality’ box. As the article later reveals, including these people makes the total in London higher than the actual total across the country, which is impossible. Could it be that the hack has included this figure rather than the actual figure because the real one would make it too obvious that this article is misleading?

This ‘get an FOI request from police forces’ tactic will always return a scary looking overall average. Great for frightening the readers with – not so great for actually giving an accurate idea of how many crimes were committed by people from overseas.

A couple of weeks ago, Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre gave evidence to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee (here’s a video of the session).  During the session, he was asked about the practice of churnalism and after a bit of waffle, Dacre answered that churnalism does go on in other papers, but, ‘I would refute that charge to the Daily Mail.’

He was also asked about the practice of kicking off stories with misleading headlines that are contradicted in the story’s text. He answered, ‘I’d like to think this doesn’t happen in the Mail – I’m not going to hold my hand on my heart and say it doesn’t. It does happen in some areas of the media.’

This would be news to those who remember my post ‘How the Mail’s Home Affairs Editor fact checks press releases‘ from a couple of months ago, where the Mail had reproduced a press release from MigrationWatch and played about with it a bit to make it look more threatening.  There’s a better example from earlier this week.

This Monday’s front page headline in the Daily Express was ‘EACH ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT TO COST US £1MILLION‘.  The story had been churned from a MigrationWatch press release, which didn’t actually say that each illegal immigrant was to cost us a million pounds, but said that if there were an anmesty for illegal immigrants, then each family of four granted an amnesty would cost a million pounds if they all arrived at 25, worked for no more than minimum wage their whole lives, while claiming the maximum in tax credits, child benefit and housing benefit the whole time.  The housing benefit alone counts for about half the million.

MigrationWatch’s own headline is ‘Amnesty for Illegal Immigrants Could Cost Taxpayers ‘Up to £1m’ Per Family‘, so you can see how it’s been twisted.  That’s some nice churning and misleading headline chicanery from the Express, but this is MailWatch.  What about the Mail?

Monday’s Mail reported the same story, and the current headline on the website is ‘Each illegal immigrant costs us £1m, says study as Government faces calls for amnesty‘.  Where the Express headline took MigrationWatch’s claim, removed the uncertainty and lied about the cost applying to each individual rather than each family of four, the Mail’s goes even further.  Looking at the Daily Mail’s headline gives the impression that every illegal immigrant currently in the country costs a million pounds each right now.

Usually, when an article has a misleading headline, the story beneath has a bit of clarification buried somewhere toward the bottom.  This one never clarifies that the cost is a potential for a family of four and not for each individual, although it hints at it with:

In London, where some 70 per cent of illegal immigrants are believed to live, the costs are even greater. As rents are considerably higher in the capital the total lifetime costs for a two child family resident in London is £1.1million, of which £505,000 is Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit.

So, Paul Dacre ‘refutes’ that churnalism goes on in the Mail, and would like to think the paper doesn’t lead with misleading headlines, and here’s proof that his ‘refutation’ is nonsense and the paper tells lies in headlines.  This story has been churned and exaggerated either from the Express’s coverage, or directly from the MigrationWatch press release.  ‘Daily Mail Reporter’ does appear to have at least seen the press release, since every quote attributed to Sir Andrew Green is lifted word for word from it.

Dacre also defended the Mail’s anti-MMR stories, coverage of the Max Mosely affair,  and publishing the name of the village that Josef Fritzl’s daughter was relocated to by saying that all these things had been reported elsewhere in the media first – a practice he’s ‘refuted’ even occurs in the Mail.