Bag's Rants

Statistics and the real world.

Reading this article about 'Fears over road casualty figures'. It seems that there are discrepancies between the figures in A&E and those reported to the police. Of course the police ones are the publicised ones and the ones the targets are set on. Don't actually see what there is to be afraid of though. Where is the fear coming from? We will never know.

Now I remember this was mentioned not too long ago but I can't find it so it looks like I didn't comment at the time.

Anyway, my thoughts were there is a very simple reasons for this discrepancy.

Nobody want the police involved in their business any more. All they will do is question everybody, ticket everything and people will get hit with £100 fines plus three points on top of their accident costs for stupidity. So only serious accidents or clear cut accidents get logged and recorded.

So it's win win. The police figures show accidents are coming down as per target. Yippee! The poor punter is not down £100 or so and three points for a mistake and still gets his treatment. The government is happy. Another target met, on paper anyway, and can be publicised. Most of the stats are rubbish anyway so what difference does this one make?

Personally, I don't see the problem but I'm sure there will be a law coming out of this somewhere.

posted by Bag @ 11:00 am