Change the record, this one's getting dull now.

Nottingham is the most dangerous city in the country. Apparently. Yawn yawn yawn. We've heard it all before and quite frankly, it's b******s.

Now I may be a touch biased in my opinion on this, there's plenty of cities in this country I'd be risking my neck walking through and Nottingham isn't one, but it would seem from the Reform report splashed all over the news today, that I'm not the only biased one. Someone really has it in for Nottingham, and is going to make sure that everyone else knows it.

Nottingham has the highest rates of murder in 2005, according to the report, but then that was helped by a man trying to become a serial killer bumping off the homeless.

As the list goes down, the author lets their true colours out. Place X has the highest level of certain crime, place Y is next, place X has the highest level of the next crime, place Y is next and so on and so on, until you get to burglaries, where place X has the highest, place Y is second and Nottingham is third. Why feel the need to mention that ? You haven't mentioned the third level place on any of the others.

Clearly police forces across the country have different methods in recording crime and producing information on crime figures. Forces across the country police very different areas. Nottingham, a town of a quarter of a million people with little (if any) rural areas is incomparable to an area such as, off the top of my head say, Cambridge, with their associated countryside. Apples and pears. The Reform group responsible for the report were even told this by the West Midlands police (page 29) and were asked not to include their figures within the report. Reform did anyway.

Which then begs the question, what is this report for ?

Is it a report to show which is the most dangerous city in the country, an honest appraisal of all the data available, even if all the data available is, at best, inconsistent?

Is it therefore a report highlighting the inconsistent nature of police force statistics, pleading for publicly available performance figures? As their executive summary puts it:

"Accurate, relevant and easily intellible local data on crime would put pressure on police-forces to improve."

What, like schools and hospitals ?

Or is the report a half-baked, Friday-afternoon, lets-get-it-done-and-go-down-the-pub exercise in London-centric, shoddy, pseudo journalism aimed at making the South look better than it is and keep the employees of the Reform group in a job for a bit longer than they should be.

Look at us, look at us, we're important.

No, actually. No you're not. You're tossers.

*** Additional ***

Reply from Cllr Collins