hear no violence, see no violence, spin no violence

News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress. All the rest is advertising. So said newspaper magnate Lord Northcliffe and he couldn't have been more right. Today I have had a flurry of media interviews following our decision to highlight the most dangerous places in the UK mostly caused by people who wished I had kept quiet about the figures.

The top ten most dangerous places are identified, for those who care to look for them, in Home Office crime stats published about a month ago. All we did was get hold of the excel spreadsheet which showed the basic command units that the police operate in and their levels of reported crime for violent crimes against the person. We then sorted that list into those with the highest levels of reported crime per 1000 of the population.

There were no great surprises in the list. Some large cities and four London boroughs all made the top ten as you might expect. What I didn't expect was the level of denial by some of the areas in the top ten. There has been a flurry of senior police officers and local councillors trying to claim that the figures are in someway wrong and that they don't have a problem. All is apparently sweetness and light if it wasn't for busybodies like me raising the fear of crime. Areas where violent crime is clearly rising want to insist that it is falling. I had one very aggressive woman call from a London Borough ranting at me on the phone that this would undo all the good work that had been done.

Methinks they doth protest too much. 750 people are murdered in the UK every year. There are 2 million violent crimes a year. That is too many in my book. For the areas where most of these crimes happen to deny they have a problem is dangerously irresponsible. The first step in curing alcoholism is to admit you have a problem. The first step in ending the social disease that is violence and aggression is to admit you have a problem and ask for help.

There are many people who need to have a bit more fear of crime. Young men aged between 16-24 are the people most likely to be a victim of violent crime. Most of them seem to think that they are invincible and that it'll never happen to them. As a result they expose themselves to dangerous risks, disregarding their own personal safety, and all too many are ending up dead.

Women have taken on board the personal safety advice given out by the Suzy Lamplugh Trust over the last two decades. Young men have yet to get the message. It doesn't help us to get the message out to them if local bigwigs insist on putting their local spin ahead of the national statistics. Violence doesn't go away if you stop talking about it - more people become victims if information about the risks they face is suppressed.