From THE PRIVATE SECRETARY
L
(20)
HKK 14/16 Dear Paknick
गरार
196)
HK!On for action a Sir A. Lontoon 17 Wilford.
Poro.
19/60
HOME OFFICE
WHITEHALL SWIA 2AP
i8th October 1973
is
Miss Kelly
We must wits to Has Kays again
Aas 19/10
You sent us a copy of your letter of 2nd October to Tom Bridges, to which were annexed figures of the growth of capital crime in Hong Kong.
The Home Secretary has asked me to say that he thinks that the figures would be more meaningful if those for murder and manslaughter were separated. We should also like to be clear precisely what these statistics refer to.
Are we right in assuming that they are of offences known to the police (the normal measure of the murder rate in this country) or are they figures of cases prosecuted or of cases in which there were convictions?
We also wonder whether you have satisfied yourself that it is right to take the statistics at their face value and that there has been no change in law or practice which might account for apparent increases in the actual volume of crime. It is our own experience that one has to be very careful to be sure that an increase in "crimes known" is not attributable to such factors as a change in the reporting habits of the public or the recording practice of the police rather than to an actual shift in the level of criminality.
We think that it might be interesting to see the murder figures related to the size of the population by expressing them as a "murder rate" per million.
I am sending copies of this letter to the recipients of yours.
Yours sinurely Michael Balita
M.J.C. BUTCHER
P. H. Grattan, Esq.