Priorities and Distinctions in Reporting Cases

There was a piece at examiner.co.uk by David Ottewell and Samantha Gildea that claimed to show, using proportional mapping, where certain crimes are more likely to take place in England and Wales. It was headlined with "More Incest in West Yorkshire Than Rest of England and Parts of Wales, According to Crime Maps."

Crime maps showing which counties are most affected by different crimes have revealed West Yorkshire as the region with the greatest number of incest offences.
The Examiner's Data Unit has created a string of 'crime cartograms' - maps where areas are made bigger or smaller according to how many, or few, of a particular offence they have seen.

They show, at a glance, how our region has a hugely disproportionate problem with incest and other family-related sex crimes compared to other parts of England and Wales.

The problem is that nowhere in this piece was any distinction made, so we can only assume they are including consanguineous sex (consensual, to be redundant) between adults and assault/abuse/molestation. Those are two very different things. The first shouldn't be a crime in the first place.

After showing a map skewed by population density, they moved on to one skewed by the number of "incest and familial sexual offences."

Immediately we see how West Yorkshire appears to have rocketed in size. 

That is because there were 94 such offences in our region in the 12 months to the end of September - far more than any other part of the country.

The Metropolitan police area, covering London, had just 14. 

The place with the second most was actually Kent, with 58.

After getting what was apparently the most important offense out of the way, the piece moves on to such uninteresting offenses as, oh... homicide, firearms offenses, blackmail, and theft of mail. Silly us, we don't think if adults choose to have sex with each other, that fits in to statistics about murder and weapons violations.