POLICE STATISTICS AND THE PARANORMAL - A MISLEADING RESPONSE

Police - Misleading Statistics?

Recently, a researcher named Alexis Davey wrote to Lincolnshire Police requesting data from police reports of paranormal activity over a five year period.

The request was categorised by the police into 8 groups, and the responses that you can see below have mostly significantly increased each year:

2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 Witch 24 34 43 35 35 Werewolf/ werewolves 1 0 0 0 1 Vampires 0 0 1 1 3 UFO 0 0 5 1 4 Ghost 19 21 22 35 55 Zombie 1 1 2 3 2 Demon 70 89 107 149 212 Wizard 1 3 7 4 5

To put matters into their true perspective the police reply with these statistics was, `The above incidents are the incidents in which the above key words were included in the free text summary. This does not mean that all incidents were incidents of “Paranormal Activity”

So (as an example) if someone called the police to report a disturbance with neighbours they heard whilst watching a vampire movie, the word `vampire` might be added to the statistical data shared above.

In effect, these figures do not give a correct overview of Alexis Davey`s request. They merely show how statistics can be easily manipulated or misinterpreted.

So despite all these requests made to police forces across the U.K. we are still none the wiser.