FoI request by Daily Echo exposes police news blackout on serious crime reports

A Freedom of Information request by the Weymouth-based Daily Echo has shown the public is not being told about hundreds of crimes in Dorset each month, including serious violence and sexual assaults, the paper claims.
The story by Darren Slade, published on 31 December, says the revelation has fuelled concerns police are suppressing bad news for fear of frightening the public.
His story says Dorset Police gave the media details of fewer than 35 crimes in October. But an FoI request by the Echo has revealed that there were 3,573 crimes in that period.
The Echo says Dorset Police released details of: 12 cases of violence against the person – compared with 800 recorded that month; No sexual offences – when 70 were recorded; Five robberies – compared with 26 recorded.
Bob Satchwell, executive director of the Society of Editors, told the Echo: “It just beggars belief that the police are withholding information on this scale....I’m sure there’s a feeling in some quarters that releasing information increases the fear of crime. It’s just ridiculous.”
The Echo reported that Dorset Police spends £500,000 on PR and employs around a dozen full-time public relations staff - none of whom it says were available to comment on the story.
Roy Greenslade in an Evening Standard column at the beginning of December argued that there was a link between the cases of Sally Murrer and Damian Green, because they show the way the police have been clamping down on information released to the press.
He wrote:"They are the tip of an iceberg because they led to arrests and secured a public profile. But across Britain, police have been clamping down on the amount of information given to journalists. Despite appointing public relations officers, who did not exist in my long-ago reporting days, the amount of information given to local reporters has diminished down the years. Whether they are misquoting the Data Protection Act or simply being bloody-minded, police are giving out less and less information that should be in the public domain."
I agreed with Roy's comments here based on many stories we covered when I was deputy editor of Press Gazette.