Why is the truth on migrant crime so difficult to accept?

Telegraph

a day ago

A spate of sexual assaults near asylum hotels has pushed the issue of migrant crime onto the national agenda. The coverage of traditional broadcasters towards this issue has shown that some in the media class are not willing to engage in a proper discussion of the risks associated with open borders, in a move that could destroy the last vestiges of public trust in the BBC, Sky News and ITN.
The few politicians and commentators actually prepared to tell the British public what is happening in our country have faced a barrage of pushback from self-styled 'data journalists', who no longer see facts as something worthy of reporting, but instead as an inconvenience to their worldview.
Ministry of Justice data has revealed that a quarter of rape and sexual assault convictions last year were of foreign nationals, despite them accounting for little over a tenth of the population, and government data shows that certain nationalities are far more likely to commit these crimes.
But some have retreated to a bunker of statistical illiteracy, jettisoning basic mathematical competence in order to create nuance where there is none. One case-study of this practise is the 'factcheck' conducted by Sky News on data taken directly from Connect, the Metropolitan Police's custody database.
Last year, over 40 per cent of those charged or cautioned for sexual offences in London were non-British citizens – a rate roughly 35 per cent higher than the rate of British citizens. Sky's 'data and forensics' team told readers this was not the case, as 40 per cent of London's population was born overseas, and therefore 'foreign-born individuals are less likely to be charged with sexual offences than somebody born in the UK'.
But the rudimental error – as highlighted by Jamie Jenkins, the former head of labour stats at the ONS – was that they were only able to reach this summary by comparing apples with pears. If the data on charges and cautions is by nationality, which it was, then you cannot compare it to population size by country of birth, which is what Sky did.
Nearly half of London's migrant population now hold British passports, and would appear in crime figures as 'British nationals'. Sky's conclusion artificially inflated the crime rate of British nationals, and thereby downplayed the crime rate of foreign nationals.
Sky claimed its approach was based on advice received from the Office for National Statistics, the Home Office, and the Metropolitan Police. But the rug has now been pulled from under their feet. The Metropolitan Police came first – publicly admitting it had given 'incorrect' guidance to the broadcaster as the result of 'genuine human error'. A correction was reluctantly shunted onto the bottom of Sky's analysis.
A second quickly followed, as it transpired the ONS had given no advice to Sky on how it should conduct analysis of crime rates. A late night amendment to the article, removing references to analytical 'recommendations' received from the Home Office, completed the hat trick.
A sizeable chunk of voters believe that current immigration levels are impacting the safety of women and girls. Genuine fears are being voiced at protests across the country, as neighbourhoods push back against young men from culturally distant nations being housed next door. If certain media outlets do not reflect these views in their reporting, and continue to reject legitimate concerns, their spiral towards irrelevance will only accelerate.