Mr Oli Bird of London complained to the Press Complaints Commission that a blog posting on the Spectator’s website, published on 5 December 2009, contained inaccurate information in breach of Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Editors’ Code of Practice.
The complaint was upheld.
The piece under complaint was an entry on Rod Liddle’s regular blog for the Spectator’s website. It said that “the overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community”. The complainant said that was not the case and pointed to statistics produced by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), which showed that in the area covered by the Metropolitan police force, the majority of arrests for notifiable offences were of white people. In categories defined as ‘violence against the person’ and ‘sexual offences’, black people made up 32% of arrests.
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