Leading article: A distorted picture of crime in Britain

Sir Ian's choice of this example may say something about his sense of what the public reacts to and how the media handles it. For a senior policeman who has laid such emphasis on his public relations skills he has a remarkable capacity for sounding the wrong tone. Nor does he assist his mission to present a new, multicultural face for the police by trying to envelop the media in the charge of "institutional racism" so specifically laid at the Met's door by the Stephen Lawrence inquiry.

Yet Sir Ian's irresistible urge to the own goal should not divert attention from the force of his underlying argument as he put it to the Metropolitan Police Authority on Thursday. The press, he asserted, instinctively played up crime involving white victims at the expense of the persistent and in some ways worse crimes of violence against innocent blacks. It is easy to respond, as some newspapers have, by quoting the cases of Stephen Lawrence, Damilola Taylor, Anthony Walker and others. Such high-profile cases are the exceptions that prove the rule. Taken overall, if you read the press or watch television your view of crime in Britain would be distorted, suggesting as it does that the worst of violence was committed against whites and the least of it against blacks - the reverse of the truth.

Some of this is simply the media's sense of what concerns the public, the majority of whom are white and who do fear violent crime excessively. A good deal of it also stems from class rather than racial bias. The middle-class victim of a violent burglar gets greater coverage than a poor victim of a mugging whatever his race. But there is a real distortion here which the media should try to rectify. Sir Ian, who is making considerable efforts to reverse the bias within his forces, has a right to ask the media to look into its own practices as it abuses the Met for its actions.