STEPHEN LEWIS reports on new league tables which reveal North Yorkshire is one of the most crime-free areas in the country.

FOR anyone worried about violent crime, yesterday's headlines in the Evening Press made depressing reading. A 42-year-old man visiting York for a night out with friends was still fighting for his life today after a bloody assault; and a pregnant woman kicked in the stomach in Whitby led to a fight between locals and bikers.

Reading such headlines it is easy to leap to the conclusion that society really is becoming ever more violent. Even official Home Office figures - which revealed that violent crime jumped by 22 per cent across the country in 2002/03 - seem to support that view.

The reality, however, may not be quite so bleak.

Experts at York University have been applying the kind of rigorous statistical methods normally used for calculating things such as the retail price index to analysing crime figures.

They have come up with an "index" of their own - the York Index Of Public Safety - which, for the first time thanks to changes in the way crime figures are counted, can be used to directly compare different areas of the country, police force by police force, to see just how likely you are to become a victim of crime.

And what it reveals is that North Yorkshire is one of the safest parts of England and Wales.

The county comes fourth in a "public safety league table" after wealthy Hertfordshire, Surrey and Wiltshire.

The worst places to live, if you want to avoid becoming a victim of crime, are Staffordshire, Greater Manchester, the West Midlands, London and - right at the bottom - Gwent in Wales.

The table also breaks down each police authority area, pinpointing crime "hotspots" in each. In North Yorkshire, not surprisingly, rural Hambleton and Ryedale are the safest places to live, while Scarborough and York top the list of places where you are most likely to be a victim of crime.

But even so, insists Professor Roger Bowles of York University's Centre for Criminal Justice, Economics and Psychology, compared with other parts of the country nationwide, York and Scarborough do comparatively well, coming out somewhere in the middle.

The point of the "public safety index" is to give ordinary people the chance to find out just how safe the area they live in is, says Prof Bowles.

The York team has used published police crime figures, and then applied a "multiplier" to calculate the level of real, rather than recorded, crime.

That's important, says Prof Bowles, because estimates are that only one in six crimes of violence, for example, is ever reported to the police. "Crimes of violence against the person are predominantly fights and things outside pubs," he says. "The reason why many of them don't get recorded is because there are two people who are committing crime against each other."

The resulting figures are then used to allocate each police region a score out of 100 for each of the six major categories of crime - violence, sex crime, robbery, burglary, car theft and theft from a parked car - plus an overall score, the Index of Public Safety.

The higher the score, says Prof Bowles, the safer the area.

If, for example, you live in an area with a violent crime index of 90, it means nine out of ten households in that area can expect that no one living in that household will be a victim of any form of violent crime in the next 12 months. If the area in which you live has a violent crime index of 80, however, only eight out of ten households can expect to be free of violent crime in that period.

The league tables have been published on the Internet, so anyone can log on to check out an area - useful, for example, if you are planning to move home and want an idea of whether a new area is crime-free or a crime hotspot.

The tables can't, at least yet, be used to compare this year with previous years because, until now, different police forces used different ways of counting crime.

But they can be used in the on-going debate about allocation of police resources.

"One can look across the country and see a big variation in safety levels," says Prof Bowless. "I suppose the natural question is whether as a society we would want to deliver more resources where safety levels are low."

Be careful before you wish for that, however. It may mean York and Scarborough getting a bigger share of the North Yorkshire police pot - but it may also mean North Yorkshire as a whole losing out to London or Gwent.

Check out how your own area shapes up by logging on to www-users.york.ac.uk/rab12/yips.htm

Updated: 10:17 Tuesday, July 22, 2003