Lies, damn lies

OK, this is starting to piss me off now.

There are various stories in the local rag (The Echo) about how things are better/worse than last year, most of which completely ignore relevant factors such as weather and the economy, but this one annoys me the most...

Festive drink drive figures up - despite crackdown

Basically, the number of people arrested for drink-driving this christmas is higher than last year. The article goes on about how the police are disappointed that the figure is so high, despite a 'crackdown', whatever that means. Not once in the article does it mention that last christmas most of Hampshire was under about a foot of snow.

Yes, that's right - only those with very short memories would be surprised that the number of drink-drive arrests are up this year compared to last... last year there were considerably fewer cars on the roads due to harsh weather conditions, and probably fewer police cars around too, for the same reason. I bet if they were to report the number of arrests as a percentage of the total cars on the road, rather than an absolute figure, it'd be pretty constant year on year.