Well, here is one creative of way of "lowering" the crime rate:

The Government is misleading the public on the true level of crime in Britain by instructing police forces not to record many offences, while simultaneously logging crimes in which nobody is convicted or even taken to court as "detected".

This week the Government will release its latest quarterly figures for recorded crime in England and Wales, the last such release before the general election. But regardless of whether they show an overall fall or rise, they will give a highly distorted picture....

In the last prime minister's questions before the election campaign began, Mr Blair boasted: "It's a well established fact that crime has been falling for years."

In February he said: "The important thing is crime is actually down, not up. However, that is no consolation if you are a victim of crime. There are also record numbers of police but people don't always see them out on the street."

... that's because they're spending most their time in the office, doing paperwork on the fake crime numbers they've been asked to generate...

The revelations on the "counting rules" put into stark relief the Government's claim that it has recently broadened the criteria by which crimes are logged, resulting in a rise in recorded incidents. In fact, under a sub-clause in the counting rules, the police are allowed to record only "one crime per person". In an incident where several crimes are committed by the same person against the same victim, only the most serious single crime is recorded.

An example given is that "a house is entered [burglary], the female occupant is raped [rape] and her car is stolen from the driveway [vehicle theft]". The statistics must overlook the burglary and car theft, the Government has ordered. The record should read only: "One crime of rape."

I'm sure she'll feel only one-third as victimized under these new rules.

In another get-out, police are also told to log multiple offences as only one crime if they are all reported at the same time.

Ten armed men run through the streets shooting dozens of people, and they are all reported at once? One crime!

The other matching problem with statist solutions -- besides that they generally work badly -- is that the government, one it has sufficient control, goes to great lengths to hide how badly it's actually doing, making it difficult to get reliable numbers on much of anything. Leftists, sadly, are often gullible enough to believe this is lack of information is bona fide evidence of perfection. See, for example, Michael Moore's depiction of Iraq as paradise in Fahrenheit 9/11.

You know, perhaps we in the US could learn something from this. We have a budget deficit problem, right? Why not just tack on a few extra zeros, and make the problem just... go away!