Chasing for crime reports

We seem to spend an inordinate amount of time chasing people to make allegations and put on crime reports when they clearly don't want to, and I'm curious to know if other forces do it too.

Whenever I question this, the answer is that we have to follow the Home Office counting rules, which means that we have to officially record every crime we are made aware of and generate a crime number so that the government can accurately track crime statistics across the country.  I can see that this is necessary, but don't believe for a minute that it's accurate - different forces work in different ways, and anyway it's far too easy to massage the figures.

Don't assume that I mean the figures are massaged to make forces look good, or to make certain areas look safer than they are - the way my force works, I sometimes think that management are deliberately trying to make the place look worse than it is.  The street level crime maps at http://www.police.uk/ are quite fun for this - I live in a very quiet and safe area, and yet it comes up with about a hundred reports of anti social behaviour per month.  I suspect a lot of these are absolutely rubbish, locals complaining about kids making noise in the skate park and so on.

The really annoying ones for us in the control room are the jobs where someone has called something in, maybe made an appointment to see officers, then cancels the appointment and stops answering their phone.  We end up calling them back every couple of hours, leaving answering machine messages, sending officers to put calling cards through their doors...  Sometimes if a person drops off the radar there's a concern for their safety but for most of these cases it's quite clear that they've just changed their mind about reporting whatever it is that's happened and don't want to talk to us any more.  Often they were drunk at the time of the original call, and the sober mind realises that the matter's not worth pursuing.  I wish I didn't have to waste so much of my life chasing these people, but supervisors and closers rarely let me close an incident without a crime number on it.

It would be hilarious if a member of the public tried to get us done for harassment after turning their phone on and finding all the messages we've left...