POLICE bosses have been rapped after a survey revealed they had failed to record correctly up to a fifth of crimes committed in the county.

The Audit Commission gave an overall performance level of 'red' - the lowest of three ratings - after inspecting Lancashire Police over a seven day period in February.

It found that, in a worst case scenario, 19 per cent of the incidents it checked were classed as non-crime when they should have been crime.

The inspectors found vehicle crime and burglary were being properly 'crimed' in Lancashire, but discovered some problems on other incidents, such as assaults, racism and domestic violence.

In some areas of East Lancashire up to 88 per cent of domestic violence incidents could have been wrongly classified as non-crimes.

Chief Constable Paul Stephenson has agreed an action plan of improvements and ordered an independent crime recording audit later this month to track the force's progress.

From April 2002, all forces were required to be consistent with the National Crime Recording Standard (NCRS) and the Audit Commission is currently carrying out inspections to check the new rules are being correctly applied.

Police stressed there was no evidence of unethical behaviour and believe they were honest mistakes by officers still coming to terms with the new system.

Over the seven days assessed there were 1,680 incidents, which the police had recorded into 849 crimes and 831 non-crimes.

But the inspectors judged that 1,167 should have been crimes as 318 were incorrectly classed as non-crimes. In the report they said: "This is a poor result".

Their decision was made on the basis of information left on the incident log by the police officers who had investigated the incidents.

The inspectors said, while it was a worst case scenario that all 318 should have been crimes, it was likely that with more information on the log, they would have agreed with the original decisions of police officers in more cases.

It is a stipulation of the NCRS that the logs must have sufficient detail to justify a non-crime decision.

Other identified problems included incidents for which the victim did not want to make a complaint being incorrectly recorded as non-crime.

And some cases were incorrectly classed as non-crime because the complainant could not be contacted.

A Police Authority report, which will be considered on June 3, said: "Albeit the audit did find areas for development, analysis has shown these were the product of inappropriate adherence to policy and lack of knowledge. The auditors did not find any evidence on unethical behaviour.

"The result of the audit was disappointing for the force because of the great efforts applied in this area over the previous two years.

"However, the constabulary responded robustly and promptly to the audit findings and agreed the action plan.

"The Chief Constable is keen to reassure the authority of the progress being made towards achieving the action plan. To this end, a further independent audit of crime recording will take place in May."

Percentage of incidents correctly classified as non-crime:

Eastern Division Pennine Division

Burglary 97 94

Criminal damage 82 86

Vehicle crime 100 97

Violent Crime 89 59

Domestic violence 33 12

Racist incidents 57 62

Disturbances 20 8

Overall 78 70