What's Going On In Great Britain?

Be careful with the UK stats, they mix surveys and reports. Police reported crime is most analogous to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports. The UK surveys cross to DOJ survey stats.
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/html/cjusew96/crvs.htm

Thanks Jim. When I get a moment I'll try and find the DOJ survey stats for 1996 and beyond, too.

Yes, Ch5 is very interesting:

"In contrast, police recorded violent crime figures show substantial increases in recent years, almost double the number in 1998/99 following changes to the counting rules in that year requiring the police to record crimes of common assault and harassment for the first time. Factoring out the effect of the 1998 counting rule changes, recorded violent crime increased by a further 95 per cent between 1995 and 2003/04. About a quarter of this is due to increases in recording of violent crime following the introduction of the National Crime Recording Standard (NCRS) in April 2002. The remainder of the increase is likely to be largely due to increased reporting of violent crime by the public, increased police activity and other improvements in recording by the police in previous years (Figure 5.2, Table 2.04)."

Translation: "Violent crime has not doubled -- our police are just getting better at recording it."

Right.

Indeed.