This article reviews briefly the uses and abuses of seriousness surveys and then examines the crime seriousness ratings and rankings of representative samples of the police and from one Northern and one Southern police force area England and Wales. It concludes that there is high concordance (both among the and between police and public) on offences such as violence and theft by a police officer, but more disagreement on the rating of frauds, burglary, and victimless The police understate the absolute and relative seriousness of business fraud offences, probably because of their occupational culture. Few significant differences appear between offenders and non-offenders or between victims and non-victims. Finally, the policy implications are discussed. In Britain, as other Parliamentary democracies, public opinion— hypothetical or as measured by surveys—is frequently cited as a justification for criminal justice policies: by Sir Kenneth Newman as a rationale for devoting more police resources to street crime London (Home Office, 1983); by the Director of Public Prosecutions when blaming juror attitudes for the low prosecution rate of offences by the police (though see Williams, 1985, for a critique); by Freedom of Information advocates as a reason for not prosecuting those who leak Official Secrets in the (though a jury convicted Ms. Sarah Tisdall for leaking secrets to The Guardian)-, and by sentencers. Attempts to lead opinion via denunciatory sentences may be ineffectual (Walker and Marsh, 1984), but sentiments are given pride of place justifying longer sentences for violent offenders and vendors of illegal narcotics.1 Indeed, the Home Office Working Paper Criminal Justice (1984, p. 7) makes the retributive role of the quite explicit when it states: [Sjentences . . . must also reflect the public's view that crimes of violence are evil and deserve punishment . . . [T]he most serious offenders must expect to pay dearly for their crimes. When officials or interest groups wish to disobey vox populi, they make claims to special expertise or to the need to preserve The Law from political interference. There is seldom any attempt to make explicit the moral and/or intellectual basis for such professional autonomy. Rather, even