Police officers are failing to record rapes and child sex abuse offences in an attempt to improve performance figures, MPs have been told.
Officers use techniques such as "cuffing", "nodding", "skewing" and "stitching" to make figures look better, the House of Commons Public Administration Committee has heard.
One serving officer told MPs rapes and child sex abuse offences were being recorded as "crime-related incidents" or "no crimes".
He said he estimated rapes and serious sexual offences were being under-recorded by around 25% because of the manipulation of figures.
Metropolitan Police constable James Patrick - who is currently awaiting disciplinary proceedings - said he became concerned after joining the force in 2009 and finding robberies being logged as "theft snatch" in order to get them "off the books".
He said: "The extent of this in the borough I was initially in was large. They were showing in some reports... a 400% increase in street robberies. If you looked at the same reports a couple of days later, robberies would be static, but theft snatch would have increased by a large amount."
The committee chairman, Bernard Jenkin said he was "shocked that apparently such manipulation of police statistics could possibly happen on such a wide scale and become so institutionally prevalent".
Bernard Jenkin said massaging figures was 'institutionally prevalent' Former West Midlands chief inspector Dr Rodger Patrick - no relation to the constable - drew the committee's attention to a number of practices he said were commonly employed to improve crime statistics.
The first was "cuffing" crimes to make sure they did not appear in figures. To do this police officers would describe multiple incidents as a single crime, record thefts as lost property or simply decide they did not believe complainants.
Another technique was "nodding", where an offender might admit a number of offences in return for inducements such as being charged for less serious offences which would result in a reduced sentence. Dr Patrick said: "Sometimes inducements in the form or sex, alcohol or access to meals are offered."
He described "skewing" as where forces put resources into those areas measured by performance indicators. He gave the example that to reduce burglary, forces might put resources into burglaries at the "cost of investigating something like rape or child protection".
Another practice was "stitching" where suspects were offered cautions when there was not enough evidence to convict them of a crime or recording that an informal warning had been dealt out without the offender ever having been informed of it.
Mr Jenkin said: "This is a really savage thing to say, that we can't trust the leadership of our constabularies to measure their own performance. This is what we pay our Chief Constables to do."
The Metropolitan Police said: "The Metropolitan Police Service is committed to ensuring crimes are accurately recorded and has put in place robust processes to ensure crimes are neither over- nor under-recorded."
Kent Police Deputy Chief Constable Alan Pughsley insisted that, despite a damning report into the way his force recorded crime statistics, mis-recorded offences were often "honest mistakes".
Earlier this year a watchdog warned that Kent Police were more interested in chasing targets than helping victims after it found one in 10 crimes were under-recorded.
Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) concluded that an institutional bias existed in the force towards chasing numerical targets for solving crime and that led to some officers focusing on categories of crime.
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