Professor Ken Pease, former acting head of the Home Office's police research group, and Professor Graham Farrell of Loughborough University, estimated in 2007 that the survey was underreporting crime by about 3 million incidents per year due to its practice of arbitrarily capping the number of repeated incidents that could be reported in a given year at five. If true the error means that violent crime might actually stand at 4.4 million incidents per year, an 82% increase over the 2.4 million previously thought. Since the five crimes per person cap has been consistent since the BCS began this might not affect the long-term trends, however it takes little account of crimes such as domestic violence, figures for which would allegedly be 140% higher without the cap. The ONS responded by explaining that because victims of ongoing abuse often are unable to recall the detail and number of specific incidents it makes sense to record this crime as a series of repeat victimisation. These are only recorded in this manner if the incidents described were ‘the same thing, done under the same circumstances and probably by the same people’.