Some critics of Left Realism have seen the promotion of local crime surveys as further evidence of ‘a return to positivism relying uncritically on victim surveys and reasserting the primacy of the police and justice system’ (Worrall 2007). Likewise Walklate (2007), for example, criticised the focus on local crime surveys by Left realists as confusing the reality of crime in a particular locality with the sum total of individual opinions revealed in the survey data.