Police should not go soft on any type of crime
AS IF it were not hard enough already to make a living from running a shop, with online retailers eating into business, now comes the depressing news that the Metropolitan police has started screening out reports of shoplifting where the value of goods stolen is less than £50.
A freedom of information request revealed that the force’s Telephone and Digital Investigation Unit has adopted an “in-out” policy of automatically putting to one side any reports of offences which fail to reach this threshold.
In the year to August the policy led to 20,000 reported shoplifting cases, 15,600 bicycle thefts and 33,000 cases of criminal damage being dismissed as not worthy of further investigation.
Of course the police need to prioritise the many crimes which are reported to them. It would be absurd if they took a dozen officers away from investigating a fatal stabbing in order to pursue someone who had stolen a Mars bar. But to set a minimum figure below which they will not bother to investigate a theft is equally silly.
It is as if police had announced that their speed cameras were not going to be used to capture motorists doing less than 50mph in a 30mph zone – with the result that 50mph would become the de facto speed limit.
Now that shoplifters know the police are not going to be bothered with any theft of less than £50 it doesn’t take much to work out how they will react. They will make sure they check the label of the items they steal and make sure they don’t say more than £49.99.
GANGS of shoplifters – and there really are gangs of them – will still be able to lift thousands of pounds worth of goods in a day. But so long as they are careful not to exceed what they will treat as a £50 allowance in an one shop at any one time they can be pretty sure they will be safe.
The arbitrary limit ignores the effect of a crime on the victim. While the big retailers might be able to write off losses from shoplifting as just one more expense of running their business, for a neighbourhood post office stores £50 might be a fair slice of the weekly profits. It is going to become impossible to run such a business if there is no effective law enforcement.
Ignoring petty thefts is a false economy. It might free up police time in the short term but only at the cost of generating more crime to deal with in future. Criminals who are allowed to get away with their first, minor offence are quickly going to develop an appetite for stealing.
While shoplifting might sound a minor crime alongside such things as stabbing and rape, there is a lot of evidence to show that people who commit acquisitive crimes are especially likely to develop into serial offenders.
A Home Office report published in 2013 followed the careers of 220,000 people who had committed their first offence in 2001. Within nine years, 14 per cent of people who had committed robbery, burglary or vehicle theft as their first offence had developed into chronic offenders, with more than 15 crimes to their names.
The same was true of eight per cent of shoplifters. By contrast, only three per cent of sex offenders, violent criminals and drugs offenders had developed into serial criminals.
Obviously, those figures do not provide an argument for putting less effort into dealing with sex offences, or those involving drugs and violence but they are a reminder of why petty, acquisitive offences need to be treated seriously too.
A similar lesson came from the experience of zero-tolerance policing in New York in the 1990s. A city that had appeared to be verging on a state of lawlessness was brought back under control. Early this year New York’s murder rate fell below the level of London’s.
Zero-tolerance policing worked so well because New York’s police officers found that many of the minor criminals they thought they had apprehended actually turned out to be more serious criminals. These major criminals, they discovered, didn’t tend to bother paying for a subway ticket.
Yet in Britain policing seems to be going in the opposite direction. Police seem to be focusing ever more on a few areas of serious crime – as well as popular causes like historic sex offences involving celebrities and establishment figures – while minor crime is either ignored, treated as an insurance issue or, in the case of motoring and littering offences, farmed out to CCTV cameras.
W‘Ignoring petty theft is a false economy’
E ARE losing the link whereby police get to know criminals through minor offences and are then able to use their knowledge to solve more serious cases.
The Met’s policy on shoplifting is not the worst example of policing-by-algorithm. Action Fraud – an organisation set up by City Of London police but which now handles the reporting of fraud cases across the country – only automatically assigns a real, live police officer to a case when the sum involved is more than £100,000. It is astonishing that someone could lose their life savings and a police computer would not regard it as a priority.
I know police numbers have been cut and that many forces have been struggling with their workload. Even so, to turn a blind eye to acquisitive offences which fail to reach an arbitrary value threshold is inviting an explosion in crime.