Crackdown on pet crime sends a vital message to all crooks
THE death last week in woodland near Kent of Julia James, a police community support officer, seemed initially to mystify the police. But they are now, it seems, working on a theory that a series of “dognappings” in the area might provide a clue.
If that does turn out to have a connection to her killing it would introduce a new and even more devastating dimension to a crime that has soared over the past year of lockdown.
It’s hardly surprising that many of us have bought a pet for company – and that pet has often been a dog. Between March and September last year, 2.2 million people welcomed a dog into their family. That huge increase in demand has led to a corresponding increase in their price – with prices doubling, trebling or even quadrupling depending on which research you believe.
That has made dogs even more valuable to thieves and the number being stolen has risen dramatically. There are no overall official figures available but last year 2,438 dogs were reported as stolen, according to figures from 37 of the 43 police forces in England and Wales. That is 20 per cent higher than in 2019, when there were 2,026 reported thefts. The actual figures are likely to be far higher as not all stolen dogs are reported.
ANYONE with a pet will understand just how painful a crime this is. Suddenly, a beloved member of the family is gone. It is deeply traumatic. So it is quite right that the Government has said it will push a “ruthless” crackdown on dognapping, with Boris Johnson revealing at the weekend that the Lord Chancellor has set up a dedicated Pet Theft taskforce to ensure that “the criminal justice system is dealing properly with anyone who is so malicious as to steal a dog”.
But it’s not just the pain it causes that makes it important that dognapping is tackled by the police. All the evidence shows that when the police allow these types of crimes to flourish, it has a damaging impact on crime levels generally.
This is what is known as the Broken Windows theory, after an article written by two US academics. They started off looking at forces’ penchant for driving around in patrol cars, rather than walking on the beat, and showed that the police simply missed much low-level crime. As the academics showed, “having officers walk beats did in fact make their neighbourhoods safer”.
More fundamentally, they showed how “small things matter in a community and if nothing is done about them they can lead to worse things”. They used a metaphor: “Just as a broken window left untended in a building is a sign that nobody cares, leading typically to more broken windows, more damage – so disorderly conditions and behaviours left untended in a community are signs that nobody cares and lead to fear of crime, more serious crime and urban decay.”
Astonishingly, this rather obvious insight is still ignored by many police forces, which leads to the vicious cycle in which crime escalates and the police lose the confidence of the public.
Figures published yesterday show one particular example of this. The figures show that the police have not even identified a suspect for nearly one million burglaries between 2015 and March 2020 – let alone brought anyone to trial. In other words, out of the 964,197 domestic burglary investigations in that period, 82.3 per cent achieved absolutely nothing. The criminals got away with it.
There are many factors behind this but one of the most
important is the police’s failure to tackle other so-called “lowlevel” crime. Why are there so many burglaries? Because the message is sent out to criminals that they can get away with it.
Take knife crime. In 2019, the police logged a record 45,627 offences involving knives or sharp instruments. Just 7.1 per cent resulted in a charge or a summons.
WIDESPREAD use of cautions is a cancer at the heart of our criminal justice system, with the police behaving as if they deal with the problem, when they do the exact opposite.
The Government boasts that it is recruiting an extra 20,000 police officers as part of nearly £1billion more in funding. That is important but it’s no use if police spend all day driving around in patrol cars and then hand out a caution when they do find a criminal.They need to be out on the beat, and crucially, they need to be empowered to tackle crime.
That’s why it’s good that the Government is pushing the need to tackle dognapping. Not only does it matter in its own right – it also sends the message that criminals will pay the price.
‘Police need to be out on the beat and empowered to tackle crime’