Sharp increase in recorded crimes
After falling for 20 years, violent offences have risen sharply. The Tories’ reputation is now at stake
Recorded crime has risen by 14 per cent, the largest increase since records began, as robbery, burglary and violent crime all went up, according to official police figures. The statistics, published yesterday by the Office for National Statistics, show reported crime has risen sharply over the past year to 5.3million incidents. Almost every category of crime rose, according to the figures collected by the 44 forces around England and Wales, with drug offences the only area to show a fall.
RECORDED crime has risen by 14 per cent, the largest increase since records began, as robbery, burglary and violent crime all went up, according to official police figures.
The statistics, published yesterday by the Office for National Statistics, show reported crime has risen sharply over the past year to 5.3million incidents. Almost every category of crime rose, according to the figures collected by the 44 forces around England and Wales, with drug offences the only area to show a fall.
The figures follow warnings that funding cuts have forced some areas to stop attending so-called low-level crime such as burglaries and shoplifting because they do not have enough money or officers to do so.
Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, Superintendent Lee Pache of Lincolnshire Police said the force was considering only attending shop robberies if the suspect was still on the scene.
The ONS also published the Crime Survey for England and Wales yesterday, which showed a 10 per cent fall in crime in a direct contradiction to the official police figures.
Experts said the survey, compiled by interviewing members of the public on their experience of crime, was a more accurate picture in some areas, but concluded that a rise in robbery and burglary shown in police figures accurately reflected what was happening on the ground.
ONS statistician Mark Bangs said: “These latest figures indicate that levels of crime have continued to fall compared with the previous year, but this picture varied across different types of crime and not all offence types showed falls. While overall levels of violent crime were not increasing, there is evidence of rises having occurred in some of the low incidence but more harmful categories such as knife and gun crime.”
The recorded crime figures show that robbery went up by 29 per cent last year, vehicle-related theft went up 18 per cent and burglary eight per cent.
Although the figures show a much steeper rise in domestic burglary, the ONS said this was due to a change in the way incidents were recorded by police, which now includes robberies from sheds as well as properties.
Shoplifting, bicycle theft and muggings also went up across the country, while crimes involving cars and vans – including break-ins – rose too.
Yvette Cooper, chairman of the Home Affairs select committee, said ministers could not ignore the pressure police forces face to tackle the rise in crime.
She said: “These figures continue to show that crime is changing. The crime survey notes that the fraud and computer misuse are now the most prevalent crime covered by the survey. Yet evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee shows the police are investigating only a very small minority of these offences.”
Knife crime or incidents involving blades or other sharp objects rose by 21 per cent last year to 37,443 offences overall – the highest tally since 2011. Gun crime also went up by a fifth year on year, to 6,694 recorded offences.
Afew years ago, Theresa May set out to make a hard-hitting speech about how too many lawabiding black men were being stopped and searched by the police. Her officials got to work on it, but soon hit a problem: the only in-depth study showed that, if anything, white men were the ones being singled out. There was no evidence to suggest any kind of racial discrimination.
It was all a bit embarrassing, so reference to this study was removed from the draft of the speech – and the then home secretary went ahead anyway with her spirited j’accuse. Black men, she said, are up to seven times more likely to be stopped and searched. It cannot continue.
Politically, the speech was a great success. It was a potent charge, and it helped to establish Mrs May as a reformer with a social conscience. Her figure was technically correct: when compared with the general population, young black men are far more likely to be searched. It’s just that if you look at those on the streets of an evening (as the Home Office had done), the bias vanishes.
Not that the police dared point this out: they heard and obeyed. The number of stop-and-searches conducted by police more than halved, but this raised an awkward question: what effect would this have on knife crime?
The latest figures arrived yesterday. Recorded knife crime rose 21 per cent in the last year across England; the number of murders in London rose 19 per cent. Cressida Dick, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, has admitted that her officers might have become fearful of stopping and searching suspects. They wonder whether, if accused of racism, they’d be supported by their bosses. This is just one part of a strange overall picture: after falling for almost 20 years, crime – in almost all its recorded forms – is rising again.
This comes at an inconvenient time for the Conservatives. Until now, they’d been able to argue that there was a kind of domestic peace dividend: fewer crimes meant fewer police were needed and the Home Office budget fell by about a fifth. As home secretary, Mrs May seemed to achieve the impossible. Every year, she cut the police budget and police numbers. Every year, they complained. Every year, crime fell.
It seemed rather miraculous, but those of us who applauded Mrs May as she wielded the axe so elegantly have reason to pause for thought now. Violent crime is up by 20 per cent over the last year; robbery by 29 per cent. To be sure, improvements in police records will account for much of the rise – but not all of it. The Government is always pointing to the Crime Survey, which still shows things improving, but it’s becoming far harder to claim that police figures are a freakish statistical blip.
And anyway, the Crime Survey asks people about their own experience – so it will never properly pick up the rare but serious crimes (like knife attacks) that seem on the rise.
Peter Neyroud, a former chief constable now at Cambridge University, has been working with officers in 40 forces to develop a “harm index”. The aim is to judge crime by the harm done, rather than adding up all kinds of offences to make a misleading total. He says this index, now being used by forces to help focus on the worst crimes, has been rising fairly steeply for the past two years in many forces.
Crime always changes. Burgling houses is risky, far easier to steal a moped and ride around town snatching expensive smartphones wielded by unsuspecting pedestrians. I encountered a couple of these thieves when standing on a curb a few weeks ago. They pulled up next to me, as if to park, then grabbed my phone from my hand. As I watched them speed off, I thought what a perfect crime it was. The helmets made them unidentifiable and it was over in seconds. Some phones cost £1,000 and there are plenty of idiots like me who wander around with them, having not yet adjusted to the new reality of street crime.
The chances of any thief bumping into a policeman are lower than at any time for decades. We have lost one in seven of our frontline police over the past eight years and now have fewer – as a share of population – than any country outside of Scandinavia.
The Conservatives have been working on the assumption that there is no link between police numbers and crime levels – if there was, they ask, then why did Mrs May preside over such a collapse in crime? Plenty of criminologists have drawn similar conclusions: the world over, it’s hard to link the fall in crime after the mid-1990s to police resources, or lack thereof.
But now there are harder questions to answer. How sure can we be that there is no link between criminality and police numbers?
It could well be that police levels are as low as they can realistically go without making the streets more dangerous. Especially with far more officers now dealing with timeabsorbing offences like cyber-crime and historic sex offences. The theory is a simple one: fewer officers on the street means less visibility, which emboldens the bad guys. At some point, a tipping point might be reached.
As Home Secretary, Amber Rudd has carried on her predecessor’s agenda: talking tough, planning more cuts and telling the police not to moan about them. This worked for Mrs May at the start of the decade, but what if the cuts have gone too far?
Mrs Rudd can certainly point to a drop in surveyed crime, and say that it tells the real story. But what if it doesn’t? After a while, voters do tend to notice.
Now and again, our politicians talk about “evidence-based policymaking” where facts, not ideology, shape the agenda. But Tories are beginning to look guilty of policy-based evidencemaking: using whatever statistics suit them politically.
It was wrong of Mrs May to pretend that the police were singling out ethnic minorities for stop-and-search – and it would be wrong for Mrs Rudd to be in denial about rising crime now. The Conservative Party has always sold itself on stability and security. If it loses its claim to that, there might not be much left.