Why did you ring 999? We really don’t care about burglaries any more...
TWO major – and increasingly ridiculous – TV police dramas, first Broadchurch and now Line Of Duty, focus on sex offences. They don’t seem to be interested in any other crimes, and these don’t seem to happen anywhere near the officers involved. You’d think the police have entirely given up bothering with what we used to think of as normal crime.
And now it turns out that this is very nearly what has happened. As well as ignoring great numbers of crimes, so they never even appear in the figures, the police have begun ignoring many of the crimes that they have recorded.
Last year Greater Manchester Police did not investigate 57 per cent of domestic burglary reports. London’s ultra-politically correct Metropolitan Police dropped 49 per cent of burglary cases after ‘preliminary review’. The Greater Manchester ‘service’ admitted it had ‘screened out’ 111,445 crimes, 45 per cent of the total reported last year. Criminal damage, shoplifting and arson cases were also left uninvestigated in large numbers. Likewise, one in three ‘public order’ offences, the sort that can make life an utter misery, was dropped.
Nationally, Freedom of Information requests have found that just five per cent of the 2.1 million burglaries, yes 2.1 million, reported in Britain over the past six years have resulted in a suspect being charged. I wonder how many of those were convicted, and what then happened to them (not much has to be the best guess). No wonder many people no longer bother to report crime.
Perhaps we could have a police drama about an old-fashioned copper who tries to serve the people of his area by seeking to prevent crime from happening. Except that it would last only one episode before he was sent off on a diversity training course.