Losing faith in police

In the latest display of institutional neglect, we can now report that at least eight police forces have stopped pursuing fuel thefts from petrol stations – otherwise known as “bilkings” – in which a motorist drives away without paying after filling their tank. Yes, sometimes this is down to someone innocently forgetting to pay, but overwhelmingly it is deliberate and remains a crime, and the whole point of the police is to enforce the law. If they do not, their inaction will send the message that thieves can get away with it, leaving petrol stations exposed to miscreants. That is a clear failure of duty.

Police forces complain that they have to deal with new categories of online crimes at the same time as their funding has been cut, but there’s no escaping the damaging cultural change that has also occurred at the top of the ranks. There appears to be a belief that traditional forms of burglary and theft are really second order issues, that they no longer matter as much. In addition to that, modern policing has dramatically downgraded visibility – and not bothering to attend the scene of a crime would be an extreme version of this. There was a time when there were fewer officers per capita but they patrolled the streets and were highly visible in the community. This model of policing didn’t just catalogue crime: it helped prevent it.

The police have got to take every crime seriously, on the principle that enforcing the little things deters worse from happening down the line. The message must be simple, which is that all crime is wrong and comes with consequences. The alternative is a fraying of faith in the police: the innocent won’t trust them, the guilty won’t fear them.