Crime rates don’t tell the full story
Labour’s Gareth Derrick believes falling crime rates hide a darker secret
POLICE forces all across the UK have been starved of police officers over most of the past decade, with an average force reduction of around 14%. But it has taken a negligently late recognition that crime is changing and that violent crime had increased rapidly to comprehensively discredit claims by the former Conservative Home Secretary Theresa May that rises in crime were not an inevitable consequence of reductions in police officers and funding cuts.
At the September meeting of Devon and Cornwall’s Police and Crime Panel, Commissioner Alison Hernandez headlined with the recent Crime Survey report that shows Devon and Cornwall with the lowest crime rate in England and Wales, describing how the traditional acquisitive crimes of burglary and theft are much diminished.
Much of this is really good news, but I had to remind the Commissioner that her own reports show that violent crime has grown by around 90% in the past four years. It is now the single biggest category of crime here and is the most significant threat to safety in our communities.
The Prime Minister’s vote-grabbing pledge to bring in 20,000 additional police officers looks nowhere near likely to replace the 500 or so officers and Police Community Support Officers that have been lost in Devon and Cornwall. Nor can this grand gesture (amounting to just 140 officers so far) address the fact that the rest of the criminal justice system suffered even deeper cuts than the police. The CPS had its budget slashed by a third. Prison officers were cut massively too, along with magistrates and court houses, and let’s not forget that the “privatised probation” experiment collapsed in failure. In a perverse twist, the challenges within the criminal justice system were relieved by the policing pressures that caused a drastic fall in the proportion of crimes resulting in a summons or other outcome. Halving to less than 8% since 2015, around 30,000 crimes are now unresolved here each year.
Increasingly, criminal suspects have been released under investigation, which often just pushes their case into the long grass, bringing fear and uncertainty to victims and allowing many of those released to simply commit further crime. The backlog at our courts was excessive, well before the Covid crisis made things much worse, a fact conceded by Commissioner Hernadez when she described a one-year delay before a court hearing in respect of a crime against a child as “abhorrent.”
Every additional police officer will help greatly in the long term, and if well targeted in a comprehensive approach to deliver greater prosecution of crime and broader crime prevention measures, crime rates should be pushed back. But there’s a serious risk that a surge in suspects being charged without a significantly better performing court system will lead only to further instances of justice denied for the victims, who suffer greatly by delays, as often do innocent suspects. Prisons too are hardly in better shape, with independent prison “watchdogs” reporting that too many jails are plagued by drugs, violence and appalling living conditions, even while prisoner numbers have been falling due to low prosecution rates. Assaults by prisoners on staff and their fellow inmates has more than doubled over the past five years.
Ministerial pledges to increase sentences for violent prisoners and terrorists must not be treated as vote-grabbers like Boris’s police surge, but come with serious longterm investment across the spectrum of our criminal justice system.
The Covid crisis has brought many new challenges to policing, but some welcome relief in crime volume that has allowed many police officers and community support officers to spend more time on the streets preventing crime.
Taking a positive approach based on education through to enforcement, they have performed strongly in the dynamic arena of questionable emergency legislation.
This crisis will end, and our police will now build in force strength and no doubt in time reestablish their full focus on the prevention and prosecution of the full spectrum of crime. Devon and Cornwall’s uniformed police and its civilian staff are working tirelessly to make sure that criminals get to meet the justice system. That job is hard enough, but it’s what happens when criminality meets justice that really worries me.
Gareth Derrick is the Labour Party Police and Crime Commissioner candidate for Devon and Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. Elections are due in May.
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