AT LAST, A POLICE CHIEF WHO WANTS TO CATCH CRIMINALS
Police should tackle burglary and violent crime rather than probe wolf whistling, a senior officer said yesterday.
Sara Thornton said that forces lacked the manpower to pursue every issue raised by campaigners. Instead of logging claims of misogyny they should ‘refocus on core policing’ – dealing with emergencies and investigating crime. ‘We do not have the resources to do everything that is desirable and deserving,’ said Miss Thornton, who is chairman of the National Police Chiefs Council.
‘I want us to solve more burglaries and bear down on violence before we make more records of incidents that are not crimes.’
Miss Thornton’s remarks come at a time of rocketing crime levels, which have been blamed both on
cuts to frontline officer numbers and on dubious priorities. The police chief spoke out as:
n The scale of organised crime plaguing the UK was laid bare in a report identifying around 4,600 serious and organised crime groups;
n The NCA ordered unprecedented action to make police forces investigate the UK’s worst ‘county lines’ hubs where gangs are selling drugs with impunity;
n Andy Cooke of National Police Chiefs Council said regional serious organised crime squads were in crisis and ministers were not listening to pleas for funding.
Miss Thornton, who was chief constable of Thames Valley, appeared to question the decision of the Home Office to investigate whether misogyny should be a hate crime.
She told the NPCC conference yesterday: ‘I’m not saying misogyny is not an issue. What I’m saying is, is recording it as a crime necessarily the best way to reduce that? What I’m questioning is whether making it into a criminal offence and thinking of it solely in terms of a criminal justice solution is that the best way to deal with what is essentially an issue about the way we all behave and treat each other?’
She added: ‘We are asked to provide more and more bespoke services that are all desirable – but the simple fact is there are too many desirable and deserving issues. For example, treating misogyny as a hate crime is a concern for some well-organised campaigning organisations.’
Yesterday criminal justice cam- paigners praised the senior officer. David Green of the thinktank Civitas said: ‘This is quite a remarkable turnaround.
‘At last police have a leader who is listening to the concerns of ordinary people worried about the rise in crime and does not want to criminalise people by inventing non-crimes or pursuing people who said something silly on Twitter.
‘She is the first senior police officer to admit that the pursuit of those historic crimes has been a criminal waste of money. She deserves well-earned praise.’
Nottinghamshire was the first force to start recording wolf whistles and sexist comments as misogynistic incidents.
But after a two- year pilot scheme derided by officers as a ‘ticky box’ exercise, the exercise led to just one conviction. Miss Thornton also called for the end of historic sex abuse investigations focusing on dead suspects.
She said: ‘Neither investigating gender-based hate incidents nor investigating allegations against those who have died are bad things to do necessarily – they just cannot be priorities for a service that is overstretched.’
Wiltshire Police spent £1.5million investigating sex abuse claims dating back decades against the late former prime minister Sir Edward Heath.
The latest police figures show that 849 out of the UK’s live 5,572 inquiries into historic child sexual claims – around one in six – are about dead suspects.
Miss Thornton said that police should be concentrating instead on paedophiles attacking children today. She spoke out days after a damning House of Commons home affairs committee report warned that ‘policing is at risk of becoming irrelevant to most people’ because stretched forces can no longer investigate many crimes.
In the three years to March, crime reported to the police soared 32 per cent to 5.5million incidents. But the number of charges or summons plunged 26 per cent – meaning 153,000 fewer suspects were taken to court.
Violent crime has almost doubled from 778,000 offences to 1.4million since 2015 – the highest figure since records began in April 2002. Overall, a crime is committed every six seconds.
Police chiefs point to a 19 per cent real-terms decrease in funding and a fall of more than 20,000 in officer numbers since 2010. But critics have raised concerns that police have got their priorities wrong after it was revealed that forces investigated 94,000 hate crimes in 2017-18, even though many were little more than grievances.
Sam Smethers, chief executive of women’s rights charity the Fawcett Society, said: ‘Covering the basics is important, but we note that the chair of the NPCC doesn’t say that attacks on people because of their race, religion, or disability should stop being treated as a hate crime.
‘All we are asking is that abuse and harassment aimed at women, because they are women, should be taken seriously for what it is – a hate crime.’
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