Finally, police show sense to beat burglars
IN WHAT is being trumpeted as a historic first, the police are now sending an officer to every burgled home.
This is a huge victory for common sense, the victims whose much-loved properties are ransacked – and the Daily Mail too.
Not until we exposed how crooks were breaking and entering people’s homes with virtual impunity did chief constables take decisive action to tackle this scourge.
It is truly appalling that for so long forces thought it acceptable to offer those whose homes were violated, and hard- earned possessions and irreplaceable mementoes stolen, no more than a perfunctory phone call and a crime number.
The question that remains, then, is: Why on earth has it taken so long for the police to do something so eminently sensible?
Some chief constables have previously blamed cuts in manpower. But this is less a problem of funding than policing priorities. Who decrees that an offensive tweet should take up more police time than a break-in?
equally, the same police who chose to be absent when a home was raided were startlingly present when it came to hollow virtue-signalling. Yet a police car daubed in rainbow colours is little use if it never makes its way to a life-ruining burglary.
So the fact that all burglary victims are now receiving a visit from a uniformed bobby is welcome. However, for all the good intentions, it will be pointless if it is little more than a tick-box exercise.
With national clear-up rates standing at a pitiful 3 per cent, it’s no wonder housebreakers currently feel emboldened.
Top brass say prosecution rates will soar, and they must – urgently. If officers turn up to the crime scene, it not only increases the chance of catching an intruder and gathering valuable evidence, it also reduces future offences and reassures victims.
The contract between state and citizens, where the latter rely on the former to uphold law and order, has been eroded.
If the public is to regain lost trust in the police, it must believe wholeheartedly that each crime reported will be investigated – properly and thoroughly.