Third of London crimes investigated on the phone or internet, Met admits

MORE than a third of all crimes reported to police in London are now only being investigated online or over the phone, Scotland Yard revealed today.

The force said it was having to prioritise violence and other serious crimes over “volume” offences such as vehicle break-ins or criminal damage.

With fewer officers, police chiefs are relying on telephone investigation units to probe thousands of offences.

The figures show that out of 77,320 crimes reported to the Met in September, 28,838 (37 per cent) were dealt with by its Telephone and Digital Investigation Unit. Out of these just 4,638 were passed to an officer for a full inquiry.

Deputy Assistant Commissioner Mark Simmons, in charge of local policing, said: “I’d love to be in a position to investigate all crimes. But like any organisation we have got a budget to work to, we have demand to meet and have to make decisions about what we prioritise.

“We have to take a clear view about what is most important for Londoners in terms of safety.” He admitted there were crimes “where we are going to be doing less”, including criminal damage, vehicle crime and some low-level burglaries, such as garden shed break-ins.

He said nearly all these types of offences were now being investigated by the phone and online unit. “I would much rather our detectives were in the gangs unit investigating stabbings and doing interventions around gang members than dealing with some of the work which was possible to do when numbers were not so squeezed,” he added. The move has led to fears that fewer offences will be prosecuted, but Mr Simmons said the detection rate for criminal damage had not fallen: “There is a risk that people start to feel that we are not interested. That is not the case.

“We do an assessment of everyone who calls in, even if it is minor vehicle crime, with consideration of their vul- nerability. We cannot do everything in the way that we could before with the numbers we have and the way crime has changed. We have had to put more resources into cyber crime, for instance, which has grown exponentially.”

The phone and digital unit, launched last year, is part of a major restructuring as the Met struggles to meet budget cuts. It includes a contentious plan to scrap borough-based policing and replace it with 12 larger “multi-borough” command units. Conservative London Assembly member Susan Hall said the roll-out of the command units masked a cut in local officers. “This is an irresponsible move at a time when crime is going through the roof,” she added.

The Met has had £700 million of cuts in recent years and been warned it faces £300 million more. Boroughs have lost 1,131 officers in the two years to August. The specialist crime department, which investigates murder, gangs and organised crime, has lost 1,394. Only counterterrorism has seen a rise, of 371.

Mr Simmons claimed police had ringfenced neighbourhood teams with a minimum of two officers and a PCSO for each ward.