Police will give priority to crime victims who don’t speak English
NON-ENGLISH speakers will be given priority if they are victims of crime, Scotland Yard has said, as it warned that only “vulnerable” people should expect visits by officers in person.
Craig Mackey, Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, said budget cuts meant the police would have to “triage” victims of crime when deciding whether to send officers.
He said healthy, middle-aged people such as himself would be less likely to get visits than those who did not speak English as a first language, were elderly or had learning difficulties.
The intervention by Scotland Yard will be seen as an attempt to push the Government into abandoning a review into the police funding formula which forces fear could lead to significant cuts.
Mr Mackey’s comments were met with a furious response by the Conservatives. One minister accused him of “scaremongering” and “getting a shot in early” in an attempt to secure more police funding.
Mr Mackey said: “Increasingly, we will look at trying to assess people and crime on the sort of the threat, the harm, the risk, and people’s vulnerability. It’s feasible that if my neighbour is a vulnerable elderly person who has experienced a particular type of crime, that she gets a face-to-face service that I don’t get. So we triage things... we assess people’s vulnerability.” He said it could “manifest itself in a number of ways: people with learning difficulties, a whole range of things, some people for whom English isn’t a first language”.
His intervention, in an interview with the London Evening Standard, threatens to reignite the debate around policing that featured in the election campaign. The Tories denied strenuously last night that police funding had been cut. One minister said: “How can they argue that they haven’t got enough money? The spending review of 2015 protected police funding.”
The Home Office said that “every victim of crime” deserved a good service from the police “regardless of their circumstances” and said police funding had been protected in real terms.
Mr Mackey said the Met had “no alternative” but to reduce the number of officers because of a £400million drop in funding over the next five years.
He said burglary victims would “probably always get a service” but victims of vehicle crime and other lesser offences may not get a police visit unless the person affected was considered vulnerable. He insisted the 999 service was “absolutely not changing”.
Tim Loughton, a Tory MP who was a member of the home affairs select committee in the last parliament, said: “The seriousness and impact of a crime is not dependent on some politically correct wish list from the Metropolitan Police. They are pushing their own political agenda.”