Police must focus on the public’s priorities
The frustrations felt by people over the failure of the police to investigate what many regard as serious crimes have been regularly reported in this newspaper. They include forces that only attend burglaries in evennumbered homes – assuming they bother to turn up at all. Car crime, shoplifting and vandalism are unlikely to be investigated.
Much more time is spent on domestic abuse, malicious communications and online fraud compared with theft and burglary. This is not to devalue the former, but burglary in particular traumatises and violates, yet few are ever solved. In some constabularies, up to half of reported offences are never looked into.
The upshot is that people lose faith in the police and do not report offences at all. This may look good on the crime statistics but is a disaster where trust in the forces of law and order is concerned.
As we report today, Matt Parr, HM Inspector of Constabulary, has found that charges were brought in just eight per cent of crimes recorded in England and Wales in the year to March 2019. “If you are the victim of a minor burglary or minor assault or car crime,” he says, “people have now got to the stage where their expectations are low and the police live down to those expectations because they simply don’t have the capacity to deal with it.”
He adds: “These levels of volume crime resolution are corrosive for the long-term relationship between the public and police.” It is even affecting the outcome of crimes that the police do investigate such as domestic abuse and sexual assault, with an increase in the proportion of victims who are no longer supporting prosecutions.
Mr Parr is right to call this “corrosive”. It is eating away at the contract between state and citizens, whereby the latter rely on the former to uphold law and order. If this is not happening, people will make their own arrangements. It is no surprise that private security guards are being hired to patrol streets the police have vacated.
We all know that the police are under pressures that tie up officers, though some constabularies appear to manage. But there has been a shift in priorities without any debate. Who decreed that an offensive tweet should take up more police time than a burglary? We are promised 20,000 extra officers. They must be used to investigate the crimes the public considers important.