In basket-case Britain, thieves run riot while woke police forces do nothing
ABurglary doesn’t seem to be of interest to senior officers today. They’d rather sign up to the latest in social justice dogma
Could it be that the oldfashioned basics of crime simply don’t strike the police as all that exciting any more?
n 11-year-old boy was recently called “shorty” by another boy on the street. As far as children’s taunting goes, this was fairly mild; further up the cruelty scale might merit some kind of disciplinary intervention from a parent, teacher or another allegedly responsible adult. What it almost certainly wouldn’t require is police action. Or at least it wouldn’t in the days before the world went mad.
Back in June, however, a Wiltshire police officer opened a “non-crime hate incident” file on the aggressor, also 11, for his jibe. Absurdly, the report could now appear in the kid’s criminalrecord checks for the next six years, hampering later employment opportunities and surely making him the sort with more, not less, time and inclination to bully others.
The police’s zest for “non-crime hate incidents” is well known, with some 10,000 of them logged per year. A non-crime hate incident – essentially a neat description of most of my interactions with my neighbour – is defined by the College of Policing as any incident where a crime has not been committed, but “where it is perceived by the reporting person or any other person that the incident was motivated by hostility or prejudice”.
This remit, of course, leads to absurdities like opening the file on the 11-year-old. But police have also developed a habit of arresting people for offensive tweets and memes.
Recent video footage showed a Hampshire man being arrested by officers for reposting an image of four “progress” pride flags arranged into the shape of a swastika to denote the authoritarianism of woke causes. The image is as absolutely offensive as it is stupid. But a matter for the boys and girls in blue? I doubt a great many people would think so.
Perhaps there would be more time and inclination to debate the finer points of this sort of policing if forces were not so utterly and patently failing to go after real crime. It’s not even that police are trying and failing to make Britain safer; they seem completely uninterested in making even the vaguest efforts to do so.
Andy Cooke, HM chief inspector of constabulary, last week released a report detailing “dire charge rates”, with fewer than one in 20 thefts (4.2 per cent) and one in 15 burglaries (6.6 per cent) resulting in a criminal being caught and charged. A Telegraph analysis of 32,000 neighbourhoods earlier this summer found that police had failed to solve a single burglary in nearly half the country in the past three years. The message in basket-case Britain now rings out loud and clear: if you want something, just steal it!
It’s certainly a consequence-free way to acquire stuff. Officers don’t seem to be even doing the basics, such as gathering CCTV evidence, conducting house-to-house inquiries, or keeping victims informed – if there is anything to inform them of, that is.
When I received a particularly nasty death threat from an Islamist back in 2007, the police were technologically hopeless, but at least made a vague effort to look into it, visiting the internet café from where the message had been sent (identified by the tech guys at the newspaper I was working for at the time, not the police). I prayed that I would never have any more persistent or serious reason to call on the police, who seemed well-meaning but utterly without resources or skills to cope cleverly or seriously with anything even remotely difficult.
Crime has got more complex in recent years, but the problem has turned out to be more basic. However sophisticated fraudsters and other attackers and trolls have become, many people are still grappling with basic infractions on their private property and the terrifying sense that there’s nothing they can do about it. More generally, there is the menace of an emboldened acquisitive criminal class that, depending on where it catches you, may or may not throw some disfiguring violence into the mix, knowing full well they’ll likely get off scott-free.
The taxpayer, under the cosh as the worst cost of living crisis in a generation bites hard, might well be scratching his or her head. How is it that despite HMRC grabbing increasingly large swathes of our earnings, we don’t seem to be able to expect any protection or succour whatsoever from the law, or any other public services for that matter?
Could it be that the old-fashioned basics of crime like burglary and robbery simply don’t strike the police as all that exciting any more? Could it be that senior offices think it’s more glamorous to focus on the nebulous goals of social justice?
In wokeland, there is certainly more virtue in showing the world that you are on the “inclusive” side of history than in methodically pursuing the man who stole Mrs Jones’s laptop and passport from her front room, or Mr Jones’s clarinet from his locked car.
There continue to be warnings that some police forces contain Rightwing extremists – bad apples that have been allowed to moulder therein. But institutionally, the British police has swung to the far-Left, and its energies have been directed accordingly, away from real crime and towards the chimeras of social justice. In May, the College of Policing released an energetic, emotional Race Action Plan in which it set out an agenda to become an “anti-racist” police “service” and to explain race disparities. Don’t be fooled by the pragmatic language: it was not a sensible and realistic plan to tackle the continued problem of racism within policing, but an ideological project laced with all the usual woke dogma.
So there is appetite for action: it’s just a shame that action is towards becoming a kind of Left-wing sociological think tank rather than making ordinary people, including ethnic minorities, feel safer.