The UK home secretary has insisted the police have the resources required to meet a pledge to follow all “reasonable lines of inquiry” in a fresh crackdown on crime.
Police forces in England and Wales have agreed to follow all evidence such as footage from CCTV, doorbells and dashcams, as well as phone data, to find suspect or stolen property.
Launching the policy in a round of media interviews, Suella Braverman said: “Police are committing to following every reasonable line of inquiry. There’s no such thing as minor crime.”
Challenged on how police could achieve this aim at a time when they are so over-stretched, Braverman told BBC Breakfast: “The police have a record number of men and women working on their frontline than ever before. So they have the numbers of people who are there.”
She added: “This is about ensuring that those resources are properly diverted to what I call common sense policing, back-to-basics policing, that they don’t dismiss certain crimes as unimportant or minor. It’s about ensuring that they are freed up from doing other time-consuming tasks.”
Asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme about a 20,000 decrease in the number of officers from 2010 to 2018, Braverman pointed out that the government had recently met its “milestone” target of replacing these officers.
She also said the government was reducing the burdens on police by insisting health professionals dealt with all calls related to mental health, a policy she said could save 1m hours of police time.
The new commitment on following all reasonable lines of inquiry, agreed by the Home Office, the National Police Chiefs’ Council and College of Policing, comes as part of a crime week of policy announcements planned by the government.
Labour described it as a “staggering admission of 13 years of Tory failure on policing and crime”.
The shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, said: “Pursuing reasonable leads like CCTV is what the police should be doing, but – because of abysmal Tory management – over 90% of crimes go unsolved, the proportion of crimes prosecuted has dropped by more than two-thirds and more criminals are getting off.
“Instead of supporting our brave officers to catch criminals, the Conservative government have cut neighbourhood policing by nearly 10,000, left a 7,000 shortage of detectives and allowed the growth of appalling delays between the police, CPS and courts.
“The fact that the Tories are boasting about asking the police to do the basic minimum that victims of crime should rightly expect, whilst failing to tackle the underlying problems they have caused, shows how badly they have failed over the last 13 years.
“Labour will put 13,000 extra neighbourhood police and PCSOs [police community support officers] back on our streets, increase detective recruitment and ensure more crimes are charged to keep our streets safe.”
