They never did catch the scumbags who broke into my car a few years back.
I lost hope when I walked half a mile to find the nearest police station, only to discover it was closed.
Eventually you just give up and get on with it. The aggravation, the bureaucracy, the deep sighs when you call up to get an update, the waiting on hold, the going through it all for the umpteenth time because the person dealing with it is on leave, the feeling that once they hang up they’ll forget they’d ever spoken to you. It all stops being worth it.
It is easy, then, to see why, out of 268,000 burglaries between April 2020 and April last year, just 14,000 were solved while – wait for it – 243,000 cases were abandoned, according to official statistics.
Easy, too, to understand why police solved just 5% of burglaries last year compared with nearly 9.4% six years ago.
While Home Secretary Priti Patel is playing to her rabid gallery, enforcing her hostile environment and pinching metaphorical life rafts away from human beings in the English Channel, criminals are being allowed a free pass. Hyperbole? Not really. Home Office statistics suggest the number of crimes solved across the board has plunged to a record low with just one in 17 resulting in a charge.
Only one in 20 violent crimes ended in a charge in 2020-21. Just one in 77 rapes ended in a charge. Knife crime remains at an all-time high.
Never mind the Covid lies, misinformation and double standards, Sue Gray, after having her report redacted, should channel her frustrations into a forensic examination of our shambolic Home Secretary’s track record.
Because the bottom line is that none of us are safe with such shocking statistics. All of us are at risk from the complacency that has convinced our Cabinet ministers they can fall asleep on their watch and get away with it.
Patel urged the public to tell police if their neighbours or friends had guests over during lockdown. Yet was not so vocal when evidence of her boss’s own rule-breaking came to light.
Maybe she’s taken her eye off the ball in terms of fighting crime because she’s been working so hard to cover his back – and hers.
