I retired from the police service in 2011, just late enough to experience the effects of austerity (The dirty secret behind Tory ‘crime week’: their policies ruined policing1 September). Historically, police officers had been allowed to work beyond their contracted 30 years, and many did so. However, due to the government’s policy of austerity, a police regulation was used to force out all those officers in my force who had completed their 30 years – the most experienced officers.
At the same time, a moratorium on recruitment was introduced. In addition to losing its most experienced police officers, the police service also lost a lot of its most experienced civilian support staff – analysts, scene-of-crime specialists, and police and community support officers.
Up to then, we had seen crime levels falling for several years and detection rates rising. Theresa May, then the home secretary, stood up at the Police Federation Conference around that time and rebuked everyone there for all sorts of miscarriages of justice, citing Stephen Lawrence (1993) and Hillsborough (1989), among others. She went on to scold the audience and to tell them they could do the job with far fewer resources.
Suella Braverman’s policy is harking back to “zero-tolerance policing”, a flawed strategy that was first introduced in New York by Rudy Giuliani. It has since been discredited and proved ineffective. No police force has the resources to investigate every crime, eg shoplifting, graffiti, burglary etc, because there are usually no lines of inquiry, or only flimsy ones. If they try to investigate every crime, they’ll end up neglecting the crimes deserving more attention.
In 1996, I was a shift inspector in south Birmingham, covering an area of approximately 20 dense urban square miles. On nights, we frequently had only six officers to respond to the most urgent calls that were reported during the nine-hour period. We were “firefighting”; we were not investigating crimes properly, nor preventing them. When Labour took office in 1997, we started to get the resources we desperately needed, and by 2010 recorded crime had fallen significantly and detection rates had risen. Unfortunately, we seem to have gone back to 1996.
Andy Murcott
Laguépie, France
• While I would not fundamentally disagree with Gaby Hinsliff’s article, why don’t we hear anything about crime reduction? For example, action by the government and insurance companies in the 1980s and 90s significantly reduced car theft. Where is the proactive work going on to make life harder to commit offences and reduce crime? In particular, why isn’t a risk of becoming involved in crime treated as a serious child protection issue, so we can break the school-to-prison treadmill?
Then there is the question of what do we do with the suspects we catch. There are massive backlogs in the criminal justice system as a direct result of government cuts. As one acquaintance who works with offenders pointed out, the sheer hassle of being taken to court is itself a significant deterrent.
Finally, what about how we use the police – and other law enforcement resources such as HMRC and Trading Standards – to greatest effect? The decision by the Metropolitan police that they would not be attending callouts for mental health issues unless specifically required is to be welcomed, for example.
John Boxall
Frome, Somerset
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