The glass was smashed, the kitchen door swinging ominously ajar. Pushing nervously through it, I already knew what I was going to find: we’d been burgled. What I didn’t expect, given the bitter experiences relayed by friends, was for the police to do anything much about it.
So imagine the shock when a scenes of crime officer arrived to dust for fingerprints, or when the police kept calling to update us on their investigation. Our burglar was never caught, but at least it felt as if someone cared, and we might be the safer for it.
Burglary isn’t the worst of crimes, but it’s frightening nonetheless to think of someone prowling through your house, noting maybe what’s worth coming back for another time. So we were arguably lucky to be burgled back in 2010, when (or so I later heard) Thames Valley’s then chief constable, Sara Thornton, was pushing a policy of fully investigating even so-called minor crimes, including routine burglaries, to help boost public confidence.
Five years of budget cuts later, however, and Thornton – by then running the National Police Chiefs’ Council – was publicly calling for a serious national conversation about prioritising resources, warning that a 25% cut in funding at a time when reports of complex cases including sexual offences were also rocketing had led forces nationwide into difficult choices, including downgrading responses to crimes such as burglary. It would be another eight years before her successors at the NPCC announced, this June, that every force in England and Wales was once again now committed to attending every reported home break-in.
Yet the damage is arguably done, for all those who have felt brushed off in recent years by overstretched officers seemingly desperate to close a file. Only 3.9% of burglaries in England and Wales ended with someone being charged in the year to last March, and even that was a slight improvement on the year before. The charge rate for bike thefts – no small thing if a bike is your only mode of transport and this is the third one to get nicked – was just 1.5%. And, frustratingly for anyone using apps or trackers to follow their stolen laptop’s journey across town, the police won’t necessarily go and hammer on a door just because your valuables are apparently behind it.
Retailers, meanwhile, complain of police being too busy to respond to shoplifting, with Waitrose resorting recently to offering officers free in-store coffee. The speed with which police seemingly give up on routine theft cases – half are closed within 48 hours without identifying a suspect, according to one analysis – may sometimes have been the most efficient use of scarce resources, but it leaves victims feeling abandoned and furious, and even the Tory-supporting press on the warpath.
These everyday crimes may not be as serious as rape or murder, but because so many people experience them, they have a powerful impact on perceptions of policing. Last year the chief inspector of constabulary in England and Wales, Andy Cooke, warned in a report that poor responses to burglary and theft were undermining trust. Well, now we have Rishi Sunak’s attempt at restoring it: “crime week”, the latest in a series of themed weeks seemingly purpose-built to remind an angry nation of just how badly things are going across various public services, while Labour gleefully points out how much better things were when it was last in power.
The home secretary, Suella Braverman, duly announced powers to sack rogue officers – for which the Met’s chief commissioner has spent almost a year publicly pleading – and reheated a pledge that henceforth police will follow all reasonable leads even for supposedly minor crimes, such as studying CCTV, doorbell and dashcam footage or GPS data to find suspects or stolen property. What she didn’t explain was why something this basic isn’t happening already, because thereby hangs an awkward tale about what exactly successive Tory governments have been doing for 13 years.
The 20,000 policing posts cut under David Cameron’s austerity programme have now been restored, and a few thousand more added, helping ministers once again to promise the things we all used to take for granted. But the damage done isn’t so easily undone, a decade later. Cooke’s report identified not just resourcing issues but “basic errors” made by officers, raising questions about how well recent intakes of recruits are trained and supervised. Thornton’s successors at the NPCC, meanwhile, argue that while staffing levels are up 2.6% since 2010, recorded crime is up 25%, suggesting workloads have barely eased – especially as both public expectations and patterns of offending have changed over the decade. Even Louise Casey’s otherwise scathing recent review of the Met talked of frontline officers juggling such heavy caseloads that their burnout rates were higher than those of doctors during the pandemic.
Jess McDonald, a former Met detective turned author of an eye-popping book about her experience of being fast-tracked into frontline policing, described her job to me earlier this summer as like fighting fire with a water pistol: all her colleagues seemed to be swamped, leaving precious little time to show rookies what to do. After a long day drowning in reports of often distressingly violent crime, she’d get texts from friends indignant that nothing seemed to be happening about their stolen bike, and think to herself: you have no idea what it’s like out there. “Theft of a phone? Forget it, they don’t have time,” she told me. These are pressures mirrored across public services – plenty of teachers or nurses would recognise the demands from on high to keep somehow doing more with less – and none of this summer’s announcements have felt like an answer to them, which is why it’s hard to imagine anything profound changing as a result.
Crime week, in short, has been Sunak in a nutshell: diligent about tidying up the loose ends that more careless predecessors let slip, and still perfectly capable of understanding what Conservative voters want – but offering too little, and too late to make much difference now.
Having successfully distanced himself from the chaos caused by his two immediate predecessors, he still seemingly can’t bring himself to acknowledge the long-lasting effects of his former mentor David Cameron’s time in office, perhaps because to do so would be to unpick the big lie underpinning austerity: that Britain could somehow have the same public services for less money; that huge savings could come from merely eliminating waste and excess; and that, once the books were dutifully balanced, the country could simply return to the sunlit uplands. Instead, permanent damage has been done, and it doesn’t take a detective, for once, to work out whodunnit. All that’s left, when the election finally rolls around, is for the public to return its verdict.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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