Britain’s police have got their priorities tangled, and they are less effective than they should be as a result. A report this week from the chief inspector of constabulary for England and Wales, Andy Cooke, gives a shocking account of one of the worst examples, although it is far from the only one. Nearly a million burglaries and thefts are reported by the public each year. But in 2021, the police in England and Wales charged a suspect in just 6.6% of robberies and 4.2% of thefts.
These charging rates are indeed “dire”, as Mr Cooke, a former chief constable of Merseyside, rightly calls them. But they are worse than that. Levels of police failure of this kind do not reflect fairly on the hard and principled work of many good officers, but they raise serious questions about the professional competence of the force. They help to sap the public’s confidence in police effectiveness, and they weaken respect for the police. For a service that has always seen itself as part of the communities it polices, not as an external imposition on those communities, this is particularly devastating.
There is plenty of blame to go round. As Mr Cooke points out, the Cameron government’s austerity measures got rid of more than 22,000 police officers between 2010 and 2017, nearly 13% of the UK total. Cuts of that level lead umbilically to cuts in service. Though police numbers are edging up again, there are still 12,000 fewer police in this country than there were 12 years ago. Increased demands on them in addition to property crime, in the form of things like crime prevention, major investigations, domestic violence, sexual offences, traffic, public order and public sector equality strategies, all take up time and resources too.
Yet this in no way excuses some of the things that Mr Cooke has found. The basic failings on which he reports are often staggering. They include failure to consult CCTV evidence before deciding whether to pursue cases, failure to warn victims not to interfere with crime sites that they have reported, failure to conduct house-to-house inquiries, failure to give crime-prevention advice, and failure to keep victims informed about progress (or, all too often, the lack of it).
Mr Cooke rightly calls these “basic errors”. But they are basic errors in an essentially responsive and flawed view of policing. Responding to incidents and reports, too often in cars and sometimes unnecessarily mob-handed, has rarely been a good approach to policing. Good policing, by contrast, requires a proactive, community-based approach as well as an ability to respond effectively. On the basis of what Mr Cooke says, Britain’s police are spending their time doing the wrong things, or are not very good at their job, or both. If this is to change, political will is needed. The inquiry into policing priorities by the Commons home affairs select committee could hardly be more timely, although it is only a start.
It was not always like this. Community policing, in which police were better rooted in localities, were required to consult, and secured a measure of local support for preventive and investigative policing, was well established in several forces before the cuts began. The cuts have not just meant fewer officers. They have also meant, in many areas, the relegation of the neighbourhood approach. Community policing should not be romanticised, but at least it worked much of the time. That is more than can be said for the current crime-fighting approach.
