Where’s law or order in police priorities?

Anyone who has been burgled will agree that the trauma is not just about the loss of possessions, bad enough in itself, but the violation of one’s inner sanctum.

My only personal experience of burglary was when I lived in Sydney, in a ground-floor flat on the northern shores of the harbour.

I awoke one morning to discover my treasured leather jacket, handmade by a Nottingham tailor and irreplaceable, was missing from the hook where it hung, like an artwork, opposite my bed. I knew at once it had been stolen, and exit footprints on the paintwork beneath the (open) window confirmed my fears. I called the police.

As they inspected the premises, about three rooms in total, they asked if anything else was missing and, when I shook my head, they pointed to a small dusty table in the corner of the sitting room where just the night before my television and video recorder (this was the 1990s) had perched.

As noted above, lost property is not necessarily the worst part of a robbery; far more frightening, in my case certainly, was the fact that a stranger had been in my bedroom while I slept. 

The police suggested keeping the window closed in future and that was it. No chance of catching the perpetrator, even with the footprint “evidence”, so no point trying.

This also seems to be the prevailing attitude among police in Britain today, with reports this week showing that nearly half of all burglaries across the country went unsolved.

Of more than 32,000 neighbourhoods analysed by the Daily Telegraph, more than 14,000 (46 per cent) had seen all their burglary cases in the past three years closed with no suspect caught by police. The worst neighbourhood, in Sheffield, went three years without any of its 104 burglaries being solved.

Charge rates for crime, in general, are at their lowest in more than 30 years. Only six per cent of all crimes resulted in a charge last year, about one in 17 offences, according to another report. The charge rates for some crimes were lower — 2.9 per cent of all sexual offences and 1.3 per cent of rapes led to a charge, compared to five per cent of burglaries and 4.3 per cent of thefts.

I wonder if there is any correlation between these alarmingly low clear-up statistics and the seemingly high number of investigations into complaints that hardly qualify as crimes.

It came to light last week that the comedian Joe Lycett was quizzed by police after a joke in his stand-up routine, about a donkey, offended a “fan”. The matter is now closed and Lycett said the officers were “very nice about it all”, but, still, they took a statement from the comic and many people, especially those whose burglaries, or worse, remain un-investigated, will be appalled at current policing priorities.

Comedians are fair game for over-zealous thought police, as are women who dare to speak up for their rights. All it takes, apparently, for the long arm of the law to overreach is one outraged member of the public.

The case of Marion Millar, an accountant arrested and charged in Scotland last year for allegedly posting transphobic tweets, was a particularly low point in British policing. Although the charges were later dropped, the incident highlighted the blurring between the police’s duty to protect the public and their involvement in cultural clashes.

More recently, Avon and Somerset police treated the frightening intimidation of a woman’s group by masked male trans activists as some kind of regular rally.

“Officers facilitated around 150 people’s right to protest in Bristol city centre,” said the force in a statement afterwards, “we are pleased to have been able to facilitate both these demonstrations.”

Footage of the event, which saw the women barricaded in a pub for their own safety, reveals an angry mob of men screaming obscenities, and the puzzle is why the police legitimised their “protest” rather than rounding up and arresting the ringleaders.

Law enforcers are to some extent encouraged by ministers, who want to increase the reporting of all forms of hate crime, criminalising people for holding unpopular opinions.  

But to restore public confidence in the police, at a low in the wake of the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Met officer and admitted failings in the investigation of serial killer Stephen Port, forces must focus on their core remit of catching criminals.

Three constabularies — Greater Manchester, Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire —have cut the rate of burglaries by half and trebled detection rates after trials involving officers being sent to the scene of every break-in, proof that a return to old-fashioned policing can produce results.

The new HM chief inspector of constabulary, Andy Cooke, has called for more of this, insisting that chief constables deal with actual offences and avoid politics and policing the “different thoughts that people have”.

“The law is quite clear in relation to what is an offence and what isn’t an offence,” he said in an interview with the Times in May.

The fact that it needs to be spelt out reflects the massive drift in what constitutes police responsibilities, and in what the public has come to expect of the police’s role, from criminal to social referee.