'Sleepwalking into a nightmare': surge in crime paints a bleak picture

Crime has surged while officer numbers have hit a record low, according to figures, which reveal a bleak picture of policing in England and Wales.

A decades-long fall in overall levels of crime appears to be stabilising, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), while police-recorded offences involving knives and guns have increased, and murder and manslaughter is on the rise too.

Meanwhile, figures released on Thursday show that the number of police officers has hit a record low and the proportion of recorded crimes that result in someone being charged or summoned to court fell to another record low at 9% – fewer than one in 10.

Rank and file officers have said they are not surprised by the rise in recorded violent crime as the number of police officers falls. The Police Federation said: “We are sleepwalking into a nightmare.”

Sarah Jones, the Labour MP for Croydon Central, who has campaigned against knife crime, declared a “public health emergency” and warned of an “epidemic”.

It does not look good. Offences involving knives or sharp instruments rose by 16% to 40,147, according to figures recorded by police. Gun crime rose 2% to 6,492 offences over the period, which was a less pronounced rate than knife crime.

The total number of homicides – murder and manslaughter – rose by 12% from the previous year to 701, excluding exceptional incidents with multiple victims such as the terrorist attacks in London and Manchester.

There were also increases in police-recorded burglaries and robberies, which rose by 6% to 437,537 and 30% to 77,103 offences, respectively.

Some caveats, however, temper the picture painted by some of these headline figures.

Firstly, the ONS acknowledged an increase in the number of crimes recorded by the police does not necessarily mean the level of crime had risen.

For many types of crime, police-recorded statistics do not provide a reliable measure of levels or trends in crime, statisticians warn. They only cover crimes that come to the attention of the police and can be affected by changes in policing activity, recording practices and the willingness of victims to report.

The latest estimates from the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW), which runs alongside the police-recorded data and measures people’s experience of crime shows that most types of offences remain at levels similar to the previous year.

Furthermore, most people did not experience crime, according to the CSEW. The latest survey estimates showed that two in 10 adults experienced any of the crimes asked about in the survey in the previous 12 months. This figure has fallen considerably over the long term. Around four in 10 adults were estimated to have been a victim of crime in 1995, although this was before the survey included fraud and computer misuse.

The drop in officers to 122,404 officers as at 31 March, from 123,142 a year ago, was also incontrovertible. But with regards to the link this has with falling or rising levels of crime, there was room for doubt. Violent crime as recorded by police has been increasing since 2014 but it was falling between 2009 and 2014 – as police officer numbers were being cut.

Home Office research also stated that – on a force-by-force breakdown of violent crime offences – not all forces with falling officer numbers were experiencing rises in violent crime.

What should perhaps cause most alarm was not the levels of recorded crime – but the already very low and falling detection rate.

A Home Office document released at the same time as the police workforce and crime data showed that police forces closed almost half – 48% – of cases with no suspect identified. It rose to 75% when looking at theft offences.

And the proportion of crimes that resulted in a charge or summons to court fell by two percentage points from 11% to 9% – fewer than one in 10. This is the lowest since the new system of measuring the detection rate was launched in 2015.

There is one caveat here, too: a changing mix of crime with rising numbers of complex crimes such as sexual abuse and an increasing volume of digital evidence, which may require more intensive work to investigate, may have had an impact on the detection rate.

Nonetheless, the fact that fewer than one in 10 of recorded crimes result in a charge or court summons will be deeply concerning for those unconvinced that England and Wales are living through a violent crime epidemic.