Crime figures and the effectiveness of the police

Freedom of information data released this week revealed that the Met have spent £35,000 on calls to the speaking clock and £200,000 on calls to directory inquiries. This is a revelation as I had no idea the speaking clock was still going.

Every computer clearly displays the time as do mobiles, which to my mind conjures the image of officers who know the time but are on the phone listening to the time sponsored by Accurist pretending to chase down leads while the Sarge watches. And who uses directory inquiries these days when the Internet supplies all the answers free of charge?

All those 118 numbers are headed for the directory graveyard to be buried alongside Thompsons and the Yellow Pages. Plod didn’t get the memo though and keeps ringing them up and costing us cash. The money is less worrying than the implication that the police are more ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ than ‘CSI’. A Met spokesperson said not all of the police have Internet access, which is pretty bad in this day and age. What are they using, type writers, bits of slate and cups connected by tightly pulled bits of string?

The crime statistics were also released this week and demonstrated that the police detection rate during 2010-11 was 28%. This means that the instances where someone has been identified and interviewed and there’s enough evidence to charge remained at under a third. That said the crime stats also showed The Met had an immense 815,092 crimes to solve, so in the 12 months to September 2011 there were 105 crimes per 100,000 people - compared to a rate of 74 for England & Wales.

The crime figures also show a 2% fall and that despite the murder rate in England and Wales rising by 5% last year, the overall crime rate remained stable or even shrank - even counting the crime cluster of the August riots. The murder rate spike is mostly due to the Cumbria shootings that killed 12 people, so that figure was due to a random and rare occurrence.

So even despite using the same sort of technology as television’s ‘Cadfael’ the police have managed to reduce crime! Well I guess Holmes didn’t need the Internet either right? Well, when Don’t Panic’s office was burgled we knew who the perpetrator was, even after the police had taken our statement it took about 20 calls to the station to speak to the investigating officer. He eventually agreed to go to the offender’s home, where he found our stolen camera. We also supplied tapes of the disgruntled ex-employee offering to return the stuff for £3,000. He didn’t even get charged and the whole thing was forgotten.

Water under the bridge now, but it didn’t fill one with confidence in the constabulary – especially as it rings true with the experiences of a lot of other victims of crime, whose cases seem to be quietly forgotten by the police, whose abacuses aren’t able to save much data.

If we zoom out of individual experience and examine trends the total number of crimes recorded by the police in the European Union is decreasing. Until 2002, the trend was upwards. It is true to say that the countries where the decreases are most noticeable include the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and France.

Across Europe violent crime and car theft have fallen, so could this mean the outmoded police simply benefitted from the decreases in crimes that are no longer all that easy to commit, with banks and cars becoming much more secure? Also crimes against the person like bag snatching are up 11% in the UK because people now carry pricey smart phones.

But it’s not all bad news. Before the office burglary I was assaulted and briefly kidnapped. That crime was dealt with by the Flying Squad, who solved the crime by triangulating the signals of my mobile and other victims of the same gang.

They caught the scumbags and they got sentenced to 14 years without anyone even having to give evidence. That was real ‘CSI’ stuff and demonstrates that with the right investment in technology and training we could have a force that solved far more crimes, but cutting funding now is not the way to achieve this.