Burglary rates are a scandal – new rule forcing cops to attend within an hour shows they’ve utterly failed at their job
IT sometimes seems that the British police pursue everyone other than criminals.
Every week there is some absurd new action by police.
Usually a dawn raid on the house of a girl accused of “mis-gendering” someone.
Or crack squads of officers searching for “hate incidents”.
Or forces such as the Met sitting by while people incite violence on our streets, only to then try to explain to the public what the Met thinks calls for “Jihad” actually mean.
All the time they fail at their central task.
And while there are many good officers desperate to actually do their job, the crime figures speak for themselves.
In England and Wales three quarters of all home break-ins end up with no suspect identified.
Worse, Home Office figures show that someone is charged in fewer than four per cent of cases.
Four per cent! That is a national scandal. Or it should be.
But as many homeowners know, this appalling figure has not come about because burglars in this country are incredibly brilliant.
Rather it is caused by the fact that the police seem to be supremely unbothered.
Like other crimes — bicycle theft or pickpocketing — the police often seem to take no interest in house robberies.
I know a number of people who have found it almost impossible to get police officers to their house after being burgled.
And what is so ridiculous about this is that we live in an era when many houses have CCTV and when images of burglars are easier to capture than ever before.
Meaning the police should have far more leads than ever before.
Now it seems that finally the police have noticed something is wrong. And that they ought to be pursuing crime.
New guidance from the National Police Chiefs’ Council says officers should make it a priority to visit the scenes of domestic burglary, and should do so within an hour.
Certainly that would be some comfort to the public.
After all, with every minute that goes by, the chances of a burglar getting away with their crime increases.
And as the NPCC has finally admitted, the hour immediately after a burglary is “the golden hour”.
It is the time which makes every difference between arresting a suspect or not, recovering stolen property or not.
In that golden hour the new NPCC guidance says officers should carry out forensic tests, searches, interviews with neighbours and obtain CCTV from doorbells or security cameras.
It is astonishing this has to be said at all.
After all, while burglary rates have declined in this country since the 1990s, there are still more than 1,000 break-ins every single day in this country.
And as anybody who has been burgled knows, it is not just the financial costs of burglary that hurt. It is also the sense of violation.
The vulnerability that comes from the knowledge that someone has been in your house. And could come back again.
Yet the only force in the country able to reassure the public — the force we all pay for — has utterly failed at their job.
Alex Franklin-Smith, Deputy Chief Constable of Warwickshire Police and the NPCC’s lead for burglary, admitted as much this week when he said that the detection rates for burglaries are simply not good enough.
Not in the eyes of the public and — finally — not in the eyes of the police.
“So that is very much where our focus is at the moment,” he said.
But why wasn’t it always?
What crimes are more important to pursue than a crime as common and devastating as burglary?
What are the public meant to do when the police leave us so helpless?
One answer is to try to lead the investigation yourself.
The news yesterday reported on a woman in St Albans who was burgled in October.
Sharon Allen has the bad luck to live in Hertfordshire, which has one of the worst burglary conviction rates in the country.
And no wonder.
In St Albans itself — a city of 148,000 people — there has been no police station open to the public since 2015.
If I lived there I would be demanding to know where exactly my taxes had gone. It is an astounding example of failure, that fact.
And indeed, so seemingly unbothered were the police by the break-in at Ms Allen’s house that she ended up turning amateur detective.
She had given the police black and white security camera footage from her house, enough to identify the culprit.
But the police didn’t bother following it up. So she is trying to do it herself.
But it should never have come to this.
The police have two jobs, which is to try to prevent crime, and pursue it wherever it occurs.
In recent years there have been too many examples to list of the police meddling in things that should be none of their business.
Yet here is something that should be their only business — and which they have to be reminded to actually do.
This reminder should never have been needed.
But now it has been given, let’s see if it works.