Douglas Murray Douglas Murray

The police have given up on actual crime

issue 23 March 2024

What do you do if you can’t solve crime? For the police in this country – as in many other western countries – the answer is obvious. You police non-crime.

The fact that our police do not police crime is not my view. It is a fact. Recent figures have shown that they currently fail to solve 90 per cent of reported crimes. Put into real numbers, that is 6,000 criminals every day getting away with serious offences. In 2022 that included 30,000 sexual offences, 320,000 violent crimes, 1.3 million thefts and over 310,000 cases of criminal damage and arson. Or to put it still another way, only 6.5 per cent of crimes led to a charge or court summons, while 2.2 million cases were dropped because no suspect was found.

Some areas of the country manage to beat even this record. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, in the past three years police forces have failed to solve a single burglary in half of all neighbourhoods in England and Wales.

Written by
Douglas Murray

Douglas Murray is associate editor of The Spectator and author of The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason, among other books.

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