The police have given up on actual crime

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. Not one. Nada. Zilch.

So what are they reduced to doing? Why, policing language of course. As the great Mark Steyn has said, our societies in the West have ended up policing everything except crime. As he knows.

Take a phrase I was introduced to only this week: ‘tragedy chanting’. This is one of those new phrases used as though they are familiar terms. It is also the offence with which two Manchester United fans were charged with after an FA Cup match against Liverpool. Following the arrests, Chief Inspector Jamie Collins said that Greater Manchester police ‘will clamp down on this and arrest those who engage in such behaviour, regardless of what team they support’. You could observe that a force which fails to distinguish itself during actual tragedies might disproportionately incline to policing ‘tragedy chanting’ as some kind of recompense.