Why the police have lost the public’s trust

The Home Secretary has admitted a thing that has long been known to those of us without close protection officers: that in many communities, people often feel that ‘crime has no consequences’. 

Her remarks this morning also acknowledged another pretty obvious fact: that the country has lost respect for the police.

Yvette Cooper’s words are strikingly overdue. The government’s own crime data for last year tells a sorry tale: in England and Wales, the proportion of crimes resulting in a charge was 5.7 per cent. An increasing number of cases are closed with no suspect identified – nearly 40 per cent. Nearly three-quarters of burglary cases are closed without an offender being held to account. With the highest ever level of shoplifting, half of those 430,000 crimes reported don’t identify a culprit. Recently on social media, the Met’s Deputy Commissioner Dame Lynne Owens intervened personally online to assist a victim of a phone robbery who had located her stolen mobile in a phone shop, but was unable to get local police to take any interest.