Your case or mine? The crimes we must solve for ourselves

At first, when her south London flat was broken into last winter, Zena Ambrose
couldn’t have been more impressed with the response from the police.

The communications consultant returned home from work late at night to find a
burglar had stolen her MacBook, driving licence and designer clothes worth
£250 that she had just bought from TK Maxx. She telephoned 101 (the number
for non-emergency crime) and two police community support officers (PCSOs)
arrived that evening; the next day, a detective came and dusted for
fingerprints. Then, however, it all went silent.

“A few months after it had happened, I got a phone call asking me to go to the
shop and get a receipt for the clothes, and then take it to the police
station for evidence. But the shop was actually just opposite the police
station.

“I was really shocked, to be honest, and pointed out to them that it was
probably the police’s job to do that. But it didn’t make a difference. I
still had to go round and get it.”

Hers, she accepts, was not a particularly distressing case. More troublingly,
this week it emerged at Humberside Crown Court that the wife of a serving
soldier in Afghanistan had been subjected to an 18-month campaign of
sexually explicit threatening telephone calls, only to be told when she
reported them to the police that she, too, should carry out an investigation
herself by tracing the man’s phone network provider. The judge, Jeremy
Richardson QC, has ordered the Humberside chief constable to provide an
explanation.

What both incidents reflect is a worrying pattern of a seeming reluctance
among police forces to investigate crimes properly. In a report released
yesterday by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC), this failure
was laid bare.

The report, the most extensive ever conducted in HMIC’s 158-year history, has
revealed a “postcode lottery” of how police forces deal with crimes. Some of
the 43 forces across England and Wales barely scraped a 50 per cent crime
victim attendance rate over a 12-month period, ending in November last year.

Instead of being investigated, the report says, many crimes were simply
shelved within a minute of a victim calling the police, and relegated to
some digital archive or file. Increasingly, it seems, we are being told to
investigate society’s misdemeanours ourselves.

John O’Donohue, a London doctor, railed against this lackadaisical approach
last month after a driver had crashed into two cars belonging to him and his
wife outside their Blackheath home one evening and sped off. The
Metropolitan Police, he said, responded only after he had posted comments on
its Twitter feed, where it was boasting of crime reduction in the area.

The report cites vehicle crime, in particular, as an area in which members of
the public have been told to act as “do-it-yourself detectives”, checking
for CCTV and fingerprint evidence, interviewing neighbours and trawling
second-hand websites for stolen property.

Some 50 per cent of victims of antisocial behaviour who responded to an
independent survey as part of the investigation said they were certain the
police had not provided them with any crime-prevention advice. “In a range
of areas, the public were then left to carry out their own investigation,”
says inspector of constabulary Roger Baker, who compiled the report.

In 1829, Sir Robert Peel, the home secretary, established the underlying
principle of Britain’s constabulary: “The police are the public, and the
public are the police.” As the HMIC report shows, those lines are becoming
increasingly blurred. The fear for many is that when society no longer
trusts the police to bother to investigate crimes, its basic tenet erodes to
nothing.

“Our concern is that victims are not being given what they need in terms of
investigation and further support,” says Mark Castle, chief executive of the
charity Victim Support. “Secondly, they are not being treated with the
respect they deserve. A failure to do so has an impact on the confidence in
the police service.”

Castle describes the term postcode lottery as “very disappointing”. But this
is what the HMIC report clearly shows. Only six forces have a policy of
attending all crimes; the remaining 37 use call-handlers who then decide how
to deal with each report. The differing policies have resulted in huge
discrepancies in policing, with call-handlers in some 17 forces failing to
identify vulnerable victims. And while in Warwickshire, you have only a 39
per cent chance of a police officer turning up after you have reported a
crime, in Cleveland it is guaranteed.

“Policing has got to be a partnership,” says Ian Spittle, deputy chief
constable of Cleveland Police. “There are some things that the report has
outlined that I would be very disappointed about if found in our force.”

As for sending victims of crime out as amateur sleuths, he says: “The approach
here is that we think there is value in attempting to get to 100 per cent of
crimes. There are many minor crimes reported to the police that, on the face
of it, could be assessed as having little prospect of being solved. I
suppose that is why some forces use that as a screening process.

“But a member of public describing what has happened over the phone to our
call centre might not give the full story. They might miss key things in
telling us and there could be investigative opportunities that we could
exploit. It is reassuring for a victim of crime to know that we are
exploiting every investigative opportunity we can. It also enables us to
engage in the community, give reassurance and tease out evidence around that
crime or other issues in the community.”

Spittle, a police officer for 28 years, says budget cuts have had a major
impact and he cannot guarantee that in future his officers will be able to
keep up their 100 per cent attendance rate. His force is now 1,350, down
from 1,745 in 2010. Nationally, in those four years, police officer numbers
have decreased by eight per cent, staff by 13 per cent and PCSOs by 17 per
cent.

Tom Winsor, chief inspector of constabulary, disagrees. The police, he says,
have the appropriate resources to attend and prioritise crimes. “Over the
past 10 years, crime has fallen by 38 per cent, and over the past four
years, it has fallen by 10 per cent,” he says. “Therefore the police have
more time to be able to prevent crime, maintain the Queen’s peace and catch
criminals. With modern technology, a great deal more can be done to improve
productivity of individual police officers. But in some cases, officers in
some forces have little more than a notebook, radio and pen.”

The failure to attend is, the report claims, exacerbated by a failure to
investigate. The report identified 30,000 suspects across 32 forces who had
not yet been questioned or arrested in the past year – with 6,000 in one
force alone. HMIC is conducting an audit of forces after claims that the
official police figures known as the Crime Survey for England and Wales have
been fiddled, and in May warned that a fifth of all reported crimes were not
being properly recorded. Such failure to investigate crimes is currently all
too apparent in Rotherham, where South Yorkshire Police has been found to
have an “unacceptable” culture of disregarding serious victims of crime.

The only solace in the latest damning findings by HMIC, says Mike Hough,
professor of criminal policy at Birkbeck, University of London, is that
police forces have now been given only six months to do something about it.

There is, of course, much to be proud about in our national willingness to
stand up for one another. The Queen’s Speech in June even outlined new legal
protections for have-a-go heroes and Good Samaritans so they cannot be sued
by criminals. But no society’s citizens can be left to police themselves.
Peel intended his constables to be ever-present, ever-visible beacons of
public service, not a crackly voice down the line from a call centre.