Regular readers will know that I have an obsession with home burglaries. Specifically those occasions when a burglar goes into a British home, helps himself to the contents of the household and finds that the last people on his case are the British police. Scanning some recent burglary statistics, I was struck again by the almost miraculous failures of force after force.
Take Kent Police. In a recent breakdown of crime statistics, the force managed a career high. In one of the areas where they are meant to have oversight, there were 123 home burglaries. Of those 123 burglaries, they managed a great, round zero in their detection rate of the burglars. Or 0.0 per cent as it comes up, slightly forlornly, on the stats chart, presumably to differentiate it from those majestic years in which Kent Police may find themselves capable of locating, say, 0.1 per cent of culprits.
A report from 2023 dug into some of the possible reasons for this. His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) not only found that the number of crimes solved by Kent Police is ‘unacceptably low’ but that there are ‘areas for improvement’. One such area was their record of responding to the public. As of March 2023, the force did not have a call switchboard for the public to dial when they are victims of a crime. Almost exactly a third (33.4 per cent) of calls went unanswered, because they use a system which puts callers to the non-emergency number straight through to what is called ‘a call handler’, who then never calls them back. Responding to these problems, Deputy Chief Constable Peter Ayling said: ‘We acknowledge there are areas where improvements could be made and are being made.
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