The press, declared Lord Leveson, must not be allowed to mark its own homework. There is one profession, however, which the government seems quite happy to allow to judge its own success. Every few months we are presented with the latest set of crime statistics and invited to believe that crime is falling, clear-up rates are improving and so on. It would be much more convincing if the figures for recorded crime were not themselves compiled by the police — a group with a rather obvious vested interest in presenting those figures in the best possible light.
A set of figures teased out of the police this week presents a different picture of police clear-up rates. Constabularies appear to have decided that now even a caution is too harsh a punishment for thugs. Many thousands of violent offenders are being dealt with through ‘community resolution’- which requires them to say they are sorry, in return for which they receive no criminal record whatsoever. In the past year, 33,673 cases of violence against the person have been dealt with in this way, including 10,160 cases of serious violence and 2,488 cases of domestic violence.
A bizarre schism is opening up in our justice system. Against the constant downgrading of punishments for serious crime exists an increasingly belligerent regime for dealing with the most minor of offences. Among the many people who might feel aggrieved by the treatment of violent offenders is a non-smoking Welsh pensioner fined £75 for picking a cigarette butt from his shoe and discarding it on the pavement.
That is one of the many stories of over-zealous council enforcement officers who have been armed with powers to hand out civil penalties. It is easy to wonder whether, if fined in this way, the most profitable course of action might be to punch the officer on the nose. That would ensure one was dealt with under the criminal code, which could well involve an apology but no further action.
Councils that send civil enforcement officers on to the streets are allowed to keep the fines; in many cases the officers themselves are incentivised to hand out as many fines as possible by being allowed to keep a percentage for themselves. Police forces, by contrast, do not profit from putting a criminal behind bars. On the contrary, pursuing a criminal case costs them money. Their temptation, therefore, is to ‘clear up’ a crime in the quickest and easiest way possible.
It did not help to hear Tom Winsor, the Chief Inspector of Constabulary, this week assert that the primary role of the police is not to catch criminals but to prevent crime in the first place.
Although Mr Winsor had a reasonable point to make —- that poor use of technology was hampering the police keeping tabs on serial offenders — it was a remark which could be used by chief constables to excuse officers from frontline duties and give them the less challenging role of hectoring people to lock their doors and windows.
It would be crude and wrong to put police officers on incentive schemes to lock up as many criminals as possible (just as it is crude and wrong to have civil enforcement officers on similar incentive schemes). But the police must not forget that they are employed by us to remove criminals from the streets.
A sorry silence
Ed Miliband tied himself in knots this week trying to evade the question, would borrowing rise under a Labour government? Eventually he admitted it would, to the delight of his enemies. But Labour’s problem is not just that its leader fluffs his lines. Miliband is more hampered by his refusal to recognise that the last Labour government ruined the public finances by running a £40 billion overdraft during the boom years, when it should have been paying off debt to prepare for the inevitable bad times.
There is no political reason why he cannot make such an admission: he was a junior member of Labour’s last cabinet who had little to do with fiscal policy. It would not harm him in the eyes of the electorate if he admitted that Labour lost the election because Gordon Brown turned his back on his famous promise to balance the budget over the economic cycle. Indeed, he would profit just as Tony Blair did in the mid-1990s by apologising for the Callaghan government’s record on the public finances. Either Miliband is too scared of his shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, who really did have a hand in Brown’s fiscal policy,- or he believes that even with a £120 billion overdraft you can still borrow your way out of an economic crisis. Neither explanation inspires confidence.
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