The Metropolitan Police Force which serves London is abandoning around one-third of all crime reports after a single phone call under the mayoralty of Sadiq Khan.
Criminal damage, theft, affray, so-called “low-level” assaults, and even burglaries can be dropped without any investigation after the victim’s initial phone call to the police, under a policy The Times describes as having been “secretly introduced” by the London force in 2017.
The Met assesses some 37 per cent of offences via telephone phone call, with the Telephone and Digital Investigation Unit (TDIU) telling a majority of victims their cases will not be investigated without clear CCTV or forensic leads — although the latter cannot really be discovered without a police investigation in the first place, in all but the most cut-and-dried cases.
The Times further notes that the public gave up on around 1.26 million calls to the non-emergency 101 number in London after “having to wait 15 minutes on average to get through” — an increase of 50 per cent on 2016.
The Met does keep a list of crimes which must be properly investigated, including homicide, sexual assault, firearms offences, domestic assault, and, of course, “hate crime.”
“Hate crime” and so-called “non-crime hate incidents” are a particular obsession of senior police officers and left-liberal politicians, including the London mayor, with special resources which police organisations complain are in short supply being set aside to investigate “hateful” comments on social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter.
“Every crime reported to us is investigated, whether that’s through face-to-face contact with an officer or detective or through alternative routes such as the TDIU,” insisted Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner Mark Simmons, in an attempt to justify the figures.
“But like any organisation we have got a budget to work to and we have to make decisions about what we prioritise,” he added.