Britain’s woke police forces have suffered a fresh blow to their credibility as statistics show close to nine in ten neighbourhoods where thefts have been reported have seen precisely zero solved.
British police officers, who have lost much of the sympathy traditionally afforded them by right-leaning members of the public as they arrest people for memes and jokes and brand tens of thousands as being responsible for so-called “non-crime hate incidents” while property crime and violent and sexual crimes are neglected, have likely lost even more now that it has emerged that they have failed to solve a single theft in some 84 per cent of neighbourhoods in the last three years.
“[solving] Theft should be the bread and butter of neighbourhood policing,” complained the Victims’ Commissioner for England and Wales, Dame Vera Baird, in comments quoted by The Telegraph.
“For many of us, reporting theft will be our first and only engagement with our local police and the response will shape our impressions of the police and their effectiveness,” explained the Commissioner, a former Solicitor-General and MP under the last Labour Party government.
“Faced with such low rates of suspects being identified, punished or charged, many victims will wonder whether theft has effectively been decriminalised and feel like victims are increasingly being left to fend for themselves while thieves offend with impunity,” she added.
Sir Mike Penning, a Member of Parliament for the Conservative Party who has previously served as Minister of State for Justice and Minister of State for Policing under David Cameron, said that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) should also shoulder a share of the blame, however, saying that police put little effort into tackling theft in part because they “know the CPS are not interested and even if they get them into court, they just get a slap on the wrist.”
Police do not only neglect investigations into thefts, however, with another Telegraph analysis of burglaries finding that no burglaries at all had been solved in almost half of the 32,000 neighbourhoods they looked at over a three-year period, with forces sometimes not bothering to send officers to the scene of the crimes at all.
This poor performance on acquisitive crime is not compensated by a razor focus on violent crime, either, with police-recorded rapes, sexual assaults, and acts of violence against the person all now at their highest since comparable records began in 2002.
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