Recorded crimes in England and Wales have reached their highest-ever level, while the proportion of crime being solved by their increasingly woke police forces has dipped to its lowest-ever level.
Some 6.5 million offences were recorded in the two Home Nations of the United Kingdom — Scotland and Northern Ireland keep their own statistics — with a mere 5.4 per cent of them resulting in a charge in the year to June, according to The Telegraph.
This is a fall from an already low level of 6.5 per cent in 2021, and a huge drop from the also not particularly impressive level of 15.5 per cent when comparable statistics began to be recorded seven years ago.
Sexual offences have increased more than any other category of recorded crime, rising by 21 per cent to fully 196,889 — with just 1.5 per cent of rapes and 3.1 per cent of other sexual offences ending in charges being brought.
Naturally not every charge brought results in a successful prosecution, so the true picture with respect to crimes ending in a criminal being convicted will be even worse than the above figures suggest.
Police representatives have long blamed funding cuts for such failures — and indeed the axe did fall particularly hard on law enforcement and courts under the David Cameron-Nick Clegg austerity regime and beyond, while questionable spending on things like foreign aid continued to increase — but there is a growing public perception that their poor performance is also linked to their apparent lack of interest in solving crimes like burglaries while wasting time enforcing political correctness through such actions as arresting a priest’s wife for offending transgender people online.
“There’s a recognition that [police]should be doing more to investigate crimes like burglary because of its impact on victims. There is a growing recognition that this has gone far enough and police have to focus on getting detection rates up,” claimed Police Foundation director Rick Muir in comments on the crime statistics quoted by The Telegraph — although it remains to be seen whether concrete action will follow this supposed “recognition”, which tends to roll around every time the latest round of embarrassing figures are published.
“People were promised more police officers, they voted for more police, they are paying for more police, and yet they don’t see or feel any benefit,” added Rory Geoghegan, a former policeman who served as Boris Johnson’s special adviser on criminal justice when he was Prime Minister.
“Politicians must hold police chiefs to account for addressing these mainstream concerns, rather than allowing them to fixate on pronouns, privilege, and identity politics,” Geoghegan added — although when he and Johnson were in 10 Downing Street there was no action on this whatsoever beyond some occasional empty talk, while the Prime Minister and Home Secretary pursued such initiatives as a bill outlawing so-called “online harms” highly like to increase, rather than reduce, the authorities’ fixation on offences against woke sensibilities and literal “non-crimes”.
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