AIBU to think Theresa May puts cuts and austerity before her duty to public safety?

[EastMidsMummy]

Theresa May as Home Secretary cut police numbers at a time when the terrorist threat was growing, on the grounds of austerity.

At the same time, her government cut taxes for billionaires and let multinational companies get away with paying no or next to no tax.

Her plans for austerity continue. How can anyone trust her to fund the services that the police - let alone schools and hospitals - need.

Police numbers are down.
Even if more money and powers have been given to the police they have not been given to increase actual real individual human beings actually serving as police officers.
It has been spent on paying the smaller number of police officers to do more by giving up their holidays and working overtime and being shipped around the country when incidents occur.
Meaning that local policing and prevention policing has become a thing of the past.
Meaning that intelligence gathering and surveillance doesn't happen effectively any more.
Which means we are spending our money inefficiently.

And Theresa May's husband makes money from G4S - a private security company that can do nothing but benefit when what was a public service becomes (like so much of the country's vital services) contracted to private companies who make a profit - which means the finite amount of money we have to spend has to have a proportion creamed off to go to shareholders instead of being plaughed into extra personnel, training and sufficient people on the ground to respond and surveil and keep us safe.

Money spent does not equal good security planning.

Proper consultation with those who do the job day in day out and not calling them scaremongers when you are warned that you are making dangerous choices is necessary.

Theresa May wanted to give the police more powers - the police said and say they have adequate powers but what they don't have are adequate numbers of staff to use those powers effectively.

When terrorists are reported to the police and they cannot keep an eye on them to prevent incidents by nipping things in the bud we are in a parlous state.

In other words YANBU.

ploughed - sorry

But when there isn't enough money to pay for something, it gets cut.

But why isn't there enough money to pay for it? Austerity coupled with tax cuts for the wealthiest is simply not a good policy. It would be like telling your employer to keep some of your salary then telling your kids you can't afford to feed them. It's idiotic.

'Money spent does not equal good security planing'.

True. That can also be seen as the general crime rate has reduced although there have been cuts in the police number.

There are over 23,000 people of interest on the terrorist watch list - it would cost over £1 million to police them effectively.

There is no easy answer - to be it goes way beyond throwing insults at the different political parties.

Code42

The Harris report I have read and is an example protecting the elite as it is all about London.

With respect Cressida Dick herself has pointed out that there are certain issues she is unable to comment on as she is under purdah. So if you can point me to her statement I will have no issue in reporting her.

I see serving and retired police officers (GMP) most of whom describe the reality of policing today as overworked and under resourced leading to delays in attending 999 calls.

The government relies on the national Crime Survey to provide statistics about crime levels but it doesn't really provide the full picture about crime levels and we should not believe the government when it tells us that crime is falling despite the huge drop in police numbers since 2010.

From the BBC - "The Crime Survey of England and Wales says that traditional crime is broadly static at just over six million offences in the year to December 2016. When you add to that experimental data on cyber and fraud, it comes to 11.5m crimes.

There are holes in the CSEW that are difficult to fill - it doesn't cover all types of victims and all types of offences and only recently began asking people about fraud and computer-related crime. But, broadly speaking, it's considered to be a good measure of the long-term trends.

At the same time, police recorded crime has gone up to 4.8m offences - a rise of 9% - and it has seen rises in both serious violence and "traditional" offences such as burglary and robbery."

Professor Tim Hope says "the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) is neither a survey of crime (it doesn’t cover much of it), a survey of victims (it doesn’t include all of them), nor a survey of victimisation (it doesn’t measure enough of it). In fact, the CSEW is much better at not measuring crime than it is at measuring crime’s true extent, which is no doubt why policy-makers have come to rely upon it so much."

Richard Garside also thinks the Crime Survey should not be relied upon "The CSEW, for instance, is shot through with omissions and methodological weaknesses that belie its status as a 'gold standard' in relation to crime trends.

The experience of domestic violence, for instance, is not captured well by the CSEW, while sexual violence is not measured at all. Violence experienced by women, children and young people, vulnerable adults, those in institutional settings, the homeless, migrants, the poor and marginalised are variously not measured at all, or done so only very partially.

Add to this the methodological problems with data collection and the CSEW begins to look pretty ropey. Those who have experienced most violence are far less likely to be interviewed for the survey, if only because they are going to be less inclined to invite a complete stranger, however friendly, into their home for a one to two hour interview involving the sharing of a lot of potentially sensitive and traumatic experiences.

The total figure for violence in the CSEW - 1,537,000 in the latest report - is reassuringly precise. It is worth remembering that it is an estimate based on the experiences of around 36,000 people. This is a relatively large sample size. It remains, though, an estimate."