Most of my experiences come from being involved in the local neighbourhood watch, and from friends in the police in London and elsewhere.
I like the idea of policing by consent and I like police officers too, who do too much paperwork and are hamstrung by questionable management goals. Most officers have no influence over the strategies they are told to implement and individual officers routinely express regret at the limits of their powers to investigate or help owing to a shortage of numbers, time and competing directives from command.
My point is that without some serious change of direction an increase in raw police numbers will have no effect whatsoever on reducing crime.
We live in a time where a former police officer has to prosecute a force for discrimination for refusing his son entry. The crimes I’ve been involved in seeing nothing done about include life changing injuries to young man assaulted without warning by gang of IC3 youths, neighbour mugged st knifepoint on DLR by three IC3 youths, young woman beaten severely by IC1 male on neighbouring street (!), resident fatally injured following stabbing by IC3 youth outside his house as he close his garage gates - no suspect was apprehended in any case.
The property crimes include three domestic burglaries, perhaps a dozen identical accounts of illegal entry and trespass, over two dozen car crime incidents (damage, TDA/TWOC, theft from vehicle), threatening behaviour/attempted robbery on a busy bus (several counts, same time and area, similar description of suspect) and in all these latter cases there were varying degrees of evidence which were not collected.
One neighbour identified without doubt the thieves who took his van and provided proof. No action. Following four or more years of videos, photos, car registrations, descriptions and likely times (they kept a regular schedule) no action was taken about the open sale of hard drugs in the neighbouring street on a route taken by children returning from two primary schools. This was finally resolved by a civic minded resident with a persuasive manner and a large bag and claw hammer.
It is regrettable to say but if you do happen to live in a place frequented by the small minority who commit the vast majority of crime you will see how little is done, and how these people have no fear of the law.
The perception I have to manage among middle- and working class residents in our area of the borough is that (1) there is no point reporting crime to the police (2) the police are more concerned with political correctness and hate crimes than violent crime and theft (3) persistent criminals act with impunity.
The issue appears to be that in the unlikely event that some crook is caught they will be seen as a victim of society and will have a brief career break at best.
There is an obvious mismatch between reality and description in the matter of serious crime, as with the knife crime in our borough and elsewhere. Perhaps only Trevor Phillips has been bold enough to grasp the nettle. In this as with other large scale failures of policing of systematic and serious crimes the obvious is dismissed.
People simply do not have any faith in the police and the courts any more, and this is due to experience not ignorance of the system.
There is no deterrent, there is no strategic priority to tackle these crimes, and the tiptoeing around the minefield of race baiting is unpromising to say the least.