AIBU to think that there has never been a better time to be a criminal?

[QueenOfAccountability]

Just as the title says really.

I'm 62 years old and genuinely believe that there has never been a better time to be a criminal. Shoplifting isn't investigated anymore, jails are full and inmates are being released early. It's like criminals have won the lottery.

Beautiful comment. I'm still waiting for the police to show up at my door for saying a hurty word on here the other day. I was referring to someone's husband's friend's who encouraged him to cheat on her, but wow the moral outcry from the virtue signallers on here was astounding. Surprised I haven't been arrested already tbh but I hope it's soon, could really do with a break the kids are driving me mad. Perhaps I should turn it up on a notch to hurry things along.

You're missing the point somewhat.

Take just the flytipping. If the likes of you and me drop, say, half a sausage roll on the floor, either by accident or design, you could have some enforcement goon trying to slap a £100 'fine' on you. The pigeons would eat sausage roll before the bloke issued you with a ticket.

Contrast that to that large, illegal waste dump in Wigan. 25,000 tonnes of waste illegally dumped. That hasn't just happened overnight. Yes, they have caught a couple of people but what do you think the outcome of any legal action would be? The operators of that site probably made well over a million pounds and any fine will be nowhere near that. Even a prison sentence would be, what? A couple of years, so they would be out before a year is up. If the punishment meted out to you and me were scaled up, the fine would be a billion pounds or more, or for prison, a 25 year stretch.

You might as well go big.

So what you're saying is that a crime committed in sight of an enforcement officer is easier to prosecute than one carried out without witnesses. Who knew?

Can you not see the difference?

As somebody who used to work for a digital forensics company I strongly disagree.

I genuinely thought that was a Mumsnet ad for a second...

Depends on the type of criminal.

I got scammed online recently for the first time ever. AI is making it so easy now for companies to create half decent websites, have them up for a week, then rinse and repeat. Most of them are probably overseas.

How much time do you spend in our court system?

How much time do you spend in our court system?

That's true. My sex pest swim teacher is still lauded as a pillar of his local community, but if he tried to grope and kiss me and many of my friends growing up I can only imagine there are scores of us who didn't feel we could speak up

Exactly. 20 or 30 years earlier he’d have been the South London Ripper or something. Posing in a PO outfit and kidnapping more young women.

It’s tough to get away with higher level crimes because everything from pinging phone signals to traffic cameras to DNA fragments to the cameras on buses, texts, search history, purchase history, app loyalty points are painting a picture of the entire crime trajectory.

I was just about to say that. In my lifetime, rape within marriage has been criminalised, coercive control made a criminal offence and provocation as a defence to murder (reducing to manslaughter) for the seemingly trial but ‘final straw’ groundbreakingly recognised by the criminal courts. Hell, I’m glad I’m a woman under the criminal justice now than when I was younger

💯

If you’re an under 18 year old sexually assaulting peers then it’s been decriminalized

Oh, I can think of some from the last few months alone!!

To cite a few;

1. Hertfordshire & London Operations: Five men were jailed in September 2026 for more than 36 years combined 😮 for dozens of home burglaries and vehicle thefts
2. Bolton Crown Court: Five men and a teenager were sentenced in January 2026 (including a 6-year sentence for gang member Hamza Ghafoor) for high-value car-key burglaries
3. Cross-County Rings: Multiple teenage and adult offenders have received 18-month to 54-month sentences across Essex, Suffolk, Surrey, Sussex, and Thames Valley for keyless car thefts and nighttime burglaries.

If you want to get a flavour of this, just go on to CPS Newsroom or local police force websites

Further, if you want less individualised examples but more aggregated drastically, according to the MoJ, around 5,076 people are sentenced to immediate prison terms for burglary annually.

FYI recorded rape cases have risen from about 8,000 in early 2000's to 75,000 last year.

You see, in one way, I find it hugely encouraging that tape victims feel they can report

A significant factor, contrary to Daily Mail aficionados’ perception, is sentence inflation. Over the past couple of decades, average sentence lengths have drastically increased. Nearly half of all now exceed four years, meaning prisoners are staying locked up for far longer than they used to, which continuously reduces cell availability.

Further, there’s unfortunately a backlog of prisoners on remand.

Harsher longer sentences and remand backlogs

Yep. Sometimes I google some of mine to see if they've ever been prosecuted, but sadly not.

My physics teacher was a scout master he later had to do a sharp exit and went to Spain and was recaptured due to an appeal someone from my local area on holiday he was nabbed and sent back to Scotland.

YABU, what a depressing thread.

It's much harder to hide these days. There are lots of different types of criminal activity happening, some on a much larger organised scale, and to target these and see the full picture and build evidence will be taking more of the resources. Decisions have to be made somewhere in this respect and you do need tight evidence of wrong doing and to be proportional.

I don't think anyone that has been convicted is having a great time really so it's not a risk to be taken lightly.

The majority of people do have some kind of moral code. This idea of everyone else gets away with stuff so maybe I should join them is dangerous. It's why we have people that try and avoid paying for stuff, not paying the correct tax (who would plead ignorance of ever caught) and think they are fine because everyone is doing it. I do believe though that most people are living law abiding lives because it's the right thing to do and to they care about others, it just won't make any headlines.