The public loses faith in police to investigate crime

[BovaryX]

The Telegraph reports the public is losing faith in the police to investigate crimes. It is quite incredible that after 10 years of Conservative government, the alleged party of law and order are presiding over a collapse in public confidence in the police. Meanwhile, the CPS are training cops to police limericks and Tweets and providing guidelines to schools about how adolescent girls shouldn't expect sex segregated toilets. WTF is going on? It is way past time to call this out.

^The public has given up on the police solving crimes, an official report warns on Friday, as it says officers have been "rumbled" for failing to investigate offences including burglary and theft.
Matt Parr, HM Inspector of Constabulary, said the failure of the police to investigate high-volume crimes like car thefts, minor assaults and burglaries was having a “corrosive” effect on the public’s trust in the police^

I have lately maintained a view, that the police prefer criminals to the general public because they spend so much time around them.

It doesn't work quite like that. What happens is at or about the year five mark the police officer begins to view criminals as representative of the general public.
When people say the police treated them as though they were the criminal when they reported a crime that is the phenomenon they are reporting on.

We should just clear off with our rape allegations

Let’s spend 2 days in court on 2 people having a fight on twitter

As usual littl nails it.

It seems that the police want to deal with crimes they have the best chance of getting a conviction out of to make their conviction ratio as high as possible- do they get performance related pay?

Online stuff is easy to evidence therefore easy to get a conviction from. They know rape is the hardest to prove so they just dont bother.

feelingverylazytoday

Wow, I was saying this very thing to my DW last week. I was bullied for around five years at school and it was almost as if the teachers were deliberately turning a blind eye. It was only in the final year, when I played more sport and got much leaner and stronger that they left me alone.
I fear the result of the police in the UK failing to support the public, will result in more vigilante action.

I fear the result of the police in the UK failing to support the public, will result in more vigilante action

Yes. I've thought this too.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and that applies to human nature as well.

What pisses me off is the fact that the public are pissed off with the police for investigating these 'crimes' but don't seem to comprehend that the police are only investigating what someone has reported as a crime. If what is reported sounds like a crime, the police have a duty to investigate it. Same with any crime. I can assure you that investigating people calling each other mean things and making bullshit empty threats on social media is not what any police officer wants to spend their day doing. But for it to stop, people need to get a grip and stop reporting stupid things.

But for it to stop, people need to get a grip and stop reporting stupid things.

I agree. But this is why the police need clear boundaries to be able to say 'this is a stupid thing to report, it's not a crime, get a grip and don't make frivolous complaints wasting police time'. Rather like the 999 service say to other time wasters, with follow up action for repeat time wasters.

But the problem is, everything has to be recorded as initially reported, and most things on initial report look like a crime, however petty it may seem, and a certain amount of investigation has to occur before it can be written off as actually being a non crime. It's ridiculous. The problem being even if 1000 people think a report is ridiculous, that one person who reported it has forced the hand of the police that it has to be investigated to a point. It's incredibly frustrating.

It doesn't work quite like that. What happens is at or about the year five mark the police officer begins to view criminals as representative of the general public.

Something like this happens in a lot of public service sectors where the workers deal with difficult or vulnerable people.

Sorry for my late reply about
Really? So you don't think the democratically elected government should be in control of the police? Then who should control them?

Even a democratically elected government is obliged to get its priorities made into law (which requires time on the legislative schedule - otherwise a manifesto could just be "passed", reading aloud, being passed by both houses, etc. Even with a huge majority, even a "rubber stamp" passage of bills takes a bit of time), and then the police can and should enforce them. In that way, yes, democratic governments can "control" police, but there is a process to follow which prevents governments from having direct, day-to-day control of the police.

That's a roundabout way of describing rule of law. Not rule by police, nor by "Government" (a Cabinet) ... and certainly not rule by lobby groups.

the balance seems to have tipped to the police being answerable to no-one
This isnt true. They are answerable to the home sec and the PCCs.
The real issue is they have no money and not enough staff so can't investigate crimes like they used to. But also dont want to spend time investigating complaints/getting investigated by HMIC so I bet will be more likely to put effort into people who make a lot of noise to try to minimise chances of a complaint/investigation.

I think the real problem in the scottow case is the hate crime legislation and hate crime aggravating the offence. If misogyny was a hate crime the police would be overrun with Twitter incidents and the law would change pdq. But misogynistic abuse of women is totally acceptable.

But for it to stop, people need to get a grip and stop reporting stupid things

No. What needs to happen is the idiotic hate crime legislation needs to be repealed. It is utterly farcical that the police have investigated 87,000 non crime incidents over five years. For those talking about new laws, how about the police applying existing laws? Burglary is a crime. But the police have downgraded it and don't bother to investigate it. Why? The police are failing in their duty to protect the public against recidivist criminals. This situation is dysfunctional and the government needs to address it.

We haven’t had a majority government for 11 years.

It’s impossible to just ‘blame the Tory’s for this’.

Give them five years with a majority and blame them for that

Oh do be quiet. The Tories love minimising spend on government, dont pretend the police would be any better off if the DUP hadn't been in govt with them.

What really needs to happen, in my view, is for the police, local authorities, schools, hospitals and government departments - but particularly the police, obviously - to stop accepting training from Stonewall and other allied lobby groups. Regulatory capture is pretty much complete now.

What really needs to happen, in my view, is for the police, local authorities, schools, hospitals and government departments - but particularly the police, obviously - to stop accepting training from Stonewall and other allied lobby groups. Regulatory capture is pretty much complete now.

Well said. What a pernicious, secretive and damaging influence is wielded by this lobby group

The real issue is they have no money and not enough staff so can't investigate crimes like they used to.

This is an important point that shouldn't be overlooked. I am not for one second negating any of the valid, accurate and insightful points made above about identity politics, hate 'crime' and lobbying having captured the police, but as someone who worked in the CJS when the coalition first came to power and still has many friends in the departments, the police, CPS and courts service have been systematically defunded pretty much since day 1 of Cameron entering No. 10. My own single region comprising one of 42 national departments lost around twelve lawyers between June - December 2010; hundreds of years-worth of legal knowledge and experience gone and not replaced in the name of 'efficiency savings', and one of our local court centres was closed down. Yes, the resources which are still in place are being deployed incorrectly, but I can understand - albeit not condone - why they are focusing on 'desk crimes' to keep the figures up in the absence of proper resources to investigate, prosecute and try offenders.

It's a perfect storm of lack of funding and institutional wrongthink.

Returning home from the town centre this evening there was a police car, no blue lights on parked on the corner of a road, so no other cars could get by. It was dark but he was talking to someone by a car. I was in a cab and waited and waited. I opened the door and asked how long he was going to be . He replied im doing my job.

Ok but roughly as im on a meter.

Him im doing my job Get out and walk.

(he was assuming i could For all he knew there could have been a wheelchair in the boot)

The taxi driver was fuming and so was i. I was perfectly polite
Blue lights wernt on and from the top of the road i couldnt tell whether it was police or a breakdown truck.

Another car pulled up behind him and also had to wait.

Way to go on community relations which are already shot to shit.

Bovary has it nailed about public sector top levels being the exact kind of out of touch, woke lunatics we've seen from Labour candidates on the webchat.

Yes, it's everywhere. It's like a virus. I have been reading a report about regional inequalities, and it's notable for not remotely reflecting the voices of the people affected at all, but, instead, pinpointing "woke" concerns.

I suspect that part of the problem is that quango/charity/public sector/think tank chief executive merry-go-round. For example, look at the former Chairman of the Parole Board (notable for the Worboys fiasco) Nick Hardwick. He started off back in '86 as the Chief Executive of Centrepoint, then he became Chief Exec at the Refugee Council, then he became Chief Exec to the IOPC (police complaints), then he became HM chief inspector of Prisons, and then he became chair of the Parole Board.

That's 32 years of being a chief executive or head honcho at a number of charities and criminal justice bodies. The guy is only 63, and has no "factory floor" experience of any of the organisations he headed after Centrepoint -- and he was made Chief Executive of Centrepoint before he was even 30.

Just to agree with Bovary and Packing - I wonder if compulsory heterodoxy might be a useful device to trial in some way? (Haidt sense.)

When senior positions are overwhelmingly held by people of one ideological and/or political leaning we see the outcomes and the isolation from the rest of society/the academy etc.

heterodoxacademy.org/

I suspect that part of the problem is that quango/charity/public sector/think tank chief executive merry-go-round.

It is incredibly incestuous, they're a very isolated and 'special' group of people anyway, and the out of touch bizarre views just get more and more concentrated. I had a colleague who worked at the top level of a charity liaising with other charities and fled in horror after a few months because of exactly this.

It is incredibly incestuous, they're a very isolated and 'special' group of people anyway, and the out of touch bizarre views just get more and more concentrated.

If you look at the situation practically, then it kinda becomes obvious how this happens.

If you don't have "factory floor" experience of an organisation, then how exactly do you know what the problems and issues are? You rely on being told, but then, at chief executive level, there's issues over accurate reporting and access to the front line etc.

So how do you set priorities? How do you make anything realistic improve? By default, it always becomes about utilising, or imposing, a set of universalist and external values because you do not have that sense of what the parochial concerns of your organisation actually are.

Again, because of the nature of a lot of public bodies, there's a great danger that utilising commercial notions of management and leadership can mean that clients/service users/stakeholders are misindentified or misprioritised (possibly because your "true" clients may be people that will never interact with the service). Throw equalities legislation into this and you can get a very strange and distorted perspective indeed.

And this is now the problem with the police. I'm currently in a predicament where I am trying to facilitate police interest in the fact a group of drug users are consistently using the grounds of a nursery school to take drugs, and they are leaving drug paraphernalia around where toddlers can pick it up. Trying to get police interest in this is a rather protracted enterprise, so it is somewhat infuriating when they seem to jump at the report of someone being mean on twitter.

And then they wonder why people have lost confidence in the police.

It is incredibly incestuous, they're a very isolated and 'special' group of people anyway, and the out of touch bizarre views just get more and more concentrated. I had a colleague who worked at the top level of a charity liaising with other charities and fled in horror after a few months because of exactly this

Michelle
This seems to be a major part of the problem. The same small circle of people, whose views are not remotely reflective of public opinion, are dominating a significant, influential chunk of the public sector. The fact that they are promoting a radical agenda which seeks to criminalise debate and dissent is truly sinister.

This makes me think of what seems to me like an increasing separation between the university educated and everyone else.

Leaders and managers in so many industries now seem to come mainly out of university programs of some kind, while the actual workers are very separate. While there was always some of that, and I think the expertise they brought was useful, it was more of a mix, people also could rise up fro the factory floor or through experience. And there were also more responsible positions like shop stewards and such for workers. It's like what used to be a permeable layer is now quite impermeable.

If I think about my own family in previous generations I can see how this started to happen. My grandparents and their parents and grandparents mostly didn't have degrees, they had trades or were military, but many went on to hold high positions in their area of expertise, areas that today are held almost exclusively by people with degrees, and generally advanced degrees. That's computer programmers, nurses, military officers, engineers, journalists, even bankers and members of government, CEOs. Even my one fairly posh great-grandfather who had a degree actually worked on his farm and his wife went to cheesemaking school.

I think at least one source of this problem has been the increase in percentage of the population that are getting degrees, and the subsequent requirement of more and more careers to have a university degree to even enter.