Electronic tags do NOT prevent criminals from re-offending, warns Met chief... as Labour lets thousands skip jail
Tagging criminals instead of sending them to prison will not stop re-offending, the head of the country's biggest police force has warned.
Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, issued a stark warning yesterday about the Government's plans to let tens of thousands of offenders avoid jail.
He said that fewer criminals serving prison time would 'generate a lot of work for police' and a 'proportion' of them would go on to commit another crime.
Sir Mark also accused ministers of having done 'no analysis whatsoever' on the impact of letting criminals dodge jail sentences or be released early.
Under Labour's overhaul of sentencing laws announced last week, some criminals – including violent and sexual offenders – will be released early for good behaviour.
And courts will no longer impose jail terms of less than 12 months, apart from in 'exceptional circumstances', with more criminals serving sentences in the community instead.
Alongside the changes, the Probation Service was given a funding boost to buy nearly 30,000 more electronic tags – enabling it to quadruple the number of criminals being monitored with the devices.
But the Met Commissioner told BBC Radio 4's Today programme tagging criminals cannot be relied upon: 'Every time you put an offender into the community, a proportion of them will commit crime, a proportion of them will need chasing down by the police.'
He went on: 'If probation are going to spend more money on trying to reform offenders, divert them, reduce their recidivism, that's fantastic.
'But a proportion of those who would've been in prison will be committing further offences because probation can't do a perfect job, it's impossible.
'That extra offending is work that police have to do to protect communities. That involves more arrests, more cases. So this will generate a lot of work for police.'
Sir Mark's comments came after he and five other senior police officers – chief constables Serena Kennedy, Stephen Watson, Craig Guildford and John Robins, as well as chairman of the National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC)Gavin Stephens – wrote a letter in The Times calling on the Government to provide 'serious investment' at this month's spending review.
As well as increasing demand and new online threats from organised crime, they said the emergency release of prisoners to alleviate overcrowding and recommendations in the sentencing review would put more pressure on policing.
The officers warned that Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer's flagship pledges on knife crime, violence against women and recruiting thousands more police officers would be unachievable without spending more.
Their warning comes ahead of the Chancellor's spending review on June 11, which chiefs said was 'the most important moment in decades' for the backing of police by the Government.
Police chiefs have also called for a radical overhaul of the structure of UK policing with fewer, larger forces amid financial shortages and difficulties dealing with updating technology.
The current structure of 43 geographical forces was established in the 1960s and there have long been concerns that the model is not fit for purpose.
As the NPCC published the police data strategy for 2025 to 2030 today, force bosses called for a redesign of the structure of policing in England and Wales.
Mr Stephens said 'the system is not resilient' and argued for 'bigger, capable forces led by a stronger national centre'.
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