Money alone will not fix our failing police
Police chiefs have told the Government that if they are to meet pledges to cut crime they need more money and more officers. Their appeal comes ahead of the Chancellor's spending review due to be published next month and with law and order expected to take a financial hit since it is not a 'protected' area.
Sir Mark Rowley, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, praised Labour's 'sensible ambition' to halve knife crime and violence against women and girls, as well as boost neighbourhood policing. But this required cash, not least because the population had risen so much (though no one seemed prepared to join the dots with large scale immigration as the cause). The problem the police have when making such demands is that the public no longer feels they make the right choices with the resources they have.
Burglaries are rarely, if ever, investigated; mobile phone thefts are ignored; shoplifters strip stores with impunity; and officers are only occasionally seen walking the beat, almost always in pairs.
Police chiefs maintain that they direct scarce resources where they are most needed and yet this is impossible to square with stories of half a dozen officers being sent to arrest someone for sending an injudicious tweet to a school website. Stories like these make it hard to take seriously the argument that police numbers are too low.
Policing is as much about choices as money. More bobbies on the beat has been a recurring policy ambition for decades yet never seems to happen. Labour has promised to recruit 2,500 police neighbourhood officers and nearly 400 PCSOs over the next 12 months, as part of the target to hit 13,000 by 2029. The police say this is not enough.
But it might be if they deploy their officers more effectively and make different decisions about what is important to the public. The Government must play its part by finally stripping away much of the red tape that often keeps officers stuck in police stations inputting data and removing self-defeating targets.
The release of career criminals back into the community because there are too few prison places also needs to stop, even if it means temporary overcrowding while new jails are built. Police chiefs say they also want structural reform which invariably means fewer but bigger forces. If they go down that road they will become even more remote from the public they serve than they are already.
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