Britain’s police have got their priorities tangled, and they are less effective than they should be as a result. A report this week from the chief inspector of constabulary for England and Wales, Andy Cooke, gives a shocking account of one of the worst examples, although it is far from the only one. Nearly a million burglaries and thefts are reported by the public each year. But in 2021, the police in England and Wales charged a suspect in just 6.6% of robberies and 4.2% of thefts.
These charging rates are indeed “dire”, as Mr Cooke, a former chief constable of Merseyside, rightly calls them. But they are worse than that. Levels of police failure of this kind do not reflect fairly on the hard and principled work of many good officers, but they raise serious questions about the professional competence of the force. They help to sap the public’s confidence in police effectiveness, and they weaken respect for the police. For a service that has always seen itself as part of the communities it polices, not as an external imposition on those communities, this is particularly devastating.
