While education and health have been sheltered from the full force of the cuts, the criminal justice system has not been so fortunate. Should the public be concerned that police numbers will fall by as many as 12,000? The answer, sadly, is yes. Simply observing the proportion of police officers in European countries is enough to suggest that there is probably going to be a problem. Unsurprisingly, countries with more officers are likely to have lower crime rates.
Yet Ken Clarke, the justice secretary, has been keen to claim that everything but the criminal justice system is effective at tackling crime, often suggesting that economic prosperity has a more substantial impact on crime rates. A report by Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay, a Birmingham University economist, to be released tomorrow, suggests this is not so. In fact it finds the largest measurable impact on crime in recent years has been police detection rates.
Would-be offenders don’t enjoy the prospect of being caught and are less tempted to commit crimes when they think this is more likely. Even small increases in detection rates can lead to tens of thousands fewer thefts and thousands fewer violent crimes. The corollary is that reducing detection rates, which seems highly probable given the scale of the cuts, will encourage and permit greater criminality.
Some may shrug and say this is the price of avoiding national bankruptcy, but it is a classic false economy: it is not just the human misery associated with high crime rates, but the increased economic and social costs. More violent robberies mean more people needing emergency hospital treatment and time off work to recover, which has an impact on productivity. More property crimes increase overheads for households and insurers and mean more expensive countermeasures for commercial premises. The denial that we are likely to face more crime means we cannot move on to a productive debate in which we try to quantify these costs and assess whether they will actually cost us more than the proposed savings.
For all that, we do need to reduce our budget deficit, and fast, and the criminal justice system must bear some of the cuts. Nick Herbert, the police minister, has repeatedly claimed that vast efficiency savings can be made in the way police forces operate. He cites reports from the Audit Commission and Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary as evidence.
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That police forces could work better is not in doubt, but there are three problems with betting all our chips on efficiency. First, as the inspectorate itself notes, the scale of cuts demanded is huge compared with the level of savings observed so far. Second, the inspectorate seems far from convinced that many police forces are ready to implement cost savings. Third, regardless of Herbert’s own priorities, it will not be he who actually implements the efficiency savings, but those with power within the police forces.
The problem is that the power to allocate resources tends to reside with officials sitting behind desks, not officers on the beat; and the last thing bureaucrats are going to cut is themselves.
The government cannot just demand greater efficiencies and hope for the best. It must also decide what police functions are important and which can be cut. News of two police officers ignoring a call to aid a woman being stabbed to death so that they could carry on staking out a sex worker illustrates this problem of a lack of focus on public safety.
New Labour’s laudable investment in the police was unfortunately accompanied by a catalogue of new crimes for the police to pursue. The expansion of “hate” legislation has encouraged the police to look not at people’s actions but at their words and thoughts. It is not uncommon for police to waste time giving a “talking to” to preachers for having offensive but entirely non-aggressive views on homosexuality. Occasionally these “thought criminals” are arrested and even convicted. Harry Taylor, a militant atheist, was convicted of religiously aggravated harassment just for placing anti-religious pamphlets in an airport chapel. The provocative (but non-violent) act of burning a Koran in Gateshead on the anniversary of 9/11 prompted immediate arrests.
Most of these activities are useless and some are positively damaging, especially when they infringe traditional British liberties of free speech and association. The government should tell the police to concentrate on violence and property crime. By doing so, it could make us a freer country while saving precious resources for tackling crimes that actually have an impact on public safety.
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Nick Cowen is crime researcher at the independent think tank Civitas; civitas.org.uk.
An Analysis of Crime and Crime Policy by Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay will be released tomorrow