A Conservative government struggling to persuade voters it can be trusted with the NHS should be able to fall back on law and order. However, new figures show a sharp increase over the past year in violent crime, including sexual assault and offences with all types of weapons. They show non-violent burglary and theft edging up as well, and overall crime recorded by police rising by 14 per cent, its biggest jump in more than a decade.
This is no blip. While the total volume of police-recorded crime remains well below its 2004 peak, it has risen for each of the past three years. The rate of increase is accelerating and it is evident in all 44 police forces in England and Wales. Ministers will point to alternative statistics from the Crime Survey for England and Wales, which measures people’s experience of crime rather than counting incidents reported to police. This suggests that a steady long-term fall in crime is continuing, with a decrease last year of 10 per cent.
The closer that headline figure is examined, however, the less it means. The biggest category of crime shown to be falling in the survey is cybercrime, but the survey does not include online crimes against businesses. It is also considered less reliable as a gauge of “high harm, low volume” incidents such as knife attacks than of high volume crimes including burglary and vehicle theft. But the signs are that increases in these categories will feed through into the survey too.
Violent crime scares large numbers of people. High volume crime unsettles many more. When both are rising the government has a problem, as Amber Rudd, the home secretary, appears to realise. Writing for The Times’ Red Box, she promises a “step change” in how the government responds to crime, starting with a new “serious violence strategy” to be published in the spring.
An internal progress report by the team working on that strategy contains little in the way of concrete proposals that have not been tried before and that might deliver Ms Rudd’s promised change. The final version will have to be much more detailed and innovative to reassure police, let alone the public.
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Some of the police-recorded crime data reveals more about changes in society and police priorities than in criminal behaviour. The number of sexual offences logged last year rose from 111,000 to 136,000. Much of the increase is attributed to women’s greater willingness to report sex crimes. Total drug crime fell, continuing a five-year trend, mainly because police no longer target drug possession for recreational use. Despite these caveats, the Office for National Statistics believes at least some of the increase in crime is “genuine”. It cannot be explained away, but it needs to be explained. The Home Office draft document highlights a “sea change in formal encounters between police and young people since the mid-2000s”, Whitehall jargon for one effect of the falling number of police on the streets, now at its lowest since 1996. The use of stop-and-search powers to disarm potentially violent youngsters has also fallen by 70 per cent since Theresa May intervened in 2011 out of concern that black teenagers were being unfairly targeted.
Turf wars between drug gangs and young people’s desire for self-defence may be other factors behind an epidemic of knife crime, but the challenges facing England and Wales are not unique. Similar ones face Australia, France, Germany and Sweden. A notable exception is Scotland, where crime continues a long-term decline and the nationalist government has kept a promise to put 1,000 more police on the streets.
Ms Rudd is considering new laws to tighten the sale of offensive weapons, including acids, but enforcing existing laws is her most urgent task. Fighting crime is not rocket science. Neither can it be done on the cheap.