A police force didn’t bother to investigate 36,000 crimes which they didn’t think they could solve, representing 40 per cent of all reported cases, it has been revealed.
Devon and Cornwall Police shelved 11,000 incidents of criminal damage and 7,700 thefts and burglaries because they weren’t deemed worthy of further investigation after an initial assessment.
The revelation further fuels fears that the government’s swingeing budget cuts to forces across the country are stifling their ability to keep Britain safe.
I blame CSI (Miami, New York etc…) Silent Witness et al for this.
Contrary to what you may see on TV it’s actually quite hard to detect crimes… I know Dave Caruso can solve a murder or robbery in 45-minutes based on “multi-modal refection sorting” or “enhanced digital inverse polarised spectral quantum analysis” etc… but the 2-Scenes of Crime civvies we have can’t…
I suspect that the bulk of these figures fall into two rough camps:
1. car/house/shed etc. damaged or items stolen over night…no witness, CCTV etc…
2. same but enquiries are so protracted it’s deemed not cost effective to investigate- DNA lift off a stone used to knock over a gnome, for example.
I don’t know if anyone has been listening to the news but we have been cut by 20%…we are to loose another 700 officers by 2015, down from its peak of 3,500. It has already axed 300 posts with a further 400 to go.
In our force that’s quite a drop.
We are told to prioritise ruthlessly. Don’t spend time on investigations that are going nowhere…
More to come too…
It don’t help when we have neighbourhood officers ORDERED to walk around in high vis and NOT TO DEAL WITH CRIME! Their only remit is ASB…
Flip help us…
