Britain’s Left Has a Statistical Problem With Policing

This today on the problems with policing and the rise of violent, unsolved crime in the UK:

Police are neglecting to tackle serious, violent crimes and focusing instead on more minor offences as they strive to meet government targets, the man charged with shaping the future of policing in England and Wales has admitted.

Peter Neyroud, chief executive of the National Policing Improvement Agency, said that over the past five years police had focused on increasing the number of “offences brought to justice”. But the former chief constable admitted that this meant that catching a murderer carried no more importance than apprehending someone who had stolen a bottle of milk.

“There has been, in the minds of many professionals, me included, a neglect of the serious,” Mr Neyroud said. “Because detecting a stolen milk bottle counts the same as detecting a murder . . . you get your points from, not necessarily milk bottles, but certainly in mid-range, volume crime, rather than serious crime.”

This is the first time that a senior officer has suggested that the target-driven culture is diverting police from properly investigating more serious crimes. His comments reinforce those of rank-and-file officers at the weekend who said that police were putting more effort into catching burglars than investigating a paedophile ring. . . .

Read the gory details here. In America, local police are precisely that – local. The state sets the qualifications, but it is the local populace who either directly elect their police leadership, or their immediate local government appoints the police leadership. Thus, accountability of the police is directly to the populace. That is not to suggest that local control is a panacea, but what you get is far less beauracracy and a proper ordering of priorities. What you do not get are crimes screened out or the situations described in some of the British police blogs such as here, here and here. If there is a rise in violent crime, the police chief is going to be addressing it and he is going to try and make the populace feel like the police are concerned, or he will find himself on the unemployment line.

And that is how it should be. No one knows better the needs of the local community than the locals. But the neo-liberals of today just don’t see it that way. A defining characteristic of the left is their belief either that the electorate cannot be trusted, or that they, the left, can do a better job of telling the electorate how to live than the electorate can possibly decide on their own. Either way, the left arrives at the same point - they seek to centralize power and limit the say of the electorate (much like with EU treaties). They dictate from on high rather than provide the general framework and the support necessary for the locals to govern themselves.

And when that happens, you get situations such as the UK finds itself in today. The Labour Government is ever quick to quote a mass of statistics to show how Britain is thriving under Labour’s sage stewardship. Indeed, several members of the Labour government have appeared in the news over the past year quoting statistics to show how much improved police performance has been on their watch. But if you lift the knickers on those statistics, it becomes quickly apparent that there are huge systemic problems.

So what was Labour’s response to this problem: “. . . [T]he Home Office [is] prepare[ing] to publish a “violence action plan” aimed at reducing the number of most serious violence, serious sexual offending and domestic violence offences.” Insanity.