Tim highlights an interesting quote from the Daily Mail report on a Civitas study released today on police priorities:
"Arresting or fining someone for a trifling offence - such as a child stealing a Mars bar - is a good way of hitting the target and pleasing the Home Office. Amazingly, the chocolate theft ranks as highly as catching a killer."
This is a weighting problem. The impossible question of how many murders to a shoplift needs to be answered in order to prioritise police resources. Forcing the police to treat them all equally through a crude set of targets leads to the madness Civitas have identified.
In a recent report we looked at the cost of reported crime in London. Home Office research over a number of years has attempted to put a figure on the economic and social costs of different crimes. When we compared those estimates with the amount of recorded crime in the various London boroughs it illustrated how certain crimes, such as violence against the person, clearly place an enormous burden on communities. Government targets that treat all crime as equal entirely miss this difference and that ignorance leads to a lack of serious action to deter serious crime.
The other problem, as the Citivas study notes, is that deterring crime doesn't give you any 'sanction detections' at all. A £10-15,000 bonus is offered as an incentive to deprioritise deterrence.
In the end, even if we had more sensible targets they would still be a nuisance. There is no statistic that can be placed in a Whitehall spreadsheet that will properly capture the varied challenge and importance of fighting crime across the UK. The only people who are really able to hold the police to account properly are the people of the communities that each police force serves. We need to send for the sheriff and give everyone a democratic say over their local police force.
One final thing to note on this subject, ordinary people will stand a far better chance of effectively and appropriately holding police forces to account if they have the right information. That's why crime mapping is so important and it is a real shame that, as Mark Wallace notes on the TaxPayers' Alliance blog, no one was put up to defend the policy on Today this morning:
"Boris Johnson has pledged to introduce crime mapping in London, and the Conservatives have been supportive of the idea, so it beggars belief that they weren't willing to put anyone up for interview to promote or defend the idea on the BBC's flagship current affairs radio programme. By failing to put anyone up, they were empty chaired and Paddick was given a free run at the idea, laying into it without anyone to argue in its defence. (It should be said that if Today are lacking someone to speak up for crime mapping in future, the TPA would be happy to stand in!)."
