Burglary victims could be asked to email evidence to police rather than have an officer attend the crime scene, a police chief has said.
Sara Thornton, the chair of the National Police Chiefs Council, said that big funding cuts could mean those burgled could be asked to send video and pictures of the aftermath.
Crime victims are facing a postcode lottery after the head of the Metropolitan police said he believed an officer should be sent to investigate every burglary, in contrast with Thornton’s position.
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe said: “In the Met, certainly while I’m here, we will visit burglaries and investigate them. I think it is a serious crime. If somebody comes into your home, I think you should reasonably expect the police to come and investigate it … For me it’s an important thing we should investigate.”
Leicestershire police have run an experiment where burglaries at addresses with odd numbers are not fully investigated and do not have full forensic work undertaken.
The context for the changes in the way police investigate burglaries is a likely large cut in government funding, with forces expecting another 25% reduction by 2020.
Thornton said forensic evidence could be gathered without a police officer visiting the scene of a crime and there would have to be changes to how burglaries are investigated to save money. “Either officers get there quickly and catch the offenders red-handed or forensic evidence is gathered from the scene. If the offenders have fled the scene before the police are called then fingerprints, footwear marks and DNA could be gathered without sending an officer.
“At the very least, a professional scenes-of-crime officer is the most appropriate person to retrieve such evidence. But as we all have access to more technology it is easy to envisage how victims might be able to quickly upload photographs or video on to digital crime reports that could enable officers to be sent to catch the offender much more quickly.”
Writing in a blogpost on the NPCC website, she said burglary was at a 30-year low. “Does it make sense to send a uniformed officer to the scene of a burglary to take a statement and look for forensic evidence, then a scenes-of-crime officer to gather the forensic evidence and finally a detective to investigate the crime?”
Thornton, a former chief constable of Thames Valley police, said that how police fulfil their key mission to prevent and detect crime will change and that chiefs like her had to be honest about what this might mean.
Police chiefs do not yet know what scale of cuts they will have to implement. That will become clearer in the autumn but the Home Office budget, the main funder of the police, is not protected.
Hogan-Howe said: “We are going to have to look around Christmas about what all this lack of money means. We just don’t know yet. It’s clearly going to be significant on top of what we’ve already lost. Then we are going to have to look seriously at our priorities.
“In some areas we are going to have to articulate where we are going to struggle to do everything we used to do.
“I’ve made clear patrolling, responding to emergencies we’ve got to do, neighbourhood policing we’ve got to do, and we’ve got to investigate serious crime.”
