Policing has been hit hard by government spending cuts. Since 2010, funding has been cut by 19%. More than 21,000 officers’ jobs have been lost in the UK. In England and Wales, police numbers are now at their lowest since 1981, the year of the Brixton riots. At the same time, the long fall in crime has ended. The latest government crime survey, published last month, shows no change in crime overall – the first in many years. Meanwhile, police recorded crime is up by 9%. Homicide is at its highest for more than a decade, with a 12% increase in knife crime.
The connection between these trends is complex and disputed. Many of the causes of crime, especially those related to economic conditions, lie beyond the scope of police. At the same time, much of policing does not concern itself with crime fighting and detection. About 25% of police time is taken up by safety concerns, missing persons and suspicious circumstances reports, while domestic incidents account for a further 10%.
Few experts ever argued that the steady fall in crime in Britain from the 1990s until this year could be easily explained by increases in police numbers. The decline was, if anything, an international one, which seemed to reflect prosperous and domestically peaceful times. So it is sensible to be equally cautious about linking the current crime rise too simplistically to the fact that there are fewer police.
Nevertheless, police resources are under greater pressure now than in the recent past. Everyone in any business knows the dangers of being stretched too far. The shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, was correct to point out on Thursday that it is extremely difficult to do more with less. So the pressure for police efficiency – always a difficult concept to define – is very high.
In Scotland – and perhaps in England and Wales before long – that has meant forced mergers. Specialist functions, including firearms and major investigations, are now increasingly managed jointly across forces. The demands of cyber investigations are expanding fast. Not every area of the country is the same, but the current pressure on neighbourhood policing – still the core police function – is palpable. This underscores the degree to which police must juggle priorities, and reinforces the reality that new demands on police time and resources can only be accommodated at the expense of other functions.
All this forms the context in which one of Britain’s most accomplished police leaders, Sara Thornton, told this week’s policing summit that “desirable and deserving” issues such as the logging of misogyny allegations, even when no crime is committed, cannot be a priority for overstretched services that are confronted with issues like organised crime, terrorism, modern slavery and sexual assaults.
It is important not to misrepresent Ms Thornton’s words. She did not say hate crime should be de-prioritised. She did not say, as some rightwing journalists pretend, that political correctness had gone too far. All she said was that the possibility that the list of hate crimes may increase should be considered in the context of the police’s resource challenges. She said the same thing about historic investigations against someone who has died.
The reality is that misogyny is a poisonously and umbilically entwined part of many criminal investigations, including hate crime and domestic violence. Ms Abbott, a serial online target, knows that better than almost anyone. As she said on Thursday, if we give police more responsibilities they must be given more resources. The truth is that Ms Abbott and Ms Thornton are both making the same valid point.
