Time for conversation on what people want from policing, says Welsh lead

12 August 2022

Police Federation Welsh lead Nicky Ryan has called for a nationwide conversation on what people want from policing after a new report found most victims of burglary, robbery and theft were not “getting the justice they deserve”.

Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) found a number of shortcomings in some forces across England and Wales in dealing with the offences.

It comes against a backdrop of recent Home Office data which showed just 6.6 per cent of robbery offences and 4.2 per cent of thefts in England and Wales resulted in a charge in the year to December 2021.

But Nicky said new and ever-increasing demands on the police were having an inevitable impact on how the service was delivered with officers often overwhelmed by extra paperwork or trying to tackle a new wave of online crime.

Responding to the HMICFRS findings, she said: “It is not surprising - but it’s not acceptable - and I think what the report says is very concerning.

“I think there are a number of reasons that sit behind what has been said and like most things within policing it is a complex picture.

“There are three main issues, the first one being demand; the second one being bureaucracy and bureaucratic processes which are often not created within the police service but are imposed by organisations like the Home Office; and the third one is uplift - the 20,000 Boris’ Bobbies we keep hearing about.

“There are not 20,000 new officers and it is not an increase of 20,000 new officers. It is simply taking police officer numbers back to where they were in 2010/2011. We are still 12,000 officers below what they were then.”

Nicky warned the solution to the issues surrounding the public confidence in policing was not always as simple as increasing the budget and said other agencies had their part to play.

She said: “We would always love more money and more staff but I think it is a more complicated picture than that.

“Policing is very often referred to as the service of last resort so when other agencies run out of capacity and are unable to fulfil the demands on them, that demand comes to the police because it often revolves around the vulnerability of people.

“We hear a lot about the Welsh Ambulance Service reaching capacity so when there is no ambulance available, quite frequently it is the police service that is sent to provide first aid and (officers) are tied up with a patient.

“And when there is a missing child, after 4.30pm or 5pm when Social Services finish for the day, that responsibility then moves to policing.

“I think there needs to be a massive conversation throughout the country about what the public actually wants from policing: is it for us to solve crime? Or is it to be all things to all people?”

Nicky acknowledged people expected to receive an appropriate response from the police if their home had been burgled and admitted recent media reports of failures to investigate certain crimes was damaging.

But she said the new and growing range of online crime coupled with the additional bureaucratic demands now placed on everyday policing were taking up a lot of time.

She said: “The Home Office asks us to do a lot of returns on statistics and to record a lot of data which has absolutely no benefit to a member of the public at the end of a crime.

“I think social media has created a whole new range of offences and mobile phones have created a whole new range of offences. We are catching up with the technology but we are never going to be in front of it.

“And it has also made people victims of crime that would never previously have been victims of crime and it makes people perpetrators of crime who would never normally have been a perpetrator of crime.

“And these new offences are very, very resource-intensive to try to investigate.”

Andy Cooke, HM Chief Inspector of Constabulary, warned failing to target burglary, robbery, and theft - classed as serious acquisitive crime (SAC) - was damaging public confidence in policing.

He added: “The response to SAC from policing isn’t consistently good enough. Too many offenders remain at liberty and most victims aren’t getting the justice they deserve.

“Forces are missing opportunities to identify and catch offenders, from the moment a member of the public reports the crime to the point where a case is finalised.

“Depending on where in England and Wales they live, some victims of SAC are more likely than others to get a thorough investigation from their Force. This can’t be justified.”