Demise of beat policing key to crime ridden UK, says think-tank
Britain has one of the least effective police services in the developed world, according to a right wing independent think-tank.
Researchers from Civitas, the Institute for the Study of Civil Society, compared Britain with France, Germany and the US and found that, contrary to Home Office claims, crime rates have soared in the last 40 years.
It said the number of domestic burglaries is five times greater than it was in 1964 and there are now thirty times more robberies of personal property.
At the same time the number of police officers has failed to keep pace with increasing crime rates. In 1921 there was an average of two crimes per officer. In 2002/3, each officer dealt with an average of 44 crimes.
But the report says inadequate police numbers do not reveal the full picture. It blamed the rise in criminality on the demise of beat policing in the UK.
It said: “The hostility of the law enforcement establishment to the old beat policing method is a significant factor in the police forces inability to get to grips with rising crime.”
But ACPO has dismissed the reports conclusions as simplistic and misleading.
Chris Fox, President of ACPO, said: “It is disappointing to see the headlines of the report that has used conflicting evidence to draw simplistic conclusions. Whilst it accepts that police officers now have twenty times the workload that officers previously had, and also accepts society has changed dramatically in that period of time, it then reaches a conclusion about the quality of policing that does not reflect the reality of the services achievements.
“Beat policing has the support of chief officers, but cannot be the same as beat policing in a vastly different society such as that of the 1950s.”
The report urged the service to rethink its approach and adopt the broken windows style of policing favoured in New York, where police officers tackle low level acts of disorder before they escalate into more serious crime.
It concluded that rapidly rising lawlessness had made Britain an unpleasant and dangerous place.
But the report added that, even with improved policing, the decline in moral values was such that crime would continue to increase anyway.