Shock horror – crime will rise as the economy takes a downturn. The sensational leaked Home Office letter that made the headlines yesterday is, indeed, blindingly obvious.
Shame on the BBC and the national papers for splashing headlines that could be easily deduced by the thickest child in school.
It’s no embarrassment for the Home Office to have to admit to a link between the economy and crime and this merely made the BBC and Tory press seem vindictive and willing to grab at any knife that will help bring down the government.
What the headlines should have concentrated on was the effect the downturn could have on the police.
Cash strapped constabularies – already having to spend too much of their budget on admin rather than frontline policing – may be forced to make “some difficult choices in terms of police numbers and priorities”.
In other words, just as there are more criminals around, there could be fewer police.
And seeing as how this admin burden is largely a result of spin-motivated and useless government target setting, maybe this is where the media should have concentrated its criticism.
While in principle a good thing, targets overkill by the government has harmed not only the police service but everything else that moves – from the NHS to education.
It has resulted in countless hours and our taxes being wasted by public service employees having to jump through government-set hoops.
The intention, of course, is to convince us that we’re paying more and more for services that get better and better.
As a result of target setting we read “Crime is falling”, “Hospitals improving”, “Children better educated”.
But that isn’t the experience of anyone actually living in this world, and you don’t have to be well informed to have heard the whistleblowers working in the front line of these public services who
say they could be doing a much better job if they weren’t so hand tied.
The failure of the police to put a public face to their service is one of the most damaging results of the increasing lengths of time spent on red tape.
In my own experience, while the occasional patrol car sweeps through, I can truthfully say I have not seen a police officer on foot in my town for at least a year – or even on a bicycle! My town has its fair share of low level disturbance and hostility from young men hanging around the station and precincts but, they too, seem all too aware that there is no visible face of the law.
In an economic downturn where “poverty” (or as some would say, consumer envy) creates increased crime such as burglary and street robbery, you need a higher police profile, not a lower one.
If police are forced to make “difficult choices” let it be to listen to the frontline officers who would rather spend their time fighting crime – the reason they joined in the first place – than wasting their efforts on unnecessary paperwork which results in tables and figures that no-one believes.
No more heroes
My view is backed up in a report published today from the Reform group who reveal that only four out of ten people would intervene if they saw a group of youths vandalising a bus shelter.
Isn’t this understandable considering these youths are quite aware they could turn round and vandalise you instead, with little prospect of being stopped before they swagger away?
If you’re really unlucky they could be carrying weapons – and it is not unknown for people who intervene in these kinds of cases to be detained at the station and themselves questioned.
The Reform group says our lack of ‘have a go’ heroes is due to policing that is too distant, dominated by targets and government control.
The answer has to be to give back more control to the constabularies, and, of course, more street CCTV schemes – not to replace beat cops but to augment them.
ID chancers
It was interesting to see from a TV news report how the Tories jumped on the leaked Home Office letter as a good reason to scrap the national ID card scheme. So where’s the connection, you may well ask?
Just that the money saved will be able to bail out those cash strapped services. But is that likely?
Despite my increasing doubts about the desirability of the ID card scheme, especially in the light of the almost-weekly data losses by public bodies, I can’t help thinking this was cheeky political opportunism. But if it was a choice between more police on the beat or ID cards for all, I know which way I’d vote.
Don’t want to be alarmist
Obviously, not wanting to seem pleased about it, but if there is this predicted increase in burglary – with property crime predicted to rise to 7 per cent in 2008 and a further 2 per cent next year – there will be an increased need for the services provided by installers.
It’s not the done thing for the security industry to trade on peoples’ fears and it rarely does (wouldn’t you agree?) But you can’t escape the fact that the security business is dependent on crime and is said to have weathered the last recession partly because of that.
Personally, I don’t think it’s wrong to make plain the benefits a security system would bring in the face of a local or regional crime wave without playing on peoples’ fears.
Look at the wonderful example set by our highly paid – and until recent years – highly regarded legal profession.
Installers wouldn’t, and probably couldn’t, stoop so low as some of the ambulance-chasing lawyers advertising all over the media.
I don’t think we’ll hear radio ads along the lines of “Leave your windows open. If our alarm doesn’t catch a crook in six weeks, we’ll give you your money back”.
Seeking compensation is a right for anyone who has had their life blighted by injury. But it’s partly thanks to these ‘no-win-no-fee’ services that our public bodies are so bogged down in red tape to protect themselves from compensation claims. As a result they’re not spending our cash on the frontline.
I’m not sure where lawyers stand in the “respect” charts these days. It was always estate agents and journalists that came bottom.
There can’t be many estate agents left and I can’t really comment on my own esteemed trade, but wouldn’t it be to the benefit of the public – not least to the legal profession itself – to curb this unsavoury money grubbing that ultimately hurts us all?
Looks like it might be going that way.
The perfect web story
We keep a close eye on our site statistics here at info4security.com, to see what’s hot and what’s not in our “most popular story” charts.
Stories that are popular with visitors to I4S at the moment include anything to do with megapixel cameras, video analytics, fuel theft or metal theft.
So expect to see at any time the perfect security web story: “Megapixel camera’s analytics catch metal theft gang in stolen fuel heist”.
If I could get Paris Hilton in there somewhere it would be even better. I’m working on it.
See you next time.