Why Is Fear Of Crime Out Of Step With The Risk

[jake-the-peg]

In a recent News question AOG suggested the London Murder rate was growing when in fact it was shrinking.

Putting aside a suspicion that people sometimes deliberately make such suggestions to promote an incorrect picture of lawlessness for their own political gains there seems to be a fear of (particularly violent) crime that doesn't match the actual statistical risks.

How is it that this comes about?

Is it just press sensationalising or is it an age thing? do we become more fearful as we get older?

[Orderlimit]

And then there is the problem with staffing levels which adds to the problems mentioned.

One example of many is a divisional central police station that looks after an area with a population of approximately 200k. In the day time there are on average 450 staff at the station with an average between 8 and 15 front-line officers responding to emergency calls, dealing with detainees the night before, dealing with front-counter reports and all the other routine reports (domestics / shoplifters, accidents and other endless task).

After 6pm, there are only about 70 people in the station, after say 10pm there are only probably 10 -15 front-line officers available. SMT (senior Management teams), recently tried to get round this dangerous problem by banning 'double-crewing' with many officers being sent to even violent incidents alone.

So what happens is the volume of work gets so high and back-logs, therefore some incidents do not get dealt with correctly, even the serious stuff. For information, even one shop-lifter could take up one officers whole shift if offender is arrested due to hideous amounts of procedure / bureaucracy.

So what are the other members of staff upto?

[Orderlimit]

Well there are the endless amount of 'senior officer' having meeting after meeting then having meetings about those meetings which is where more bureaucracy is invented which only affects front-line response officers. The new breed of accelerated promotion officers are busy studying in promotion workshops and only engaging in work (such as minor hate-crimes) that can be used as evidence in appraisals and interviews along with inventing more nonsense with further gridlocks the few actual workers.

There will always be the over-staffed diversity units sending hundreds of useless emails to the front-line staff criticising their work, identfiying new fashionable buzz-words and the creating more bureaucracy in the form of monitoring forms and on-line workshops to be completed by the end of the week.

The hate-crime units and domestic violence units will simply monitor the work of the few response teams (which is already monitored and audited) and send criticism from their armchairs (between 8am and 4pm).

Serious crime is on the increase and the now small re-active CID units cant keep up with all the work especially when SMT demand these real specialist units take on work that shouldn't be in their remit to help clear backlogs then the internal arguments occur over whose remit is what.

What ends up happening is the only work that really gets the proper attention is very serious crime / major crime and what ever is the latest 'hot potatoe' in the media or parliament is (usually nonsense).

[Orderlimit]

There is a lot more nonsense that goes on internally but the result is having hardly any coppers pro-actively patrolling the streets and re-acting to crime far too late usually taking an investigation from 'suspect identified' to 'suspect unknown' causing even more time consuming work. SMT simply will have more meetings to try and identify what the problems are and shuffle staff around and create more monitoring forms etc

[ummmm]

Birdie - The police following up the robbery of my son restored a bit of my faith. They had a 'nip in the bud' attitude.

The problem isn't the police per se. It's the attitude of individual officers. The female officer in case 1 looked at me like I was a life long down trodden victim. That is so far from the truth. The truth is, if you hit me, I'll hit you back, if I can't hit you back in that moment, learn to sleep with your eyes open.

He's long gone btw :-)