Police Priorities
Monday saw dozens of small traders’ vans converge on Parliament in protest against police inaction over the theft of tools from their vans. Four in five small traders are reported to have been victims of this crime, and the traders want police protection from it.
The traders have a point. While police can spare manpower to investigate online comments that some people object to, there is an epidemic of petty crimes such as shoplifting and burglary, as well as more serious crimes involving stabbings, that do not receive the attention they deserve.
I once asked John Major as Prime Minister to have civil servants grade regulations according to their seriousness. Open petrol containers next to a primary school might rate a 5, but selling apples in markets by the pound instead of by the kilo (then illegal) would rate no more than a 1. He asked me why, and I explained that with finite resources we should concentrate on the 4 and 5 ratings rather than on the 1 and 2. I almost convinced him, but he demurred on the grounds that it might make people think it was OK to disobey unimportant regulations.
The same suggestion could be made about today’s police. Crimes might be graded according to their seriousness, so police could concentrate on the ones that matter to people. Terrorism would count as a 5, as would murder. But so-called hate speech and upsetting people online would probably rate a 1. Armed with such a prioritization, police could concentrate on the more serious crimes.
The theft of the tools of a person’s trade deprives them of their livelihood and should merit police action. They might, for example, offer tracking devices for tradespeople to put among their toolboxes, enabling the thieves to be located, tried and imprisoned.
The Adam Smith Institute last year commissioned a poll to ascertain what people in Britain thought the national priorities should be, and the same might now be done at an official level to discover the criminal activities that people think should be given high priority. Such a ranking would enable police forces to concentrate resources where they matter most.
It would not only curb the more serious crimes. It would also bring reassurance to people that the police were being vigilant about their concerns and restore the confidence in the police that has declined of late.