Met says number of crime solved is "Woeful"

Thank you Commissioner Dick for saying what basically everyone in the nation already knows, but no one in our political establishment is willing to fix.

The top police officer in the country has admitted that the number of crimes being solved across the UK is ‘woeful’.

Scotland Yard Commissioner Cressida Dick said ‘I’m not proud’ that fewer offenders are facing punishment amid rising crime.

She spoke out about the ‘low’ number of criminals being prosecuted, adding that it did not reflect well on law enforcers. In an extraordinary indictment, Miss Dick said: ‘I am worried about the criminal justice system – the volume and complexity of crime is rising yet fewer people are appearing at court.

‘That is something none of us in the criminal justice system should be proud of. I am not proud of it.’ Miss Dick added that justice was ‘slowing down’ as it was taking far longer for officers to solve crimes due to the mass of digital evidence that now has to be analysed.

She said forces were having to ‘prioritise’ which crimes to investigate due to officers struggling with the record volume of offences being reported.

It means huge numbers of offenders – including rapists, thugs, burglars and thieves – have escaped justice and are free on the streets.

Crime recorded by police is at a 14-year high, yet detections have fallen in many crime types and the number of people formally dealt with by the criminal justice system fell last year to the lowest level since 1970.

Incredibly, police charge a suspect in fewer than one in ten crimes – meaning thousands of culprits escape scot-free. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner addressed the state of British policing in the Police Foundation’s John Harris memorial lecture.

She suggested officers may need a ‘magic wand’ to boost national crime detection rates, which are as low as 4 per cent in rape cases.

Miss Dick said: ‘It seems to me that – at least theoretically – a very large proportion of crimes that occur could be prevented or at least successfully investigated in the near future by the use of data that is already available and technology that is already developed.

‘By applying lots of resources and making the most of the data that we legitimately have now, we solve nearly 90 per cent of homicides in London.

‘But overall police detection rates nationally are low, woefully low in some instances, and the courts are emptying. So what magic wand would it take for us to be able to apply what we do in murder to so many other cases?’

Miss Dick said investigating crime had become more complex since she joined the service in 1983, which has meant justice is ‘slowing down’. She recalled how as a rookie officer she dealt with offenders who were often placed before the courts and convicted the next day.

Now it can take weeks or months just to download a victim or offender’s phone and analyse the contents for evidence.

She said: ‘Increasingly our challenge is one of prioritisation against high volumes. We have to try to make proportionate, ethical decisions about allocation of resources which are complex decisions and may be highly contested.’

You can have all the manpower, forensic specialists and equipment in the world but as long as the liberal judges allow career criminals off with slaps on the wrist, it will come to nothing. To solve the problem, we must first remove the "progressive" judges. Until then, all attempts to rid our society of its criminal elements will be in vain.