The police response to burglary, robbery and thefts is a postcode lottery with “unacceptably low” charge rates, the police watchdog has warned.
HM Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) found that victims are being failed because the crimes have been deprioritised by police forces, who are battling other demands and spending almost a third of their time responding to non-crime incidents.
A report published on Thursday found that acquisitive crimes are rarely deemed to fall into the “high harm” category, meaning they are not fully investigated.
Only 4 per cent of theft offences and 6 per cent of robberies result in a prosecution in England and Wales, and the majority of cases are closed with the marker “investigation complete – no suspect identified”.
Andy Cooke, HM chief inspector of constabulary, said: “Those charge rates are far too low for offences that have a significant impact on our communities and they need to improve.”
He told a press conference that some forces were making “basic errors” when responding to burglaries, but that police were also struggling to balance the workload from complex areas of crime and demand from dealing with mental health and medical incidents.
“Around 30 per cent of the time of most frontline officers is spent doing things other than what the public would reasonably expect them to do,” Mr Cooke said.
He previously told The Independent of cases where armed police were being deployed to cardiac arrests because ambulances “can’t cope” with demand, and said that policing was becoming the emergency service of “first, last and only resort”.
Speaking about Thursday’s report, the watchdog said that policing had also been hit by a decade of austerity, adding: “Thankfully we are seeing the uplift programme bringing 20,000 officers coming back in, but it will take some time before those officers are at a level where we can see a real difference.
“We have a national shortage of detectives, so experienced investigators may well have been placed in areas of policing away from this volume of crime.
“That demand, that inexperience, together with the pressures put on policing throughout that period of austerity have undoubtedly impacted on it.”
Mr Cooke warned of a “postcode lottery” that is seeing the response to victims governed by where they live.
The report said that some regional police forces do not have enough crime scene investigators or forensic experts to be deployed to burglaries, and each one has a different model for responding to such crimes.
Nearly a quarter of all thefts and domestic burglaries are concentrated in just 5 per cent of local areas, with London, Greater Manchester and the West Midlands seeing the highest figures.
The report said that some forces focus on preventing offences by looking at the drivers of theft, such as drug addiction and destitution, and police burglary “hotspots” to deter repeat offending.
But others do not, leaving perpetrators to re-offend and victims at risk of being targeted multiple times in an endless cycle of crime.
Mr Cooke called for police to go “back to basics” on investigations to ensure they do not miss opportunities to identify and catch offenders, help victims and stop repeat offending.
“With the resources they have, they are making basic errors and failing to do what would be deemed to be good practice,” he added.
The watchdog stopped short of backing Liz Truss’ call for police officers to be deployed in person to every domestic burglary, but said he did not think it was “too much to ask”.
