Fighting Crime (Public Engagement)

There seems to be a collective insanity, and no one knows where it started, its purpose or what it is achieving. Police officers feel increasingly that their integrity, effectiveness and efficiency is somehow being challenged and questioned for reasons they know not what. Understandably, they feel frustrated that their discretion has been taken away. It is no longer possible for police officers to decide whether a crime has been committed. I shall give the House one example. A new word has entered the English dictionary—something has been ““crimed””. People get pretty savvy and they have worked out that if they telephone and complain that their neighbour is playing their television too loudly, the police are likely to refer them to the environmental health department of the local authority. However, if they telephone and allege that their neighbours are involved in a serious domestic incident, the police respond immediately. One evening, we went to a house in Oxford where it was alleged that the husband was attacking his wife. That had been ““crimed”” as a domestic attack; the controller, or someone else, had already determined that a crime had taken place. When we got to the house, it was perfectly plain that no crime had been committed. The wife was downstairs and the husband, sadly, was upstairs watching Manchester United playing football. Even sadder, he was wearing his Manchester United strip. The only noise was him cheering loudly at the television. Clearly, that was not a domestic violence incident, but it took the police officers almost as much time and paperwork to get it ““de-crimed”” as it would have taken if they had arrested someone and taken them to St. Aldate's police station for committing an offence. It is crazy when police officers do not have the discretion to determine whether an offence has been committed. If we have policing by consent and the overwhelming majority of the public trust the integrity of police officers, as I believe they do, then it is clear that people are willing to trust police officers' ability to exercise their discretion rather than having policing controlled by Home Office-driven targets. Moreover, having spent 20 days with Thames Valley police and seen how things are ““crimed”” or not ““crimed””, one's confidence in police statistics is undermined. One feels that the controllers are often obliged to ““crime”” things to tick boxes rather than because crimes have been committed. What confidence can one place in national crime statistics? I was grateful to the Minister for Security, Counter-Terrorism, Crime and Policing for kindly coming to my constituency to see neighbourhood policing in Bicester. It is an excellent example of neighbourhood policing, with sworn officers, PCSOs and street wardens working together. As I have made clear in debates in Westminster Hall, neighbourhood policing, especially in my part of the world, is impressive. However, it largely depends on police officers who are allocated to neighbourhood policing teams not being taken away for other duties or having to cover shifts in their local police stations. It is understandably frustrating for local residents to have the benefit of a neighbourhood police officer for some time, only for him or her to disappear because they are taken away for other duties. Neighbourhood policing also requires good leadership and grip to ensure the maximum synergy between sworn officers, PCSOs and street wardens.