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Courtesy of the Times.
Britain’s biggest police force is dismissing about a third of all crime reports after only one telephone call with the victim, it can be revealed. Burglaries, low-level assaults, criminal damage, theft and affray are all on a list of crimes that can be dismissed without being investigated under a policy secretly introduced by the Metropolitan Police last year. The Met, which used to send a police officer to every crime if requested by the victim, assesses 37 per cent of reports over the telephone, according to a report seen by The Times.
Staff at the telephone and digital investigation unit [TDIU], a triaging zone for crime reports, inform the majority of victims that their cases will not be pursued according to criteria such as a lack of CCTV or forensic leads.
If the suspect in specified offences cannot be identified by the victim or witness the crime is assessed “out”, meaning that it will not be investigated. The force has cited budget cuts and a need to focus on surging violence and sexual offences. The unit, which looked at 200,000 crime reports over nine months last year, is assessing out 80 per cent of reports on average, usually after a single phone call with the victim. The dropped reports account for 29.6 per cent of crimes reported to the Met. The true number of cases that were not pursued is likely to be higher, but the Met was unable to provide figures for crimes assessed out by other departments. In addition, 1.26 million calls to the Met’s non-emergency 101 number were abandoned last year, with callers having to wait 15 minutes on average to get through. The number of abandoned calls was 50 per cent higher than in 2016, although the Met says the average time is now 85 seconds after a new system was introduced. Police forces across the country are increasingly dropping investigations into so-called “volume crime” — the lower-level offences which affect the majority of victims — because of budget cuts. The Met has made £1 billion in savings since 2010 and this year its officer numbers fell below 30,000 for the first time in 15 years. Cressida Dick, the Met commissioner, has said that a lack of resources was a factor in homicides reaching a ten-year high.
The TDIU staff handle crime reports using an assessment policy introduced in April. Lower-level offences are rejected for investigation according to specific criteria. There is a list of more than 25 crimes that must be investigated, including homicide, firearms offences, hate crime, domestic violence and sexual assault. Low-level assaults, burglaries where no weapon was carried, antisocial behaviour, robbery, criminal damage, theft and affray may all be assessed out under specific circumstances. Critics of the assessment regime say that relatively serious crimes may slip through the net. Susan Hall, a Conservative member of the London Assembly said that it was not acceptable to ignore crimes such as burglary and assault. “The Met clearly needs to innovate to become more efficient, but what’s unacceptable is for reporting changes to come at the expense of a responsive police force,” she added. Mark Simmons, a deputy assistant commissioner, said: “Every crime reported to us is investigated, whether that’s through face-to-face contact with an officer or detective or through alternative routes such as the TDIU. But like any organisation we have got a budget to work to and we have to make decisions about what we prioritise.” He said that crime diverted to the TDIU could be redirected to frontline officers later if new leads emerged.