Police numbers for crime prevention

norman dennis, 22 December 2004

Mr Kaye has raised a key issue in pointing out that the number of crimes has increased out of all proportion to the increase in the number of police officers and the “police extended family”.
In the early 1990s there were 128,000 police officers year by year in England and Wales. The numbers declined somewhat in 1994-95, and then dropped sharply from 1997 to 2000, to 124,000.
The police services had regained their 1997 numbers of police officers by 2002.
None of this of course, discouraged the media from supporting the Home Office’s version of its successes. In December 2001, for example, the BBC headlined the exciting news that “UK police numbers leap”.
Numbers have increased again since, to 138,000. This is a record high, and therefore, of course, an improvement to be warmly applauded by everyone whose interest is in the primacy of crime prevention, the great leading principle of policing in this country from the first days of the Sir Robert Peel’s Metropolitan Police to the 1960s.
When he was Home Secretary, Mr Blunkett constantly referred to the “record numbers” of police officers and to “falling crime”.
But the proper context for assessement is the increase in police numbers since the 1960s as compared with the increase in crime numbers since the 1960s.
Crime surged upwards from the early 1960s to the mid-1990s, and on the streets the surge continued until the beginning of this century. Police numbers grew very slowly.
That is the meaningful context for assessing “record police numbers” and “falling crime”. In that context, the rise in police numbers is welcome but grossly insufficient for crime prevention, and the fall in crime numbers leaves crime levels far above those of even the high-crime decade of the 1980s.
On the streets, of course, where the police role is essential in crime prevention, the fall in robberies of personal property does not get us back even to the levels of 1997, the year in which Mr Straw became Home Secretary.
As Mr Kaye implies, it is as if at the battle of the Little Big Horn Custer had been joined by another hundred soldiers, and five hundred of the surrounding Sioux and Cheyenne had gone home. There is “a record number” in the Seventh Cavalry and “a fall in the enemies’ numbers”. That’s all right then.