According to the British Crime Survey, overall crime is falling and, according to police records, it is probably stable after allowing for changes in the method of recording. In any event, since the mid-1990s, under both the BCS and police records, crime has fallen. This still leaves us with the fourth highest crime rate among the other 39 European countries covered by the Council of Europe’s, European Sourcebook of Crime, and it only means that crime is ten times what it was in the 1950s instead of eleven or twelve times.
Why has it come down? And can the police claim credit? There are two main reasons.
First, some high-volume crimes have fallen because private householders have spent a lot of their own money defending themselves. The 17-country International Crime Victims Survey found in 2000 that a higher proportion of people in England and Wales had burglar alarms than any other country in the survey: 34% compared with an average of 15%. We had also spent more on special door locks. Some 69% had such locks, second only to the Netherlands where the figure was 70%. The 17-country average was only 44%. The Home Office estimated in 2000 that, for every stolen car, £370 had been spent on security and another £320 on insurance, a total of £690. For every domestic burglary about £330 had been spent on defensive devices and another £100 on insurance, £430 in total. In England and Wales in 2000 about £4.9 billion was spent on security, or about £200 per year for every household. (The Economic and Social Costs of Crime, Home Office Research Study 217, 2000.)
Second, detection rates have been falling but imprisonment rates and sentence length have been rising. In 1951, 47% of indictable offences were detected by the police. By 1991 the rate had fallen to 29% and the latest figure is 23% in 2003. (Criminal Statistics 2003, Table 1.1) In 1992 crown courts sentenced 47% of those convicted of indictable offences to immediate custody. In 2002 they sentenced 66% to immediate custody. Over the same period, average sentence length increased from 21.1 months to 27.8 months. (Criminal Statistics 2002, Table 4.16.) Partly as a result of these changes in sentencing , the prison population has risen since 1993, from about 46,000 to around 74,000 today. The incapacitation effect of locking up repeat offenders goes a long way towards explaining the fall in crime since the mid-1990s. Criminals can’t break into your house while they are behind bars.
Since police detection rates have fallen over the period from 1991 to 2003, it is not easy to attribute the fall in crime to police success. On the contrary, if the police had played their part more effectively we might have got crime down even more – perhaps to the extent that we no longer had the fourth highest crime rate in Europe.