Police Crime Reporting

With the release of the Interim report by Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary, Tom Winsor, highlighting that as many as 20% of crimes reported to the police go unrecorded, it seems to have been a week of yet another round of news stories focussing on our broken society and the failure of those responsible for guarding our safety to report our concerns when they are raised.
Spokesmen were quick to assure us that only 13 out of 43 forces had so far been inspected, which is actually rather disingenuous, as in reality it accounts for a much greater percentage than we were led to believe.
In one interview it was stated that 'the guidelines for recording crimes is quite clear; it is just the difference in interpretation....'
I would argue that if the guidelines are indeed so clear then one would hope they would leave little room for such obvious differences in interpretation. This is of course giving the benefit of doubt to those forces where there is the suspicion that some massaging of statistics has taken place in the relentless move towards meeting targets, regardless of the reality of the world in which we all live.
It is only natural that in a concerted effort to assure us that they are on top of things, there will be those within the police force who will want to interpret reported criminal activity in a different way. This degree of fiddling with the facts may not be right, but it is only human nature when you are constantly lambasted from all sides.
However, the impact of the 14 cases of rape and other serious sexual offences that went unrecorded is unacceptable.by anyone's standards.
What we can expect of course, now that the word is out, is a huge flurry of activity in those forces who have not yet been subjected to the inspection. They will certainly be on their mettle now, and spending an inordinate amount of time on the necessary paperwork to ensure that they come out squeaky clean. This is not policing, this is ticking boxes. I for one want to see our police on the streets, where they belong as a visible deterrent.
This very public failure can only serve to demoralise the bobby on the beat, when locally at least, they seem to be doing their best with increasingly unrealistic expectations of what can be achieved.
The government plays a large part in this too, in wanting to boost their popularity by re-assuring us that crime is down. I for one, may well be happier to see it rise, in the knowledge that at least they are not just trying to paint a rosy, but deceptive, picture.
It all reminds me a bit of Walter Mitty, “an ordinary, often ineffectual person who indulges in fantastic daydreams of personal triumphs".