This would be hilarious if it wasn't so tragic. Due to budget deficits to the tune of £400m, the Metropolitan police have now decided to "stop investigating low level crimes" such as any damage or theft of less than £50 with no forensic evidence.

Run and grab an old ladies handbag to steal her last £30? Nah, not interested. Run into a beleaguered charity shop and nab some clothes off the rail? Sure, go ahead. Wake up in the morning to find your car mirror smashed by some scrote? Tough, deal with it.

You can read about it here http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk...-a8002746.html

On one hand, ok, of course, the police need to use their resources effectively and focus on serious crimes. However, when you consider the sheer magnitude of low level and petty crime in the UK, it amounts to a free pass for petty criminals, vandals and thugs who will now be even less afraid of our weak and often near-ineffectual legal system than they already were. They will likely sharpen up and start performing targeted runs on multiple low value crimes in order to stay under the radar.

The UK has to my eyes been steadily experiencing societal deterioration for the last couple of decades, and this is a further sign of it. Sad.

Very sad!

Oooh no! The Conservative Party is the party of law and order, don't you know?

If even the Tories can't be bothered to cough up cash for proper policing, what hope has that country got?

Just be sure you don't say anything nasty on Facebook or Twitter, as you can be sure they still have the resources to investigate "hate crimes".

I genuinely believe that to police the UK effectively would require a police force 2 or 3 times bigger than it is now, and not afraid to engage in a bit of rough and tumble. The problem as I see it is that the UK is so used to soft policing and lax sentencing that most of the fear of being caught by, or even encountering, a regular police officer has now pretty much disappeared in the UK's collective criminal psyche.

Our proportion of normal people to thugs, vandals, fraudsters and generally people who simply do not give a shit about the rest of society seems to grow visibly every year. I don't necessarily blame those people, I blame the successive generations of politicians who have allowed it to happen by putting their own petty infighting and cross-party squabbles above the collective needs and future of this country for so long that it's pretty much a lost cause. Combined that with an absolutely degenerate and immoral tabloid media and I really cannot see it getting any better in the forseeable future.

I forsee a future of semi-lawlessness for the UK unless something truly dramatic happens to change it.

As with everything, you only get what you paid for. If the budget is continuously reduced, and petty crime is rising, something has to go!

I love how you say that so matter-of-factly, like you had any slight inkling that the Met police would stop investigating a category of crime, or like it has ever happened before like this in the UK. Not even ex-Chiefs or other senior officers knew, so the chances of you predicting it are slim to none.

I think you'll find this has been the unofficial policy for years, 17 years ago when I had retail premises in the uk it was impossible to get the police to attend,
burgled 3 times (50k in stock taken the last time) - not interested,
credit card fraud - not interested,
shoplifting - don't even waste the phone call,
someone trying the sell stolen goods - not interested,
drug dealing - not interested,
child left in our shop while the parent went on holiday - not interested (about a week after the soham murders)

In fact the only time they where interested was
A threat to murder (Mental patient threatened my manager),
when we had a stink of rotting meat in the shop - they though it could be a dead body,
when they threatened to arrest me if anything should happen to the guys who did burgle us -I found out who did it - they went on to shoot a council employee in the face a week later because he woke them up clearing the car they stole the night before and dumped blocking the road outside their house.
when they tried to give us a parking ticket for parking outside and clearing the mess from the latest break-in - ignoring the 3 alarms going off and the fact the place had be ransacked.

they just don't seem to get if you clamp down on the small stuff then you'll have less of the big stuff later on.

The Police are so busy:



Apparently forty Police officers were on duty at the fair over eight days with only four arrests made in that time for minor incidents involving alcohol.

Here

and just for the lol's we actually backed onto the towns main police station, they still failed to ever hear our alarms.

meanwhile in switzerland the empire has taken over policing

Attached Thumbnails

 

more proof

Attached Thumbnails

 

The majority of the examples you use are not even examples of petty crime of less than £50, so I am not sure what kind of 'policy' they show other than general police incompetence, and we know they were and still are certainly guilty of that over the years.

I was told that their unofficial policy was not to attend or investigate crimes against businesses. most shop lifting was under £50, along with card fraud - it was during this time the police decriminalised card fraud.

Don't think it was incompetence either, just policy, no quick win, no quick crime solved stat, not interested, they openly said about the scroates that burgled us that they knew them, it was probably them but the stock would be long gone and they would be sued if they raided their house again. Which is nice to hear when your suddenly facing bankruptcy - we couldn't get insurance as the police's crime stats where deemed too low.

I feel like they are just confirming what they already do. I know up in Scotland my Dad had several thousands of pounds of garden machinery stolen and they didn't investigate or even check for forensic evidence. They took details of the crime (needed for insurance of course) and the serials numbers for the equipment and bunged it into some sort of database.

About a year later his rotavator turned up but the insurance had long since paid out anyway.

Just for balance, 12yrs ago, when my sister-in-law was shot at on her own front door step, it was 19hrs before the police attended.

10yrs ago, when my best mate was temp. duty sargeant in my home town, she had 8 police on the beat and 2 at the station, on a Friday night when there were approx. 10,000 people on the lash in one street (which is 55 yards long), including a few thousand visiting football fans, in a town with a population of 97k. Many times, she had to let people off with a warning because she knew the nearest free cell was over 40 miles away and there was nobody available to transport them.

Why so surprised?

The Swiss police doesn't do a lot of running around for these tiny crimes either. If any of them are solved it's by coincidence.

guess that depends on the village / town / city, never seen so many police as when the vending machine at the train station got smashed / robbed in our village, was like a murder scene, all taped off, vans etc

Where is Gene Hunt when you need him.

That would probably be the same in Groombridge. It turns into an excitement in small places