Around 700 years ago a philosopher from Surrey came up with a rule that still bears his name: Occam’s razor, which advises that the simplest solution is usually the correct one. Wondering why a colleague has arrived at work with wet hair? Rain is more likely than a burst water main. Why is crime so high? Because crooks are getting away with it.
We’re led to believe that crime is ever so complicated, with all sorts of sociological causes including poverty, inequality, austerity and the like. But the reality is that if baddies get busted, crime goes down, while a tiny percentage of the population is responsible for vastly disproportionate amounts of offending.
One respected US study of almost 100,000 people found that 1% of the population commits 63.2% of all violent crime while, closer to home, a few years ago a single family from Norfolk was found to have been responsible for 250 burglaries in the region. Even prison, so often dismissed as ineffective due to high levels of reoffending, brings benefits to society by keeping miscreants off the streets, if only a little while.
Speak to any off-duty officer and they’ll tell you they’re on first-name terms with many of the ‘clients’ they come into contact with, who often steal goods to sell on, the same faces taking the same product lines from the same shops day in, day out.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Last month West Midlands Police released figures that indicate with proper policing comes proper results: over the past two years the force’s efforts have brought about a 25% reduction in knifepoint robbery, a particularly nasty, dangerous and traumatising crime that retailers are subjected to far too often.
Over the same period West Midlands officers arrested 60% more suspected shoplifters, their efforts resulting in a 235% increase in offenders being brought to justice for retail crime. It’s too early to tell if the shoplifting purge will bring a comparable reduction in incidents to the knife-crime crackdown, but I’d wager it will.
How has West Midlands brought about such striking changes? The force hasn’t made this explicitly clear, only saying it “improved the way” officers “respond to crime reports”, and “transformed” its “policing model and call-handling systems”.
Occam’s razor tells us, though, that this transformation almost certainly involved officers bucking current policing trends by turning up when retailers report shoplifting, looking at CCTV footage, then identifying and nabbing perps they recognise on sight. Just a hunch.
As with West Midland’s figures, it’s too early to tell if the dedicated neighbourhood policing teams the government has promised will bring about a reduction in crime – whether this happens will probably be down if reality stacks up against policy promises.
If it does, it will be a good day for all. If not, we don’t need further initiatives, just a return to first principles: arrest people who steal.
