Police are failing to record a staggering
one in five crimes, including victims' reports of sexual offences and violence.
Almost a million 999 calls are ignored every year due to an obsession with
hitting targets.
The scale of the
problem is revealed today by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary, which
describes it as 'inexcusably poor and indefensible'.
The watchdog
discovered that 19 per cent of reported crimes are dismissed by forces across
the country, with hundreds of rapes and violent offences wrongly recorded as
'no crimes' or removed from force statistics 'for no good reason'. Inspectors
found:
The report says
victims are being 'discredited' by police due to a 'target mentality on the
front line'. This is resulting in serious crimes being missed, even when they
are reported.
In the worst forces,
more than a third of reported offences were disregarded.
Yesterday, Her
Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary Tom Winsor
said hundreds of thousands of victims were being denied justice. 'The first duty of the police is to protect the public
and reduce crime,' he said. 'A national crime-recording rate of 81 per cent is
inexcusably poor.
'This is not about
numbers and dry statistics; it's about victims and the protection of the
public.'
The damning report
released today reveals officers are routinely failing victims of rape and
sexual offences. Almost half of the 43 forces in
In one instance, a
man who raped a drunken woman after leading her into a wood on the pretext of
taking her on a walk to sober her up escaped justice simply because the victim
had taken some of her clothes off beforehand.
Mr Winsor said police appeared to have a 'principle of
presumed consent' to rape. He added: 'The police should immediately
institutionalise the presumption that the victim is to be believed.'
Last year, police
recorded 3.7million offences. HMIC reviewed 10,267 reports of crime, listening
back to 999 calls before looking at the way the incident was handled and
recorded. It found that even when crimes were correctly recorded, many were
later removed from the system as 'no crimes'. One in five of the 3,246
decisions to cancel a crime record was incorrect.
And a third of
victims were not told their case had been dropped.
The audit also
looked at punishments, concluding one in five offenders who received a caution,
warning or fixed penalty notice should have been taken to court or faced a
stiffer penalty. In one force, an assistant chief constable sent an email to
staff complaining that levels of serious acquisitive crime were too high and
demanding that officers should investigate first and record later.
'It resulted in
victims not being believed when they reported crimes and even discredited,'
inspectors found. They also found evidence of supervisors interfering to cut
the level of crime recorded by 'discrediting' the victim.
A national survey of
17,000 officers found a fifth had felt under pressure not to record a crime in
the last six months.
HMIC
concluded: 'A number of forces accepted that undue performance pressure had
adversely affected crime recording in the past and the culture of chasing
targets as ends in themselves had distorted crime recording decisions.'
The worst forces
were Hampshire, Merseyside,
In one case, the
robbery of a young woman who was punched and kicked by an attacker who stole
her trainers was reclassified as assault after an officer decided her shoes
must have fallen off.
Officers also failed
to protect a boy who told his teacher he had been hit by his father at home.
Despite previous
reports of the man beating his children, police dropped the case because the
family had moved house.
Adam Pemberton,
assistant chief executive of Victim Support, said: 'The sheer number of crimes
that have been dismissed by the police is alarming. It's equally astonishing
that so many victims are not told if the police decide later that no crime took
place.
'Each mistake
represents a victim losing their chance to get justice and support.'