There's been s lot of discussion in the media about police numbers and their impact on crime. From my perspective, if you take to the extremes you can derive some empirical conclusions. Have no police at all and you're likely to have crime on the level of pre-Victorian times. Have a policeman on every street corner and you're likely to reduce crime - but only certain crimes.
A lot - if not the majority - of police time is spent investigating crimes that have already taken place. The focus needs to be on preventing crime in the first place, but not at the expense of investigating crimes that have been committed. Putting all the extra resources into investigating crimes already committed is unlikely to impact crime numbers much, whereas putting them into preventing crime would, as well as reducing the load on the investigators, which is a win-win scenario.
Some crime can't be prevented though and, even then, to obtain a conviction the crime invariably has to be allowed to proceed.
Perhaps it's a bit like speed limits - a zero speed limit would result in zero traffic accidents while an unlimited speed restriction would result in lots of accidents. The aim is to reduce the number of accidents to an acceptable level given a) the cost of accidents to the economy and b) the cost to the economy of slowing down our networks to zero and the cost of policing it.
There again, if you have bent coppers the crime level would increase with the increase in police numbers.
Then there's the fact that a lot of crime is committed by habitual criminals. There may be occasions when the majority of such habitual criminals are out of prison at the same time, which will naturally throw up an anomalous spike in crime numbers.
Next is sentencing. I'm reminded of George Saville's quote; "Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen," or in other words (and to use a more modern analogy), if you keep habitual criminals in prison then they're less likely to perpetrate a criminal act. The corollary is that of one makes sentences shorter to relive pressures on the prison population then crime statistics will go up. Longer sentences for habitual criminals must have a positive effect on crime numbers.
Which ever way you look at it, it's complex. Anyway, I always though the ideal police number was 999.
Leave it to the experts, perhaps, but we've all had enough of experts...
There again, if you have bent coppers the crime level would increase with the increase in police numbers.
Then there's the fact that a lot of crime is committed by habitual criminals. There may be occasions when the majority of such habitual criminals are out of prison at the same time, which will naturally throw up an anomalous spike in crime numbers.
Next is sentencing. I'm reminded of George Saville's quote; "Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen," or in other words (and to use a more modern analogy), if you keep habitual criminals in prison then they're less likely to perpetrate a criminal act. The corollary is that of one makes sentences shorter to relive pressures on the prison population then crime statistics will go up. Longer sentences for habitual criminals must have a positive effect on crime numbers.
Which ever way you look at it, it's complex. Anyway, I always though the ideal police number was 999.
Leave it to the experts, perhaps, but we've all had enough of experts...
No comments:
Post a Comment