Why Britain’s police hardly solve any crimes 

WHEN STAN GILMOUR started out as a “regular street bobby” in 1993, he remembers picking up “multiple burglaries a day”. It was nearly all “traditional crime” back then: “you know, the whodunnit, broken window, property gone, search for the suspect”. There were no mobile phones or CCTV cameras, which meant lots of knocking on doors and learning to “manage the crime scene” to yield clues.

Mr Gilmour didn’t know it, but he had started close to the crime peak. In 1995 an estimated 20m crimes were committed in England and Wales, an all-time high. That figure then fell for almost three decades, reaching a low of less than 5m in 2023 (see chart 1). Many politicians claimed credit for this “crime drop”, which happened across the rich world, and was driven by a fall in burglary and vehicle theft. Researchers later concluded that the main cause was better security technology.

There was a catch. As the number of crimes plummeted, so too did the proportion that were solved. In 2015 around one in six recorded crimes resulted in a charge or a summons. Last year it was only around one in 20 (see chart 2). To the law-abiding citizen this shift amounts to a blessing and a curse. You are much less likely to become a victim of crime, and much less likely to see justice if you do.

Politicians often frame this solely as a supply-side problem. Britain’s police experienced steep cuts between 2010 and 2018; seasoned officers were paid to leave. The public associates ineffectiveness with the absence of visible “bobbies on the beat”. Yet a better explanation is that crime has become harder to solve. And as the caseload has changed and technology has evolved, the police have not kept up.

The crimes on which Mr Gilmour cut his teeth were voluminous, but straightforward. A car hot-wired for joyriding; a house robbed and the loot sold locally. The perpetrators of such offences tended to be “not all that sophisticated”, says Mike Hough, an academic who established the national crime survey.

Today cases are more vexing. The number of reported sexual offences, for example, has more than tripled in the past two decades, to almost 200,000 (see chart 3). Strangely, that is (mostly) a good thing: more victims are coming forward. Yet the charge rate is just 4.2%. Investigations are long and difficult and the police are still often poor at handling victims. The rate of victims dropping out of investigations has soared.

Thieves have also become smarter. Vehicle theft, which fell to a low of 70,000 in 2013, has risen by 75% in the past decade. The explanation is not a rash of young tearaways. Organised groups use electronic gadgets to target high-end cars, which are then masked or chopped up for parts, often for export to distant markets. Mr Hough suspects that as the criminal cohort has shrunk, those who remain are more skilled and motivated.

Levels of burglary remain low—it is risky to rob a house with modern security, particularly when someone might be working from home. But street phone thefts have risen sharply, often yanked from the hands of a distracted pedestrian by a balaclava-wearing bike-rider. More than 70,000 phones were reported stolen in London last year, making it the phone-snatching capital of Europe. Such cases leave few easy clues, and require sophisticated operations to crack criminal supply chains.

One way to think of crime and policing is as a game of cat-and-mouse. The mass adoption of smartphones shows how technology changes the rules. In theory, it has produced troves of data that could help police secure convictions. Yet in practice their ability to sift the data remains poor. Meanwhile, encrypted communications have made it easier for criminal networks—like those used to export stolen cars and phones—to operate at scale.

Investigations also face a rising burden of proof. “Back in the day we would stand up in court and say ‘I saw them do it’,” admits an officer. Now the police are expected to find three points of view. One copper complains that if they fail to produce CCTV, DNA evidence and phone forensics, judges and juries can become suspicious. Many modern investigations involve up to 20 kinds of evidence. Police become tied in bureaucratic knots, with little time to tackle even straightforward crimes.

Britain is not alone in facing these pressures. Other countries have also seen a decline in clearance rates. But criminologists say that the decline in Britain has been especially steep.

An imminent white paper will set out how policing can respond. It is badly needed. After three decades of decline, crime is rising. That has been driven, above all, by a surge in shoplifting, which has more than doubled in the past two years. These days even shoplifters don’t seem to fear getting caught. Keeping crime down is going to require catching some criminals. ■