Another Constable

With more money and resources we could solve the vast majority of burglaries, muggings and car crime. Looking for DNA is very expensive and therefore is limited to the highest profile crimes, or those where there is obvious DNA availability (i.e. a pool of blood). We could scour for DNA if we had more people, time and money - perhaps finding less obvious DNA deposits. I for one would gladly decommission a few nuclear submarines, or intercontinental ballistic missiles, in order to have more money available for policing. Part of the problem with the criminal justice system today is that we are not securing convictions due to poor quality evidence.

There is basically too much crime for the amount of police officer we have, or at least for the police officers we have in crime solving roles! Due to the pressures of a quick turnaround for a crime, the officer will scan through the available evidence, and if on the face of it there isn’t much evidence available, then the crime will be written up and written off, leaving the “easier to solve” crimes in the pot, for example the “named offenders”. Even then, the officer will probably do as little digging as possible to get enough evidence to secure arrest, and perhaps in the officers mind a conviction. Of course, the CPS are in the business of wanting signed confessions these days, so even if we manage to arrest an offender, the likelihood is that the CPS will not let the case progress to court.

All this because in the initial investigation, the officer didn’t have the time or resources to gather better evidence. I have 12 crimes on the go for invesigation at the moment. I wrote 6 up last week when on nights, and when I went back in yesterday, I had another 6 to replace them. Most of them have absolutely no chance of going to court, and yet I will probably spend the best part of a month chasing these 12 up, this of course on top of actually responding to 999 calls which is an inexact science as we never know in advance how many of those we get, or how many will escalate into major jobs. Realistically we need to split the roles of response and investigation so that some officers can be free from answering calls for service, purely to investigate crime, and others can purely answer calls for service and dealing with the incidents that they come into contact with. Funnily enough, this is how it used to be done, back in the days when CID would investigate every crime, instead of the new CID cores of murders, rapes, robberies etc. Of course, someone will probably win a promotion on the strength of bringing back an old system like that, but it will take a lot more bobbies, and a lot more money. Both of which are unlikely to come our way any time soon.