Crime’s up – as Tories cut police funding

IT’S BAD NEWS from the Metropolitan Police, who have reported that the number of recorded crimes rose last year (April 2016 to March 2017) compared with the year before (April 2017 to March 2018).

The number of notifiable offences increased by 6.4% – from 777,458 to 827,225 offences. That’s a shocking number – almost enough for one in ten Londoners to have reported a crime last year. However, the increase has not been uniform across all categories of crime.

The Metropolitan Police are trying to respond to the various crimes, but they have had to spend time this year cutting overheads and officers – which must be a factor in the overall increase.

Violence against the person/homicide
Crimes in this category are up by 5.26% (237,774 to 250,287 offences). Homicides, measured alone, are up by 44% – from 109 to 157 offences, of which eight occurred as a result of the terror attacks at Westminster, London Bridge and Finsbury Park. The number is lower than 2003/04, when there were 205 instances – but the Met are still prioritising bringing the number down.

Within this category, knife crime offences rose by 21.2% (12,115 to 14,680 offences), with incidents involving injury up by 5.7% (4,446 to 4,700). Although there has been an increase of 3% in the number of knife crime injuries to the under 25s, this is down from the previous year’s increase of 24%.

Gun crime has shown a welcome fall, with the number of offences down 4.6% – from 2,553 to 2,435.

The Met has responded to these particular statistics by setting up a Violent Crime Task Force which will work on preventing crimes an solving those that do tajk eplace.

Sexual offences
Sexual offences have increased in number from 17,880 to 19,854 – by just over 11%. Measured alone, recorded instances of rape increased by a very unwelcome 18.39% – from 6,510 to 7,707 offences. It is thought that part of this increase may be due to hard work carried out by the Metropolitan Police Child Abuse and Sexual Offences Command encouraging survivors of sexual crime to report it.

Burglary
Instances of burglary have increased by 11.65% – from 69,528 offences to 77,626. The Metropolitan Police is trying to tackle this by increasing patrols in burglary hot spots and targeting criminal groups with proactive operations, as well as targeting scooter-related crime. Theft of a scooter is a crime – and then it’s at least one more crime if the scooter is used in robberies. Police will also keep distributing the MetTrace property marking kits.

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