11
Jun
2014
By Calvin at 10:35 GMT, 11 years ago
Yesterday I Tweeted a report I read on Huffington Post by Steve Reed MP, Shadow Minister for Crime Prevention and Jack Dromey MP, Shadow Minister for Policing.
The reason I did so was that it was refreshing to see somebody in parliament ramming home the reasons why we’ve got to do more about preventing crime.
I think you should read the report in full, but I thought it would be useful to pull out the salient points
- Total cost of crime to the UK economy £124bn a year - £4,700 for every household
- Reoffending by young criminals costs £10bn a year, more than the cost of staging the Olympic Games
- Seven out of ten young criminals reoffend within twelve months of their release
- Crime against the person including robbery, burglary and assault costs the Government £36.2bn a year (Home Office figures), but only £522m a year spent on preventing that kind of crime, (1.4% of the amount spent on dealing with its consequences.)
- Preventing one murder would save £1.7m in the cost of investigating, prosecuting and jailing the murderer
- Cutting youth reoffending rates by 10% would save £1bn a year
- Cutting high-volume crime against individuals and households by just 1% would save £362m, enough to employ 10,000 front-line police officers
The MPs make the point that crime started reducing in the 1990s, not because of an improvement in morality, but because of improvements in crime prevention technology; things like immobilisers on all cars as standard, more people improving their home security and installing alarms and using mobile phone security.
They make the point that the biggest growth in crime today is internet-based with cyber crime now bigger than the entire global drugs trade.
So it seems that the Labour Party is exploring a range of ideas to prevent crime, such as a voluntary traffic-light rating for new products, which could warn consumers how stealable they are, encouraging manufacturers to build in anti-theft mechanisms as happened with car-theft league tables in the 1990s.
I’ve got a few other ideas up my sleeve and maybe I’ll get the opportunity to talk these people about them – I have sent a message!
Crime prevention is not being talked about enough and the budget cuts have had a disproportionate effect on this important function of the government and the police. Let’s hope we see some real practical measures sooner rather than later.
Full article here; Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/steve-reed/uk-crime-prevention_b_5477856.html?1402395531&ncid=tweetlnkushpmg00000067
