Britain is descending into a low-trust society as over half of the British public does not have faith in their increasingly woke police forces to actually solve crimes.
A survey conducted by YouGov for the Times of London found a “devastating lack of confidence” in the police, which in recent years have become increasingly preoccupied with professing their progressive bona fides and acting as woke censors on the internet while real-life criminals run rampant.
The poll found that more than half of Britons lack faith in law enforcement to solve crimes, while a third said they do not trust the police to maintain law and order in the country. The poll also found that just 26 per cent would expect police to make an arrest if they were burgled and just seven per cent believed that a pickpocket would be caught.
Meanwhile, only 37 per cent of respondents were confident that if they reported a sexual assault the perpetrator would be arrested and tried.
Overall, after nearly a decade and a half of Tory rule, just 37 per cent of the public think that the police are doing a “good job”, while a majority believe that the police are worse than they were 30 years ago.
The public’s concern is not without merit, with a report finding last month that police failed to solve a single burglary in nearly half of all neighbourhoods in England and Wales over the past three years, while the charge rate for burglaries fell to just 3.9 per cent last year compared to an already rock-bottom 4.6 per cent the year before.
Despite operating under a supposedly Conservative government, police forces across the country have devoted valuable manpower hours to policing “hate speech” and conducting workshops to promote leftist ideologies around race and gender rather than solving real-world crimes.
Former Metropolitan Police Detective Chief Inspector David Spencer warned in a 2022 report that “policing tweets” rather than burglaries, robberies, and theft, British police forces were at risk of losing public confidence.
As has been seen in Democrat-controlled cities in the United States, shoplifting is also on the rise, with the British Retail Consortium reporting 16.7 million instances of theft in the year up to August 2023. The increase resulted in a loss to shop owners of £1.8 billion, compared to £950 million in 2022. According to The Times, 61 per cent of businesses characterised the response from police as being poor or very poor.
The chairwoman of the department store-owning John Lewis Partnership, Dame Sharon White, said that the issue of shoplifting has become “systemic” and “organised”.
Arguing that the police are not doing enough to confront the growing issue, she said: “More than 80 per cent of shoplifting doesn’t have a police response, so there’s this sense that you can shoplift and you can be pretty guaranteed that there is not going to be a comeback.
“Unless somebody is dealing with your supposedly low-level crime issues, it creates enormous issues for faith and trust in the broader criminal justice system.”
Former chairwoman of the National Police Chiefs’ Council Dame Sara Thornton added: “The whole idea of the criminal justice system with prosecution and punishment as a deterrent is in danger of falling apart.”
A separate poll released on Monday from the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) found that almost one-quarter of people living in London had been physically attacked or threatened with violence in the British capital over the past five years, equating to around 2 million people.
The survey also found that one in ten London residents believe they are at risk of falling victim to knife or gun attacks from criminal gangs operating in the city, the Daily Mail reports.
Over half of respondents said they wished there were more police on patrol — or ‘Bobbies on the beat’ as they are known in Britain — to protect their neighbourhoods, while nearly two-thirds supported stop and search powers for officers.
According to figures published last year by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, Fire and Rescue Services showed that the number of Bobbies on the beat in England and Wales fell from 23,928 in 2015 to 16,577 in 2020.
Former children’s commissioner Anne Longfield commented: “There are urban areas where people have got fatigued. They just expect to see violence and that’s deeply worrying.”