The police watchdog on Thursday criticised Boris Johnson’s promise to boost officer numbers by 20,000 in England and Wales as a “simple” measure that would “not be the most effective way” of improving law enforcement.
Mr Johnson, the frontrunner to be the next Conservative leader, said earlier that he would spend £1.1bn on raising the total number of police officers to 140,000 by 2022 in an effort to “end the current crime wave”.
His cash injection would seek to reverse the cuts made by his Tory predecessors, which resulted in a real terms funding reduction of 19 per cent for police forces against a decade ago.
But Thomas Winsor, her majesty’s chief inspector of constabulary, said that Mr Johnson’s focus on putting more bobbies on the beat ignored the fact that police needed urgent investment in technology such as artificial intelligence to help them work more productively.
“Police don’t just need a lot more people . . . you have to invest to be more efficient and that will cost more money,” said Sir Thomas. “Not all of that money should be spent on hiring people. Some of that money should be spent on technology.”
He was speaking at the launch of his annual state of policing report, in which he warned that the “wider criminal justice system is dysfunctional and defective”.
Pointing to how crime rates were increasing after a 20-year decline, Sir Thomas said the 43 forces in England and Wales were “straining under significant pressure as they try to meet growing, complex and higher-risk demand with weakened resources”.
Sir Thomas called for a public discussion about what level of funding police needed to combat the rising incidence of knife crime, cyber-enabled fraud and the dangers posed by so-called county lines drugs gangs.
He also argued that individual police forces were increasingly having to deal with exceptional, resource-intensive events such as last year’s nerve agent attack on the former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, the drone disruption at Gatwick airport over Christmas and the environmental protests in central London in April.
“All demand cannot be met, so something has to give,” Sir Thomas said. “There must be a public debate about what level of harm is the public prepared to tolerate because the police are not fully resourced to meet it. Or are they prepared to contribute more to meet the threat?”
Sir Thomas added that there was a mismatch between the public’s expectations of wanting bobbies on the beat, and the funding allocated to police in England and Wales, which represents 2 per cent of public expenditure.
“Policing is among the most essential public services of all . . . without public safety and security, the other institutions of society will be in jeopardy,” his report stated.
Sir Thomas’ comments echo those of Metropolitan Police commissioner Cressida Dick, who warned in a speech last week that crime detection rates were “woefully low” across the UK.
Ms Dick called for investment in technology and expertise to help solve more complex cases.
