There is a kind of failure that’s worse than incompetence. It’s the failure that’s become so normal, so accepted, that the people responsible no longer feel embarrassed by it. That’s where Britain is with theft and burglary right now.
New figures out this week aren’t shocking – and that’s precisely the problem. They’re confirmation of what millions of victims already knew: that when someone breaks into your home or snatches your phone, the state has quietly decided not to bother.
Here’s what the data actually says. Police left 92 per cent of burglaries unsolved last year. Across a third of England and Wales, not a single break-in was solved in the entire year. Not a poor result – zero.
And mobile phone theft? That’s moved beyond under-policed into something that needs a different word entirely. Fewer than one in 100 cases led to a charge. One per cent. At that point, you’re not really policing it. You’re just filing it. At that level, it isn’t enforcement – it’s administration. The crime is real, the response is paperwork.
As a former chief prosecutor, I worked in a system that, whatever its faults, took seriously the idea that crime must have consequences. That principle is the load-bearing wall of everything else. Remove it, and nothing holds. What these statistics tell us is that, for huge categories of everyday crime, that wall is gone. We haven’t formally decriminalised burglary or phone theft. We’ve just stopped enforcing them, gradually, quietly, through years of managed decline.
I’ve long called for a dedicated unit to tackle phone theft. London’s own targeted operation against organised theft networks actually worked: phone theft in the capital dropped by around 10,000 cases in a single year. Focused, intelligent enforcement gets results. We know this. Bank robbery is down 90 per cent over the last decade because you carry your bank in your hand. Treat mobile phone theft as we used to treat bank robbery – with its own version of the “Sweeney”. We protected the money; we neglected the device.
But the police aren’t the whole story. There’s no point putting effort into a burglary investigation when you know any suspect will wait three years for a court date and may receive a sentence that barely registers. We won’t bring in special courts as we do during major public disorder. The whole system has stopped rewarding good investigative work – so, gradually, it stopped doing it.
There are practical fixes that don’t require years of structural reform. Enforce minimum investigation standards for every home burglary: attend the scene, recover forensics, don’t close the case within 48 hours without explanation. Use the technology we already have: a national stolen phone register feeding directly into Trading Standards would collapse the market that makes phone theft worth doing in the first place. And go after the networks – stolen phones are being shipped to Dubai, China and Romania. This is organised crime. It should be treated like it.
The government has published a policing white paper promising the biggest structural changes since the 1970s. Long overdue. But the family whose door was kicked in last night can’t wait for a white paper to clear Parliament and land in someone’s inbox. Strategy does not replace response.
Former chief prosecutor Nazir Afzal: ‘When the public stops believing the law will act, the law has already begun to fail’ (Metropolitan Police via PA)
What they need, what everyone who’s reported a crime and heard nothing back deserves, is for someone in power to look at these numbers and feel genuine shame.
I spent my career arguing that the rule of law isn’t an abstract concept. It’s what people experience when they report a crime and believe something will actually happen. That belief is eroding, not with a bang, but case by case, in 393 abandoned burglary investigations every single day.
When the public stops believing the law will act, the law has already begun to fail.
Nazir Afzal OBE is a former chief crown prosecutor
