I'VE BEEN Horsham's MP since 1997 and as the years have gone on I've been approached by more and more people – both locally and nationally – who tell me that they wish there were more police officers on the beat.
Come to that, I have also spoken to police officers who complain that rather than getting on with front-line crime fighting they seem to be spending more and more of their time filling in forms and getting tangled in red tape.
Shockingly, police
officers now spend less than one hour in five actually on patrol. Every time they arrest someone it takes, on average, three and a half hours to complete the process – that's three and a half hours off the streets.
Delays are experienced whilst processing prisoners through the custody stage at the police station, when waiting for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to decide to charge a prisoner and when subsequently completing the forms necessary to build a case file that then gets passed to the CPS.
Red tape has increased dramatically in the last 12 years whilst at the same time crime levels have soared.
Violent crime has increased by almost 80 per cent.
Robberies have increased by 27 per cent.
The number of people killed through the use of knives has increased by 34 per cent.
The number of people killed or injured through the use of guns has increased almost four-fold.
Gun crime has increased by 89 per cent.
The police are the most powerful weapon we have in reducing crime and I can say for certain that they and the public want them to be on the streets, with the freedom and discretion to tackle crime effectively.
In, reality they are increasingly tied up in dealing with red tape.
We recently published a policy paper called 'Back on the Beat' which details our plans for getting officers back on the streets.
We would:
Pilot the use of new specially-designed mobile jails to enable officers to process offenders without having to go back to the station.
Look to move the responsibility for filling in disclosure forms to the CPS.
Return the power to charge to custody sergeants – for some offences, not all.
Cut the bureaucracy involved in stop and search.
And we need to sort out our prison system as well. Two out of three prisoners reoffend and are sent back to prison within two years of their release. That's why our prisons are full to overflowing.
We need to break that constant carousel with its huge social, human and financial cost. But that's a story for another day.
