A decade of funding cuts and now the need to police a public health emergency means an ever-increasing need to do more with less. In the mid-nineties the gap between resources and demand led to innovative solutions like computerisation and intelligence-led policing. We need to innovate again. One way to focus stretched resources would be to focus them on the people causing the most harm in society, the ‘real’ criminals. Unfortunately, despite seemingly endless discussion, we have never been able to settle on a working definition that the public understands and yet is operationally and legally robust. A definition which would allow us to really focus our resources on criminals and assess the results.
Strangely the UK did come up with a brilliant, legally robust definition, that fits what an ordinary member of the public would think of as ‘being a criminal’, but it was overlooked. It had been wrongly named and therefore misunderstood. It’s time to look again at Section 75 of the Proceeds of Crime Act and understand what it means to ‘be a criminal’.
One of the main hurdles to fighting crime in the UK is that we have not agreed who are the real criminals. One person’s criminal is another person’s climate warrior. A persistent parking nuisance might well be a criminal if they keep blocking your drive. Even dabbling your finger in some water may be a crime, it depends where you do it.
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