Police have been accused of “ignoring crimes which aren’t easy to solve” after figures showed a steep rise in the number of cases UK forces close or “screen out” within 24 hours.
Freedom of Information requests found that police across ten UK forces gave up investigating 431,000 reported crimes within a day — a figure which has more than doubled from the 194,500 recorded in 2014, the Sunday Telegraph revealed.
While most of the reported offences dropped related to thefts, the number of violent crime cases shut within 24 hours quadrupled from 11,927 to 44,548 in the same period between 2015 and 2018 while sex crimes ignored surged from 703 to 1,605 in this period.
The National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) said: “Preventing and investigating violence and sexual offences is a priority for police forces. While there is an increase in sexual offences closed after initial investigation, it is less than one per cent of the total.”
“With more crimes and fewer officers on patrol it is taking longer to respond to incidents and there is increasing evidence that these delays hinder evidence collection, making it less likely that crimes will be solved,” it said.