Government gambling on public safety, says Yorkshire police tsar after recorded crime rise

Police and Crime Commissioner for West Yorkshire Mark Burns-Williamson.

West Yorkshire’s police commissioner has claimed the Government is “taking a gamble on public and community safety” after a large rise in the number of recorded offences across the region.

According to the Office for National Statistics, the number of offences recorded by police rose by five per cent across the Yorkshire and the Humber region in the year to June.

West Yorkshire saw the biggest rise, eight per cent, while South Yorkshire and North Yorkshire saw rises of three and two per cent respectively. The number of offences recorded by Humberside stayed level.

The region saw a bigger rise in sexual offences and ‘violence without injury’ offences, which include child abduction, neglect and stalking, than anywhere else in the country.

Temporary Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police Dee Collins.

Nationwide, the ONS’s figures showed that the number of sex offences reported to police is at the highest level since records began in 2002, a rise attributed to an better recording and an increased willingness of victims to come forward.

In West Yorkshire, bosses say the rise, including a 45.5 per cent jump in violent offences and sexual offences increasing by 72 per cent, is due to having better recording procedures after a shake-up prompted by a damning watchdog report into the way it deals with reported offences.

The force was sharply criticised last year by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) for recording robbery and violence offences wrongly and inappropriately labelling some rape offences as ‘no-crimes’.

Temporary chief constable Dee Collins told The Yorkshire Post this summer that the force has since carried out “educating and awareness raising” among its officers and staff about how they should deal with offences when they are recorded.

The force says it has seen “a small reduction in the number of calls and contact about crime related matters” which bosses say suggests “fewer people are actually experiencing more crime”.

Nationally, according to the Crime Survey for England, which is drawn from a large-scale field trial of 2,000 households, crime rates fell by eight per cent from last year and are at the lowest level since the survey began in 1981.

But this does not include an estimated 5.1 million incidents of fraud and 2.5 million cyber crimes, which were quantified for the first time. These figures show how the internet is “changing the nature of crime” in the UK, a senior police officer said.