The Thin[ner] Blue Line

"It was a bit of checkmate [trying to figure out which emergency calls to respond to]. We need to support these people in crisis, but the police are not the right ones to be dealing with them."
"It was all right, the police being the jack-of-all-trades, when there was a necessary amount of funding for the police. But if you've got 20,000 less police officers, less funding, then somebody needs to make the decision about what they want us to do."
"When the criminals realize that their gang is bigger than our gang, they start exploiting that."
Constable Richard Chant, West Midlands Police Department, Birmingham, England

Prioritisation programmes are aiming to ease pressure on officers while dealing properly with the most serious crime 

PA

"We have got a budget to work to, we have demand to meet, and have to make decisions about what we prioritize."
"All incidents of crime are of the utmost importance, but of course I would much rather our detectives are investigating stabbings and diverting gang members rather than dealing with some of the work which was possible to do when numbers were not so tight."
"We have to admit there are going to be crimes that we are responding differently to than we would have in the past."
"I know this may cause concern to members of the public and perhaps lead to fears that fewer offences will be prosecuted, but I must stress that detection rates for crimes being investigated by the TDIU have not fallen. We cannot do everything in the way we could before, crime is continually changing and adapting, and our numbers are fewer. We have had to realign our resources and invest more in different areas to meet the challenges we are facing. I want to reassure the public that we are here and will do everything in our power to help."
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Mark Simmons, London Metropolitan Police

Photo: Andrew Testa / The New York Times   Investigating a burglary at a supermarket in Birmingham, England, in November. Crime is rising, but Conservative-led austerity measures have led to cutbacks in police services.

In an eight-hour period the West Midlands Police Department took 1,452 emergency calls. A number that posed too great a challenge for the force to respond to, with fewer police at their disposal as a result of lost funding due to Britain's austerity situation over fears to extending itself too greatly financially given the uncertainty of the Brexit climate and what will ensue eventually. For some of those cases hours and days transpired before the callers saw a responding officer.

Take Birmingham as an example of the new reality in law and order during this strained state of responsiveness surrendering to austerity. While the range of emergency calls and their numbers has skyrocketed both in Birmingham and in most other British cities, far fewer officers are available to respond adequately. Britain's withdrawal from the EU and the budget pressures that have been exerted are nowhere near over as far as concerns and consequences are concerned.

Since the initiation in 2010 of the Conservative government's austerity program, the West Midlands Police Department alone has had its budget cut by $220 million, while across England and Wales police staffing has been reduced by roughly 20,000 police officers, leaving questions about whether the cuts themselves are major contributors to a notable spike in violent crime. In England and Wales murders and robberies have risen to their highest levels in the past ten years.

Social services have also been pared back under austerity, creating metastasizing problems that often fall to the police.   CreditAndrew Testa for The New York Times

Parallel cuts to social services where addiction services, housing benefits, gang mediation programs and social services for adults and children have all seen severe funding restrictions has only added to the chaos of social and security responsiveness. Police are forced to speed between emergency calls and to handle them all as best they can, so they are left with little time to patrol streets, making themselves visible to reduce the likelihood of crime.

Increasingly, police hours on health and welfare calls have left little space to collect evidence and solve crimes and as a result victims not in immediate danger must accustom themselves to waiting days for a police response, leading to a situation where the investigation of property crimes has become a vanishing low priority simply not pursued because of other, more critical areas requiring attention.

The site of a break-in attempt in Birmingham. Robberies or assaults in which the offender has left are supposed to get attention within an hour, but frequently wait days, one officer said. CreditAndrew Testa for The New York Times

This, in lock-step with recent decades of increasing diagnoses of severe mental illness, at the very time when services for these people have been reduced. As a result, officers in England and Wales have taken to detaining 60 percent more people in need of psychiatric services in 2015-16 than what pertained a decade ago -- while London police receive mental illness related calls once every four minutes.

The solution would appear simple enough; hire and train more officers. Taxi robberies and home break-in patterns are not being pursued simply because cases are shelved, with not even a cursory investigation, leading to a sense of hopelessness among victims who simply stop calling police. A situation very much appreciated by criminals for whom the situation is quite agreeable to their future and ongoing prospects.

Prime Minister Theresa May, in her previous incarnation as home secretary, was the original architect of the cuts. She also cracked down on corruption in police associations and stop-and-frisk tactics, and was responsible for the cutbacks in police personnel. The solution as some see it is to restore funding to social services, instead of expanding police force personnel, relieving them of the onerous task for which they are not professionally designed, of responding to mental health crises.

The British government has announced additional funding for the police forces, but public health budgets are expected to keep shrinking through 2021.   CreditAndrew Testa for The New York Times