Police recorded crime from all 43 territorial police forces in England and Wales has fallen overall by 25 per cent – although that is not including fraud, the UK’s number one volume crime, which is recorded by centrally by Action Fraud.
Ever since the lockdown in March, the official reporting centre for fraud for England and Wales, Action Fraud has said that ‘unfortunately our contact centre is currently providing a reduced service’.
As one senior counter-fraud detective has said, criminal gangs are ‘callously seeking to exploit the Covid-19 crisis to defraud people’. Police advice to the public is to treat any unexpected text, email or phone call with suspicion and not to respond or click any link until they’ve double checked whether it’s legitimate or not.
In the first two weeks after the official NCSC (National Cyber Security Centre) and police launched a Suspicious Email Reporting Service service, developed with City of London Police, the UK’s lead force for such ‘economic crime’, the public has passed on more than 160,000 suspect emails, leading to the removal of over 1,400 links to bogus sites.
That 25pc fall (more details of the ‘snapshot’ on the NPCC website) covers the four weeks to May 10, compared to the same period in 2019. Falls were recorded for residential burglary, vehicle crime (including theft of and from a vehicle), assaults (including GBH and ABH, Grievous Bodily Harm and Actual Bodily Harm) and robbery committed against individuals, rape and shoplifting. Forces have also observed decreases in call volumes to 999 and 101, and have also seen falls in the number of cases brought to police relating to mental health and missing persons. Assaults on emergency service workers saw a 14 per cent rise.
Comment
For the National Police Chiefs’ Council, NPCC Lead for Crime Operations is Merseyside Chief Constable Andy Cooke, who self-isolated from work in March after testing positive for the virus. He said: “These figures are not a surprise, as the public have largely stayed home during the lockdown period. Forces use any spare capacity they have during lockdown to focus on proactively pursuing criminals, completing complex investigations and reducing violence.
“As measures ease, we will bear down crime and do all we can to try and prevent it rising to pre-lockdown highs. We are confident in our resilience, and we will work closely with partners across law enforcement and the criminal justice system to meet challenges that arise as we move through the stages of the national response to Covid-19.”
