Violent offences have risen sharply under Labour, with knife and gun crime higher than in 1997. Yet police officers spend 50 per cent more time on paperwork than they do out on patrol. Labour’s obsession with bureaucratic targets and box-ticking has hindered the fight against crime. They have launched endless initiatives and top-down schemes which have made little difference. The string of broken promises has undermined people’s trust. We can’t go on with the police filling in forms instead of fighting crime.
The criminal justice system is broken. We need to rebuild confidence in the system and convince people it is working to protect them. Nowhere is our approach of transparency, accountability and decentralisation more important. Our aim is to restore responsibility and discretion to the police – getting them out of police stations and out onto the street fighting crime – while making them truly accountable to the people they serve. We will do that by giving people the power to elect an individual who will set the policing priorities for their community, and by providing detailed data about crime in their area. By giving people robust information and real power, they will be able to force the police to focus on the crime that affects their communities.
Fighting crime is about much more than catching criminals. To bring crime down for good we have got to break the cycle of reoffending and give those who have served their time a chance to play a positive role in society. Under Labour, the prison system is in crisis, and incapable of properly rehabilitating prisoners. Reoffending rates remain very high – 100,000 persistent offenders are responsible for more than half of all crime – and tens of thousands of prisoners are being let out early from prison because of Labour’s mismanagement of the prison system. The consequences of this failure are enormous. We can't go on like this.
You can read our draft manifesto on crime using the document reader below, or alternatively click here to download a copy in PDF format.