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0Why Britain’s police hardly solve any crimes
Crime has become more complex. The police have not kept up
July 24, 2025, The Economist
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When Stan Gilmour started out as a “regular street bobby” in 1993, he remembers picking up “multiple burglaries a day”. It was nearly all “traditional crime” back then: “you know, the whodunnit, broken window, property gone, search for the suspect”. There were no mobile phones or CCTV cameras, which meant lots of knocking on doors and learning to “manage the crime scene” to yield clues.
Mr Gilmour didn’t know it, but he had started close to the crime peak. In 1995 an estimated 20m crimes were committed in England and Wales, an all-time high. That figure then fell for almost three decades, reaching a low of less than 5m in 2023 (see chart 1). Many politicians claimed credit for this “crime drop”, which happened across the rich world, and was driven by a fall in burglary and vehicle theft. Researchers later concluded that the main cause was better security technology.
There was a catch. As the number of crimes plummeted, so too did the proportion that were solved. In 2015 around one in six recorded crimes resulted in a charge or a summons. Last year it was only around one in 20 (see chart 2). To the law-abiding citizen this shift amounts to a blessing and a curse. You are much less likely to become a victim of crime, and much less likely to see justice if you do.
Politicians often frame this solely as a supply-side problem. Britain’s police experienced steep cuts between 2010 and 2018; seasoned officers were paid to leave. The public associates ineffectiveness with the absence of visible “bobbies on the beat”. Yet a better explanation is that crime has become harder to solve. And as the caseload has changed and technology has evolved, the police have not kept up.
The crimes on which Mr Gilmour cut his teeth were voluminous, but straightforward. A car hot-wired for joyriding; a house robbed and the loot sold locally. The perpetrators of such offences tended to be “not all that sophisticated”, says Mike Hough, an academic who established the national crime survey.
Today cases are more vexing. The number of reported sexual offences, for example, has more than tripled in the past two decades, to almost 200,000 (see chart 3). Strangely, that is (mostly) a good thing: more victims are coming forward. Yet the charge rate is just 4.2%. Investigations are long and difficult and the police are still often poor at handling victims. The rate of victims dropping out of investigations has soared.
