The tough-on-crime approach was proven wrong before, and it’ll be proven wrong again

Like many members of the hard-right, Boris Johnson favours a policing method that prioritises arrest numbers over forming trusting bonds with communities around the country

I don’t know if anyone still likes Boris. I’ve seen a few people here and there, but I’m not sure I can believe he’s got a support base like anyone else. Every possible group of people that might be attracted to him is just as likely to be turned off by him. If you’re a traditionalist, you’ve got to look past his lifelong aversion to monogamy. If you’re a Brexiteer, you’ve got to look past the fact that he’s an incompetent negotiator. And finally, if you want to believe he’s a One Nation Tory with at least a shred of decency left in him, you’ve got to look past his announcement today.

Yes, our brilliant Prime Minister has said that we will, according to the BBC, get “10,000 new prison places” and an extension to stop and search. To be fair, for a man who seems to have blustered his way out of the early 20th century, it’s admirable to see he’s caught up to the policing methods of the 1970s. Richard Nixon would be proud. This comes alongside the push for recruitment of twenty thousand new police officers, the hiring of which will take place at an alarmingly fast rate.

Home Secretary Priti Patel, fired from Theresa May’s government for holding secret meetings with high-ranking Israeli officials, has steered the Home Officer in a very different direction from that set by her predecessor, Sajid Javid

Being ‘tough on crime’ is popular among politicians, that much is plain to see. It’s commonly accepted wisdom that the electorate will fawn over anyone that can claim they’ve brought crime down. Since ‘the electorate’ isn’t a great mass of idiots, however, and is instead a group of sane and rational people (allowing for a few odd folks here and there), an increasingly large proportion of them are opposing these slapdash measures that are unlikely to bring crime down at all. In fact, the only thing we know for sure is that relationships between the community and the police are about to get a whole lot worse.

When, in the late 20th century, crime rates were on the rise for a multitude of reasons, this style of policing was accepted by many. In Britain, it reached its peak around 1995, when the Crime Survey in England and Wales tells us there were around 18,000 crimes committed. Crime surveys are famously unreliable, so the number could be notably higher or lower than that, but the data tells us clearly that crime rates were higher than they had been before. This was the peak of a trend that began as early as 1980, and perhaps before. Crime levels rose sharply at the end of the Thatcher years, then dropped at a steady pace during Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s premierships, finally passing below 1980 levels by about 2004.

The Crime Survey for England and Wales’ results between 1980 and 2017

Some of our fears about crime right now can be chalked up to the rhetoric of papers like the Daily Mail, and the desire for new stories to feed the 24-hour news cycle, but there are real issues that need to be addressed. Knife crime in London is a well-known example. The thing is, whether or not the issues are real, people are getting scared. That’s the heart of the issue right there, because it’s fear that these new policing measures are trying to deal with. Boris Johnson doesn’t care if people are actually safe, he just wants them to feel safe. Even if they don’t see any new police officers, or see anyone getting searched or arrested, he believes people will feel safer knowing that somewhere in the country, criminals are being brought to justice.

Sadly for Boris, that doesn’t work like it used to. People are now more aware of the racist effects of stop and search measures. If you want 10,000 more people in jail, it’s no secret what the people in those prisons are going to look like. We’ve also seen what happens when you try to hire thousands of new people. In 2006, then-President George W. Bush, when attempting a similar populist move to secure the American border with Mexico, hired thousands of new officers for the border patrol. To no surprise, they made for poor officers. Hiring was rushed, so the newcomers weren’t given proper background checks, and training was cut back severely to rush them out into active duty. Boris wants to put us through that same procedure, only on a scale almost double the size.

The border fence between America and Mexico. The British government would do well to learn from the mistakes made by the Americans

Good policing can only happen when the community and the police are able to work together. When there’s a lack of trust, people are more likely to be drawn to crime. If the people enforcing the law aren’t respected, then there’s no good reason to follow the law at all. That’s twisted logic, but it appeals to certain types of people, often young men, often working-class, and often without better prospects in life clearly visible to them. You can’t blame someone for thinking like that when the police, instead of being provided with the equipment and training needed to do the best job they possibly can, are instead given an effective mandate to arrest more people, and are forced to work with a large amount of new staff that will almost certainly not be vetted properly.

Nobody is saying that we don’t need better policing. We all want a reliable police force that we can trust to do their jobs well, and not allow personal biases to infect their work. That’s what police officers want too. The problem, however, is not to allow a flood of new recruits in and hope for the best. Nor is it to lock more people away and make it look like the problem has been solved. If they really want crime to go down, the government needs to focus on paying, training and equipping police officers properly, reducing the amount of unnecessary bureaucracy, and improving relations between our communities and the police.

Police officers have been sorely underpaid for many years under successive Conservative governments, alongside their services being under-funded

But let’s be honest, people like Boris Johnson and Priti Patel don’t want that. The idea of tackling crime and improving the police force sounds complicated. It’s so much easier to throw money senselessly at the problem and hope nobody notices. The right-wing media will fawn over this, I’m sure, as will every gullible idiot that thinks you stop crime by just sticking people in prison and forgetting about them. If the government uses this as a chance to reflect on the lessons of the tough-on-crime era and understand that its methods just don’t work, there is a chance for proper reform of the police. Right now, that opportunity is being wasted, for no good reason other than a desperate appeal to Boris Johnson’s voter base that hardly even exists.