A failing police system has seen sex offences in Bexley, Greenwich and Lewisham rocket by 40 per cent in five years.
Violence has also soared, while the number of domestic abusers being charged or cautioned has collapsed.
Overall crime rose by 17 per cent, while the number of charges and cautions issued more than halved.
The dramatic changes occurred after the Metropolitan Police merged the three boroughs into one policing area called the South East Borough Command Unit (BCU) in 2018.
In a scathing report last month, Baroness Dame Louise Casey said the BCU model – decried as a cover for budget cuts – had left teams with too few officers, organised in ways which ignored local needs.
Baroness Teresa O’Neill OBE, Conservative leader of Bexley Council, agreed.
“It’s been an issue right from the very start and actually, it’s probably got worse,” she told the News Shopper.
“We don’t have very much policing at all. The officers we do have get abstracted to cover other duties – taken away to central London, leaving us denuded of police.”
Rising Crime
The latest Met Police crime data for the three boroughs is for January and February 2023.
We compared that to Jan/Feb 2018, immediately before the BCU model was imposed, and Jan/Feb 2020, after it was imposed, but before the pandemic altered crime patterns.
In Jan/Feb 2018, 11,650 crimes were recorded.
By Jan/Feb 2020, it was 13,760. In 2023, it was 13,624 – 17% higher than five years earlier.
Some offence types – like arson and burglary – fell over the five years.
Others rose significantly.
In Jan/Feb 2018, there were 2,833 reports of “violence against a person”.
In 2020, it was 3,572. By 2023, it was 3,907 – up 38% in five years.
Vehicle crime rose 10%, theft 24% and drug offences 26%.
Sex Crimes and Domestic Abuse
But the biggest rise was in sex offences.
There were 276 in Jan/Feb 2018, up to 348 in 2020 and 387 in 2023 – a 40% rise in five years.
Baroness Casey said the three boroughs’ policing structure did not respond to this trend.
“The resourcing model in South East is much the same as Central North (Camden and Islington),” she wrote.
“But there are over 50% more sexual offences in South East as there are in Central North, and more than twice as many domestic abuse offences.”
Domestic abuse reports across the three boroughs rose 38% in five years, and domestic violence with injury 29%.
“Sanction Detections”
If a crime results in a charge or a caution, police call that a “sanction detection”.
In Jan/Feb 2018, Bexley, Greenwich and Lewisham had 1,579 sanction detections.
By 2020 it was 1,301.
By 2023, it was just 725 – so crime was up 17 per cent,, but sanction detections were down 54 per cent.
For sex crimes, sanction detections were very low in 2018 (21, compared to 276 offences in the same period).
By 2023, it remained similarly low (387 offences, 30 sanction detections).
But for domestic abuse, sanction detections started low and then plummeted even further.
In 2018, there were 1,307 domestic abuse incidents and 335 sanction detections.
By 2020, it was 1,590 and 235.
By 2023, it was 1,802 offences (up 38 per cent) and 109 sanction detections (down 67 per cent)
In 2018, there were 340 reports of domestic violence with injury and 121 sanction detections.
By 2020, it was 401 and 79.
By 2023, it was 440 offences (up 29 per cent) and 31 sanction detections (down 74 per cent).
Response
The Met did not respond to our questions about Baroness Casey’s criticisms of the BCU model.
It claimed changes to IT systems were “likely to create some anomalies in recording of sanction detections for the first part of 2023”, resulting in lower numbers for January and February, but higher numbers in March and April.
It declined to further explain why its IT systems might be wrongly recording sanction detection rates.
After the Casey review was published, Met commissioner Sir Mark Rowley did not directly address her criticisms of the BCU model.
He accepted that “external factors”, like funding, governance and resource pressures, had an impact on the Met’s “ability to police London”.
But he said: “There can be no excuses for us. The core of these problems are for policing to determinedly confront.”
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