There’s no such thing as petty crime, and crime data doesn’t answer how people see law and order

I wasn’t sure what I’d write about today, however thanks to a scumbag, I do.

I make no apology for calling him that, he is one of a number of scumbags that blight our society, and no, there isn’t some reasonable excuse for why he is a scumbag, he just is.

Recently a debate has raged over crime in London, with many feeling crime has got worse in the capital under the tenure of the current Mayor. Fraser Nelson drew flak for pointing out that many forms of crime have been trending down. They did for much of the past five years. Knife crime overall has been down. Even this year in London, where it was also down but from a trend defying high. Politicians, including Mayors, and leaders of other parties have a habit of dabbling in selective numbers.

I should be clear right now, despite our political differences, or relative alliance, neither Sadiq or Fraser are ‘scumbags’.

I’ll explain who I’m referring to.

My weekend started with being woken up at 5am by a car alarm.

I wasn’t even sure it was mine but got up anyway to investigate. As I left the gate of my property there was a moment of mutual surprise as I saw, and he saw me, a middle aged, slightly overweight, black man in a baseball cap carrying a bundle and rooting around in the boot of my car.

Don’t read too much into his ethnicity, it’s just a description. The last time our street was plagued by this crime, was five years ago when almost everyone, myself twice, suffered a spate of break ins and the offender turned out to be white.

I disturbed this new menace after he had smashed four of the car’s windows to get access. I delivered a volley of Anglo Saxon and he made a run for it – laughing. As he hightailed it down the street, and knowing I’d not catch him, me being in bare feet and just pyjama bottoms, he shot back as a taunt – “Ha I’ll just come back later”.

Clearly as a threat, a half naked bearded man in his fifties, is, shall we say, clearly ‘limited’!

Apart from the criminal damage – security measures I always take, had meant he’d been frustrated in his thievery and his ‘horde’ of goods was just two decade old sheepskin pushchair liners that I had fashioned into a driving seat cover. That was it. Less value than the hat he wore.

I could have lost lots more, I am insured and, in the end, there was no violence and escalation to this incident – though in that moment of disturbing him I was suffused with a desire to escalate him to Accident and Emergency.

But that’s the real point of why I’ve chosen to write about it. It’s how this stupid incident made me feel, and how he felt about it.

I know in the end; I’d be the one in trouble with the law if I’d got hold of him. I know that having a car, and therefore having insurance means this is a low priority crime to the police. They’ve been alerted  – via an online form – and quickly delivered a crime number by text, and that is what you need for any claim. Efficient, but no human interaction took place.

This is often described as ‘petty crime’, but to me it was anything but. There really isn’t anything petty about being a victim of crime. It shakes you – whatever that says about the person – it makes you angry and upset, it’s stressed my family and cost me hours in clearing up mountains of shattered glass and paperwork to try and fix the problem. It’ll cost me way more to fix than the meagre pickings the laughing larcenist lifted.

Am I worried he’ll come back. A bit yes, but there is now nothing in the car at all and the thing I really want to keep out of an unsecured, if locked vehicle, is the rain.

It’s not the damage, or the woeful theft that has stuck with me – it was the complete absence of danger or risk this individual felt. You can see it with online videos of shoplifters, fare dodgers (as Robert Jenrick’s video showed) and I saw it face to face. To a generation of so called ‘petty thieves’ society’s answer to their completely relaxed question “what are you going to do about it?” appears these days to a be a very solid: ‘Absolutely nothing’.

You can almost see them saying ‘thought so’ as they blithely wander off. At least my one had the courtesy to run.

There is no risk to this activity, and the law abiders are left to pick up the pieces, in my case literally, with the overwhelming feeling that nobody will really do much more than sympathise at your ‘bad luck’.

In my time in the Home Office we were constantly facing calls from the Ministry of Justice outlining the problem with capacity in the prisons. I think the failure to build bigger prison capacity is a genuine miss of the ‘14 years’ and falls on the doorstep of the Tories. Of course, Labour’s solution was to release a whole bunch of delighted criminals early, so there’s blame on both sides. However it is a horrible logic that if prisons are full, what incentive is there to have a ‘zero tolerance attitude to crime’.

There is so much evidence that the normalisation of ‘low level crime’ is not good for communities. More an more people are aware of the broken window theory. Well right now I have four.

Oh, I’ve seen arguments from some of  the hard left ‘check-your-privilege’ type that ask the crime victim to think about what made the person steal in the first place, especially when it’s food. No, no dice. The anger comes from a sense of injustice that anyone, whatever their socio-economic background who ‘plays by the rules’ is at a disadvantage when facing those that don’t and won’t.

If the Tories are in the midst of making new policy, I want to appeal to my Home Office colleagues Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary and former policing minister and former Home Secretary James Cleverly, to the shadow justice secretary Rob Jenrick, and certainly our leader Kemi Badenoch – not to help me, but to work on new practical deliverable measures that push back on the ‘do nothing’ mentality that has become so baked into Britain in 2025.

There are reasons the police struggle to address this kind of ‘low level crime’ – another phrase I dislike – but it cannot be healthy that in the last 24 hours my friends across the political spectrum have echoed a long standing impression: that ‘the police won’t do anything.’

Victims of any crime, from ‘petty’ to appalling, need to feel the forces of law and order are on their side, and frankly too many don’t. Some can bandy around data all they like, and yes it’s important to look at the evidence but also to recognise it’s just as much about how crime makes people feel.

We need policy that makes people feel they are protected, and a criminal justice system that, within the law, is on their side.

The Tories rightly cherish, and need to revive, their reputation for economic competence, their historical reputation as the party of law and order is equally important to cling onto and recharge.