Has a fall in police numbers led to a rise in serious violent crime? My personal experience says yes.
In May last year my ex-partner, Seb*, tied me up with electrical wire, wrapped gaffer tape around my head and spent half an hour threatening to kill me with a knife. To say that he was psychiatrically unwell is an understatement – it was the last in an escalating series of events that had been bringing the police to my doorstep on a regular basis for weeks. I escaped from the ordeal physically unharmed but have not really been the same person since.
Seb wasn’t very well when I met him through a dating app. But it seemed to me at time that his sometimes unusual behaviour could be explained by terrible things that had happened to him: the recent death of his father, having to go to court repeatedly to get access to his son, and a bout of homelessness. When I met him he had just spent Christmas sleeping in a car that didn’t belong to him and, frankly, I thought that so much sadness for such a young person – he was in his early thirties – would be enough to drive anyone slightly around the twist.
He had needed help badly and asked for it directly. In a sense I didn’t choose him but his many sweet, helpful and warm qualities – as well as his shock of blonde hair and considerable charm – drew me strongly to the belief that I was doing the right thing. With regular meals and sleep, as well as a herbal remedy for depression, St John’s Wort, he began to get better. The drinking and other compulsive behaviours subsided, his bouts of crying stopped, his physical health improved.
He also made my life better in lots of practical ways and I grew to love him for it. I often worked nights and when AirBnB guests arrived in the evening he enjoyed welcoming them and we got a series of five-star reviews mentioning his great hosting skills. We went running together, walked for hundreds of hours along the canal towpaths of London in the sunshine, he told me about his life and vice versa. He had arrived from eastern Europe about a decade previously, had found his way on to a business computing course at a prestigious university, met the mother of his child and settled down. There were amusing anecdotes from his childhood, which he described as being “one long episode of Jackass“. He was a survivor, I understood.
His first job interview, after he had been living with me for about five months, was at Google. He confessed that he had felt like an imposter in the interview, so I paid for a short online course in interview skills and after that he got the next position he applied for. We celebrated with dinner at Ognisko in South Kensington and within three months he’d got through the probation period and had a full-time job that was better paid than my journalism. My family and friends all liked him when they met him at Christmas. Life was good.
But there had always been a fuzziness about his previous seven years that bothered me. In January, a year after I’d met him, things began to disintegrate and I soon understood why. I now know that his illness – which has been tentatively diagnosed as bipolar disorder – is cyclical on a roughly 12-month pattern. This made sense of the oddly shambolic state of his CV, which showed that he hadn’t kept a job for more than six months since university. However, as an east European, it hadn’t seemed implausible that he would have stayed in a position for only a few months before moving on. I have an engineer friend from Romania whose CV looks nearly exactly similar and his mental health is fine.
By the time Seb attacked me in May he had stopped sleeping, gone missing for several days, walked out on his job, caused two fires that I know of, thrown a brick through the window of my front door, lost all of his possessions, spent his final month’s salary in 48 hours and trashed a hotel room. The fire in my garden and the brick were both on the night that my housemate, Bob, decided enough was enough and that it was no longer safe to have Seb around. Bob was right but it meant that Seb was homeless. Again.
Two months later – possibly the worst two months of my life, during which I discovered that you can’t find psychiatric help for another person without their explicit consent – I saw Seb in an east London park, where he was living. He came back to the house for some food and then slept for 16 hours on the sofa. In the morning, after agreeing to come with me to the hospital for a psychiatric assessment, he instead attacked me.
The police caught him that evening. The electrical wire and gaffer tape he had used to tie me up were still in his bag, as well as my mobile phone, which he had taken to stop me calling the police, and the knife. However he was released again the next day for reasons that have never been properly or fully explained. I was distraught for my own safety, at apparently not having been believed and also for Seb, who by that time was a danger to himself and other people. Two weeks later he attacked someone else, at which point the police charged him with my attack as well and issued a warrant for his arrest.
However, by that stage it was too late. I had been told by the officer in charge of the case that Seb had been bailed to a friend’s address. This turned out to be untrue, which meant the police had released him on to the streets to be homeless and had no means of finding him again. For two months he was on the run before finally being caught at Lewisham library, where a sharp-eyed member of staff recognised him from a police circular. So thank you to that person.
Six months later he pleaded guilty to all charges, received the first psychiatric diagnosis of his life, apologised to me in court and is now in a medium security hospital. I’m having a lot of counselling.
I have followed the police complaints procedure but have been told there were no irregularities in the way Seb’s case was handled, which is frankly terrifying. Apparently it is completely normal for the police to release a man who has tied someone up and threatened to kill them. When they released him after attacking me they had all the physical evidence they would ever have and yet it apparently took an attack on a second person to convince them I’d been telling the truth and to charge him.
So has the fall in police numbers led to a rise in serious violent crime? Well, in my case there were two people attacked as a result of an otherwise inexplicable police inaction – which they themselves attributed repeatedly to being overstretched. I was told, among other things, that the Crown Prosecution Service had demanded forensic evidence in order to charge Seb with attacking me but that the police did not have the money to send the evidence to the lab for examination. And if they’d charged him when they had him the first time, his violent crimes would have been one rather than two. So that’s a doubling in the violent crime rate right there. As the leaked Home Office document reportedly says: “Resources dedicated to serious violence have come under pressure and charge rates have dropped. This may have encouraged offenders.”
I am also dumbfounded that it took about six months for him to get any kind of psychiatric attention after entering the system despite the police being repeatedly told by everyone involved – except Seb – that he was unwell.
It’s the human cost that matters in the end – and it’s been devastating.
* names have been changed
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