Back in September I explained Durham Police’s rather peculiar approach to investigating driving offences. I had been involved in a minor collision on the A690 in Durham. I was in stationary traffic when another vehicle on the wrong side of the road hit my van. Nobody was injured and the damage wasn’t particularly serious, but the circumstances suggested that a driving offence might have been committed.
Durham Police weren’t interested. They told me that because I had the registration number of the other vehicle, they would be taking no further action. I pointed out that I wasn’t asking them to settle an insurance claim. I was reporting what I believed to be a criminal offence.
Their response was rather revealing.
“It is our force policy that if the offending vehicle registration is known and they have valid insurance, then the insurance companies deal with any claim.”
The officer explained that the police received a large number of hit-and-run reports and didn’t have the resources to investigate them all. If both vehicles were identified and insured, they recorded the incident and left the insurance companies to sort it out. This, I was assured, had been force policy for some time.
Which seemed rather odd. Whether someone has insurance is entirely irrelevant to whether they have committed a driving offence. Insurance companies can decide who pays for the damage, but they don’t enforce the criminal law. Nor does having insurance give someone permission to drive dangerously.
Particularly because the force is running Operation Snap.
Operation Snap actively encourages members of the public to send Durham Police footage of bad driving. Last year Durham Police even produced a compilation of some of the drivers caught through the scheme. This isn’t some random scheme. Road safety is one of the explicit priorities set for Durham Police set by the Police and Crime Commissioner.
Joy Allen’s Police, Crime and Justice Plan has six overarching themes and one of them is Safer Roads. When the current plan came into force in April 2025, Allen said road safety would “remain a key area of focus”, specifically mentioning speeding and drink and drug driving alongside stronger enforcement.
So I asked to see the policy. Durham Police told me I would have to submit a Freedom of Information request. I did.
And now Durham Police have replied. There is no written policy.
The policy that doesn’t exist
The response, dated 21 October, is quite explicit. Asked for the policy governing investigations where a collision has occurred and another driver alleges that an offence has been committed, Durham Constabulary replied:
“There is no written policy.”
It explained that decision-makers in its Collision Records department review reports using something called THRIVE, an assessment of threat, harm, risk, investigation and engagement. They consider the available evidence, witnesses, injuries, damage and circumstances before deciding whether an investigation is appropriate.
Asked about allegations that drivers have failed to stop or report collisions, the answer was much the same. There is no written policy. Cases are reviewed individually, although the force acknowledges that it does not investigate every minor damage collision without injuries.
There is an important distinction between having no written policy and having no policy at all. Organisations operate with unwritten procedures and established practices all the time. And I don’t doubt that police forces have to make difficult decisions about which incidents deserve their limited resources.
However I wasn’t told that my particular collision had been assessed against a range of criteria and found insufficiently serious to investigate. I was told that the police had a longstanding force policy under which identifiable, insured vehicles were left to the insurance companies.
That is a rule than an individual assessment.
The Police and Crime Commissioner subsequently told me that decisions were based on threat, risk, severity, available evidence and the proportionate use of police resources. That is broadly consistent with the FOI response. It is considerably less consistent with the explanation given by the officer dealing with my report.
Perhaps the officer was describing an informal operational practice. Perhaps the decision was made using THRIVE and the explanation was simply badly worded. But if the police tell the public that their decisions are governed by a force policy, surely it isn’t unreasonable to expect them to explain what that policy actually is.
And if the policy isn’t written down, how do we know that it is being applied consistently?
Is crime really falling?
I’ve written before about long-term trends in violent crime and what the crime figures tell us about London.
For years, politicians and police chiefs have been telling us that crime is falling. For almost as long, large numbers of people have refused to believe them. There is a widespread suspicion that the police are manipulating the figures, failing to record offences or simply finding ways of making crime disappear from the statistics.
My experience with Durham Police reinforces that suspicion. If the police decline to investigate an alleged offence and give an explanation which is inconsistent with their own account of their procedures, it isn’t difficult to see why people might begin to distrust the numbers.
But there’s a problem with that argument. Crime really has fallen. Not every crime, not everywhere and not necessarily in the last twelve months. But the long-term reduction in most traditional forms of crime is one of the most remarkable and least appreciated social changes of the last thirty years.
The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics, published on 22 October, provide some useful evidence.
In the year ending June 2026, police recorded 512 homicides in England and Wales, down from 519 the previous year. Knife-enabled offences fell by 6%, to 48,615. Firearms offences fell by 8%, to 5,065. Recorded burglary fell by 6%, vehicle offences by 7%, and shoplifting, which had been rising for several years, fell by 2%.
These are police-recorded figures, of course, and that immediately raises the question of whether the police are simply recording fewer offences. But some crimes are much harder to hide than others.
It is impossible for a police force to make dead bodies disappear from the statistics on any significant scale. Homicides are subject to investigations, coroners, forensic evidence and, frequently, considerable public attention.
Or consider knife crime. Police-recorded offences involving knives fell by 6% in the latest figures. But hospital admissions for assaults involving sharp objects also fell, by 8%, from 3,509 to 3,218. Those hospital figures are particularly important because they are collected through the NHS rather than the police. A person admitted to hospital with a stab wound doesn’t cease to exist because a police officer decides not to investigate the assault.
The two sets of figures don’t measure precisely the same thing, and neither is perfect. But when police-recorded knife offences and hospital admissions for sharp-object assaults are both falling, it becomes rather harder to argue that the reduction is simply an exercise in fiddling the numbers.
There is another source we can use as evidence too. The Crime Survey for England and Wales asks people directly about their experiences of crime, including incidents they never reported to the police. It is therefore much less vulnerable to changes in police recording practices.
The survey estimates that violence with or without injury is 36% lower than a decade ago and 79% below its peak in 1995. Theft is 77% below its 1995 peak, while criminal damage is down by 81%. These are enormous changes. They cannot plausibly be explained simply by police officers refusing to fill in forms.
There are important exceptions. Fraud has increased, and the internet has created opportunities for criminals which barely existed thirty years ago. Some sexual offences and domestic abuse are better reported and recorded than they once were, although measuring changes in their actual prevalence remains difficult.
Nevertheless, the broad picture is clear. Britain has become substantially safer from many of the conventional crimes that dominated public debate in the 1980s and 1990s. So why doesn’t it feel that way?
The difference between crime and policing
Part of the answer is that people’s experience of policing is not the same thing as their experience of crime. Someone whose car has been stolen, whose house has been burgled or who has been threatened in the street is unlikely to be particularly reassured by being told that crime has fallen by 70% since 1995. They want the police to do something about what has happened to them. And when the response is that there isn’t enough evidence, there aren’t enough officers, or the incident doesn’t meet the threshold for investigation, the impression is that the police have simply stopped bothering.
Sometimes that impression will be unfair. Police resources are finite, and there is no realistic prospect of investigating every reported offence to the same standard. A minor collision with no injuries cannot command the same resources as a murder investigation. But there is a difference between making a proportionate decision not to investigate and appearing to have a blanket policy of leaving certain alleged offences to insurance companies.
There is also a distinction between recording an offence and investigating it. A crime can be properly recorded and subsequently closed without further investigation. Equally, an incident can be recorded without the police deciding that a notifiable criminal offence has occurred.
My experience with Durham Police doesn’t establish that they failed to record a crime, and it certainly doesn’t establish that they have been manipulating their crime statistics. What it does demonstrate is how easily the police can undermine confidence in their own decisions.
If the public are told that an alleged offence won’t be investigated because of force policy, and then discover that the force has no written policy governing that decision, they are entitled to ask what is actually going on. And once people start questioning the explanations they receive about individual incidents, it isn’t a very large leap to questioning the statistics the same organisation produces.
That is unfortunate, because the independent evidence suggests that much of the good news about crime is genuine.
A problem of public confidence
There is something very self-defeating about all this. The police have a legitimate story to tell about the long-term decline in crime. They can point to reductions in homicide, serious violence and traditional property offences. They can point to independent victim surveys and NHS figures which broadly support the picture.
But public confidence isn’t built through statistical bulletins. It is built through the everyday interactions people have with police officers, call handlers and the people responsible for deciding whether reported offences will be investigated. If those interactions leave people feeling that the police are evasive, inconsistent or simply uninterested, then all the impressive statistics in the world are unlikely to persuade them otherwise.
There is also a danger that a culture of performance measurement encourages organisations to become more interested in demonstrating success than explaining failure. That doesn’t mean anyone is deliberately falsifying figures. It means that the incentives facing an organisation may not always align neatly with the interests of the people it serves.
The question isn’t whether Durham Police should investigate every dented bumper. It is whether the public can understand the criteria used to decide which allegations are investigated, and whether those criteria are applied consistently.
That doesn’t seem an unreasonable expectation.
Does Durham Police need to exist?
There is another reason why this matters. There are proposals for a substantial reorganisation of policing in England and Wales, reducing the number of forces through mergers into larger regional organisations. The existing structure of 43 territorial police forces is being questioned, and an independent review is considering what should replace it.
Durham Constabulary is a relatively small force, and like any organisation facing the possibility of being absorbed into a larger one, it has an institutional interest in demonstrating that it performs well. Good crime figures help make that case.
Preserving Durham Constabulary as a separate organisation shouldn’t be an objective in itself. If we’re serious about devolution, there is a very good argument that police force boundaries should correspond to those of our mayoral authorities. We already have a single ambulance service covering the North East. Why should policing necessarily be organised differently?
There are arguments for retaining smaller forces, particularly around local knowledge and accountability. There are also arguments for larger organisations, including economies of scale, better specialist capabilities and more consistent standards. The present boundaries are hardly sacred, and Durham’s own police area crosses two mayoral authorities.
But whatever structure we end up with, public confidence matters. Durham Police may want to demonstrate that it is a successful, effective organisation capable of justifying its continued independence. Falling crime figures are part of that argument, but they aren’t enough on their own. When an officer tells a member of the public that an alleged offence won’t be investigated because of a longstanding force policy, and the force subsequently says that no such written policy exists, the organisation creates exactly the sort of suspicion which makes people distrust its claims about crime.
The irony is that the police don’t need to invent falling crime figures. Much of the decline is real, and there is compelling independent evidence to support it. But if Durham Constabulary wants the public to believe its statistics, it needs to be rather more straightforward about what it does, what it doesn’t do and why.
And if it wants the public to support its continued existence as an independent force, it needs to demonstrate that its current structure actually delivers better policing.
Because the question isn’t whether Durham Police can produce impressive crime statistics. It’s whether the people it serves have good reason to trust it.