(Title Image: © Copyright Jaggery and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons Licence BY-SA-2.0)
Before looking at the Police & Crime Commissioner candidates and platforms in more detail tomorrow, it’s worth attempting to judge the performance of the sitting PCCs over the last five years.
While individual PCCs will have introduced their own measures or projects as part of their police and crime plans, generally the most important things to consider are crime rates, the number of police officers and finances (namely the precept).
Following the general trend across EnglandandWales, reported violent crimes have increased in the four Welsh police force areas. In September 2020, the violent crime rate in Wales (30.9 incidents per 1,000 people) was higher than the EnglandandWales average (30.1).
Perhaps the biggest surprise is that North Wales tops the table in Wales and it’s driven mainly (in North Wales and Gwent) by significantly higher rates of what’s logged as “stalking and harassment”.
While they can’t stop people committing crimes, I don’t think any of the four PCCs can claim to have a particularly good record here – though in the two Labour-controlled forces (South Wales & Gwent), things were at least on a downward trend by the end of 2020 (probably driven by pandemic lockdowns).
Again North Wales (Plaid Cymru-controlled) stands out, both for having the highest rate overall, but also seemingly having seen a significant decline in recorded sexual offences during 2019 and 2020. That could be interpreted as being a good performance on the part of Arfon Jones.
The other forces are broadly similar and Wales has the same offences rate as England.
Except for criminal damage and arson, the rates of crimes against property in Wales have been consistently lower than in England and were on a downward trend in all force areas by the end of 2020 (presumably pandemic-driven). There’s little you can take from this.
Here’s an interesting one because Arfon Jones has been particularly outspoken on drug laws and North Wales has maintained a below-average rate of drug offences.
I don’t know why – probably pronounced problems in the Llanelli area, as well as students – but the Dyfed-Powys force area has consistently maintained the highest drug offence rate when you would’ve perhaps expected a bigger problem in South Wales and Gwent.
Clearly, something has been happening in Gwent (Labour-controlled). It could simply be that the recording process has improved or people committing public order offences are being caught more often but the high rate in Gwent stands out quite dramatically. North Wales has clearly seen problems too.
The number of officers will be broadly proportional to the number of people; given South Wales is the largest force area, they’ll naturally have the most officers. Force strength has remained fairly stable across all force areas, though South Wales (Labour-controlled) is the only force area to have seen a statistically significant decline in police officer numbers in the last five years. Even then, that was seemingly a one-off and all forces except Dyfed-Powys saw numbers drop during 2016.
All PCCs ended their terms with more full-time equivalent police officers than when they started, though the biggest jump has seemingly been in Gwent.
This is probably what you all notice more keenly than everything else because it’s added to council tax bills.
There’s clear patterns to all of them – smaller increases at the start of the term, a bigger hike mid-term, followed by smaller increases towards the end.
Overall, North Wales (Plaid Cymru-controlled) has kept precept increases under greater control, while Labour’s Alun Michael (South Wales) has, on average, increased the policing precept the most.
Plaid Cymru’s Dafydd Llywelyn (Dyfed-Powys) has generally been the least predictable, while Labour’s Jeff Cuthbert (Gwent) has at least tried to minimise big variations in year-to-year changes.
