Police are failing to officially record one in five crimes reported to them, according to a new report.
A new report reveals how the police are failing us
The highly critical report shows that more than a quarter of sexual offences - including rape - are not recorded as crimes because of 'unacceptable failings' by police.
The scale of the problem is revealed today by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary, which describes it as 'inexcusably poor and indefensible'.
The watchdog discovered that 19% of reported crimes are dismissed by forces across the country, with hundreds of rapes and violent offences wrongly recorded as 'no crimes' or removed from force statistics 'for no good reason'.
Inspectors found:
- More than 800,000 crimes reported to police go unrecorded every year;
- A quarter of sexual offences are not recorded, with more than 200 rapes dismissed as 'no crime';
- A third of violent crime is not logged, with some 250 offences ignored;
- One in five offenders who escape with a caution, warning or penalty notice should have faced a more severe punishment or been sent to court to face jail.
The HMIC's Chief Inspector, Tom Winsor, said to Sky News: "Failure to properly record crime is indefensible. This is not about numbers and dry statistics; it's about victims and the protection of the public. Victims of crime are being let down."
The inspection, which looked at over 8,000 reports of crime to the police between November 2012 and October 2013, discovered 37 cases of rape which were not recorded as crime.
And even when crimes were recorded correctly, many were removed or cancelled from the system as "no-crimes" - including 200 rapes and more than 250 violent crimes.
Mr Winsor said: "It is particularly important that in cases as serious as rape, these shortcomings are put right as a matter of the greatest urgency. The police should immediately institutionalise the presumption that the victim is to be believed.
"Offenders who should be being pursued by the police for these crimes are not being brought to justice, and their victims are denied services to which they are entitled."
One in five of the 3,246 reviewed decisions to cancel a crime record as a "no-crime" was found to be incorrect.
Police are obliged to inform victims about their decisions, but in over 800 of the cases examined there was no record of the victim having been told.
The police watchdog said that it had possibly given the impression to victims that crimes were being investigated when they were not.
Mr Winsor said some of the 43 forces in England and Wales were recording crime well, and others had improved since being criticised in an interim report in May.
He said the best forces identified in the report were Staffordshire, South Wales, West Midlands and Lincolnshire. The worst were West Yorkshire, Northumbria, Avon and Somerset and Dyfed Powys.