32
Wednesday, October 17, 1973
to hope that the great programmes of improvement in housing, education and social
:welfare will all help over crime -- though the programmes are justified on
their own merits. But in the short term we must rely very largely on
deterrence and all experts are agreed that the basic deterrent is fear of
detection. Few men commit crimes which they know will be detected.
One of the key elemente in deterrence is a large and visible
police presence. One of our endeavours has therefore been to increase
the number of police. The Government started by a drive to expand the
Auxiliaries as the quickest way of raising numbers, and because of the
vital role which the Auxiliaries could play as a link between the regular police and the neighbourhoods they serve. Within a period of something
like 9 months the Auxiliaries have been increased from 3,500 to 7,000
trained men. This has been a magnificent effort by all concerned.
We subsequently conducted a campaign for the recruitment of regulars.
This was done following the first action phase of the Fight Violent Crime campaign, and yielded 400 acceptable recruits. While this was substantially
more than had been obtained for some time in a similar drive, I think it
is fair to say that the result was greatly prejudiced by the escape of Godber and the attendant publicity, which ironically coincided with the recruitment drive. Certainly we had hoped to do better. We will be
mounting a further drive later this year, and as a result the police still
hope to be able to recruit in 1973 about half as many again as in 1972, that is to say about 1,200. But this is still not enough, and the shortfall in
recruitment and wastage from the ranks must not be allowed to continue. We
have therefore been looking again urgently at police pay and conditions of
/service,
t