Where we stand: Crime & Justice

Labour’s top-down approach to fighting crime has failed.

They have ignored the professional judgment of police officers and denied them the freedom to do their jobs - violent crime has increased as officers are forced to spend more time on paperwork than on patrol.

A Conservative Government will make the empowerment of communities a central part of our policies.

The bond between the police and the public must be rebuilt, and the first step will be cutting the paperwork which ties officers to their desks:

• We will scrap stop and search forms and cut bureaucracy to allow police officers to spend more of their time on the streets fighting crime
• We will reform the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), which regulates police surveillance, so that authorisation is not needed in straightforward cases. At the same time, we will take steps to prevent the misuse of surveillance powers by local authorities.
• We will strengthen police powers of stop and search to enable officers to respond decisively to incidents or threats of serious crime

We will take our reforms further by empowering local people as well as police officers. By introducing directly-elected police commissioners, and by requiring all police forces to publish crime maps and hold quarterly beat meetings, we will enable local communities to hold their police force to account.

To ensure that we have adequate space to house offenders, our plans for renewal of the prison estate will increase capacity by 5,000 places above Labour’s plans.

We will scrap Labour’s disastrous policy of early release, and introduce honesty in sentencing. Offenders will receive minimum and maximum sentences; there will be no possibility of parole before the minimum has been served, and release before the maximum point will be conditional on the prisoner’s behaviour and progress in prison.

We will also legislate to create a presumption that anyone convicted of knife crimes will receive a prison sentence.

We cannot tackle crime unless we also address the causes of crime, such as family breakdown, drug abuse and binge drinking.  But the fight back starts with getting more police officers back on to the streets.  Only then can we begin to rebuild the safer communities we all want.