Unsolved and increasingly unsafe: Nearly 90% of reported crime in Cambridge has gone unpunished since 2017
Violence and sexual offences were the most frequently reported unsolved crimes over the past 3 years.
More than 9 out of 10 reported crimes in central Cambridge have not led to a suspect being charged since 2017, according to an analysis of the latest police data.
Aggregated figures from over three years worth of reported crime and outcomes data, publicly provided by Cambridgeshire constabulary, have shed light upon the most commonly reported crime types.
Outcome data from police investigations in central Cambridge have also been carefully examined to determine year on year trends since 2017.
Daniel Zeichner, MP for Cambridge, said that recent police funding cuts have prevented local crime teams from being able to gather critical information and build good relationships within communities to help combat crime.
“The police cannot do the kind of neighbourhood policing with the numbers they have got that they used to be able to do, and that they very much want to do.”
On violent crimes and sexual offences, he talked about the “complicated sets of issues” faced by the police due to the relatively recent influence of county lines networks, and the proximity of Cambridge to London making it very easy for criminals to come and go.
He also said that despite being a relatively safe place to live, Cambridge has apparently been changing for the worse in recent years:
“What I’ve noticed in my five and a half years as an MP, is that it’s only in the last year or so that I’ve had people begin to say to me, particularly some young people, students, and women in particular, that they don’t always feel safe. I was not hearing that a year or two ago, so something has changed.”
Sophie Watson, a final year student in psychological and behavioural sciences at the University of Cambridge, said that despite feeling relatively safe in Cambridge, she would often experience harassment on her way home after a night out clubbing.
“If I’m walking home through the dark streets, it’s usually someone standing in the mouth of an alley, or sheltering in a shop door. As I walk past I’ll hear someone say something say something quite explicit. I just keep walking and keep my head down.”
Sophie thought that her friends felt similarly and that one of them was recently “groped in the queue at the chippy”, which she described as “normal stuff.”
Reflecting on her experiences of being harassed in her home town of Swindon, she said that she didn’t notice any “drastic change” upon arriving in Cambridge.
“Obviously [being harassed] does make me feel quite threatened. At the same time it’s not abnormal at all. I think that’s just something you learn to put up with as a woman as soon as you hit puberty. There’s something really disturbing about how normal it feels.
It’s this strange gulf between the experience of being a man or a woman in Cambridge.”
Sophie said she wanted elected representatives to do more to tackle what she described as the “normality” of being subject to sexual harassment as a woman, pointing out that she could not recall seeing this issue addressed in party manifestoes or local hustings.
Another former Cambridge student told a similar story about their time in the city.
Evie Aspinall, a political researcher based in London, described an experience of being followed and harassed by a man driving a car late at night in the city centre.
“This dodgy, scary looking, fancy car followed me down the whole street. The man was shouting and talking at me. I was just like: head down, walk.
I phoned a friend. It was a very uncomfortable experience. I never walked down that street at night again.”
She also said that the “abysmal” statistics related to sexual harassment and abuse had dissuaded all of the many women she knew of who had been sexually assaulted from going to the police.
“Basically it feels like there’s no point. You’re just going through a really traumatic experience knowing that your name’s going to get raked through the mud. Everyone’s going to question: Did they deserve it, did they not?
You’re going through all that pain and realistically they’re not going to get prosecuted.”
The proportion of investigations being closed without any identifiable suspect rose dramatically from 2017 to the beginning of 2020.
Cases where suspects were unable to be prosecuted also rose rapidly from 2018–19, before tapering off less steeply at the start of this year.
The number of suspects being charged has not changed significantly since 2018.
9 out of 10 cases of bicycle and vehicle crime, theft, burglary, criminal damage and arson remain unsolved, with bicycle thieves escaping justice almost 99% of the time.
Data related to Antisocial behaviour have not been included in this study because according to Tara Cox, Communications officer for Cambridgeshire constabulary, it is not relevant for calculating crime outcome rates.
“Anti-social behaviour is logged as incident data, not crime data, so should not be included in crime outcome rates as it will not give a proportionate picture.”
A Cambridgeshire Constabulary spokeswoman said:
“We have made significant improvements to our crime recording processes in recent years meaning many minor offences which previously may have been written off have been processed. These are often dealt with by means of community resolution or cautions, rather than someone being charged.
Sexual and violent offences are extremely broad terms which cover a wide variety of offences. Certain crimes are, by their very nature, harder to detect and those statistics can paint a disproportionate picture.”
She also said that the reasons for investigations being dropped can vary dramatically.
“These can include a lack of evidence to identify those responsible, victims not wishing to proceed with a prosecution or solutions such as community resolutions for minor offences.
When dealing with minor offences committed by juveniles it is often deemed that resolutions other than criminalisation are more appropriate, and can be an effective way of preventing further offending without the child being charged and appearing before the courts.”
Explore recently reported crimes in Cambridge during October 2020:
When asked about unexpected location data and gaps in police datasets Cambridgeshire constabulary said:
“Out of force locations may be included in the data because another force has transferred the crime to us to investigate or the address has been incorrectly entered on the system.”
Gaps in the datasets and unexpected location data, such as crimes being recorded outside of Cambridgeshire, have therefore been omitted from this analysis to provide as clear a picture as possible.
Full data analysis using RStudio is available on Github. For outcomes data analysis click here. For street crime data analysis click here.
