Wildlife Crime Survey

 Making severe wildlife crime notifiable

Severe wildlife crime, such as badger cruelty and destruction of bat roosts:

(a) should be regarded as seriously as offences like theft, drug possession and indecent exposure;

 
(b) should be made notifiable to the Home Office so that police forces can give sufficient priority to tackling it.

Each year there are over one million notifiable offences; these include those like theft, drug possession and indecent exposure. There was broad agreement that severe wildlife crime should be treated as seriously (81% agreeing) although a few were reluctant to compare across categories in this way. One officer was horrified at the question because of the implication that a crime like badger baiting, which involves systematic cruelty, could be reduced to a comparison with theft.

There was even stronger support for the statement that wildlife crime should be made notifiable: 89% either agreed or strongly agreed; 40% of the total strongly agreed.

It should be noted that the issue of whether a crime should be made notifiable to the Home Office is significantly different to whether it should be recorded under NSIR (the National Standards for Incident Recording). This new system allows for a uniform and objective set of data to be obtained about what crime is taking place, and where. This is a comprehensive database and because it includes information about incidents irrespective of whether the crime is notifiable, it will include wildlife crime. However, offences which are made notifiable to the Home Office are the ones which are used to produce performance indicators for police forces. This – as we have heard from officers repeatedly – leads to resources being allocated primarily to covering notifiable offences, and not to those like wildlife crime which are outside this category. This is therefore at the root of the problem of insufficient resources, highlighted earlier in the section headed “Staffing Levels”. Thus, the NSIR system can only solve this problem if it were to be modified so that it could completely replace it.