Immigrants boost crime in Britain

A chief constable today said an increase in immigration had left police struggling to deal with certain offences, including knife crime and drink-driving. Julie Spence, of Cambridgeshire police, said immigrant communities, often from the new EU states, had "different standards" from the UK. She issued an outspoken plea for more government funding to cope with the problems, posed by a sharp rise in immigration over recent years. Between 2003 and 2004 the number of foreign nationals arrested in the county for drink-driving soared from 57 to 966, although it has since fallen by two-thirds.

Mrs Spence also argued officers could take three times as long dealing with an immigrant offender, partly due to language difficulties. She was backed by the chairman of the Cambridgeshire Police Federation, who added many officers' time was also taken up educating new arrivals about British culture and laws. Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Mrs Spence she attacked the government for starving the force of funds to deal with the immigration influx. "The profile of the county has changed dramatically and this simply isn't taken into account when government allocates funding," she said. "We are now dealing with people from many different countries, speaking more than 90 different languages."

Mrs Spence said the new communities needed to adjust to British standards of behaviour. "When they arrive they think they can do the same thing as in the country they have come from," she said. "There were a lot of people who ... because they used to carry knives for protection, they think they can carry knives here. "We have worked with the communities because they don't necessarily come to commit crime but they need to be told what you can and can't do. "We can identify a significant rise in drink-drive, which was down to people thinking that what they did where they came from, they could do here." She said immigrants' attitudes to drink-driving were probably what they were in the UK 20 years ago.

"While the economic benefits of growth are clear, we need to maintain the basic public services infrastructure which means increasing the number of officers we have."

Research from the East of England Development Agency showed that between 50,000 and 80,000 of the region's 2.8 million "economically active" people were migrant workers, and they contributed about 360m pounds a year to the regional economy. Many worked in the food-processing and agricultural sectors.

Mrs Spence also said "feuds" between rival foreign gangs could involve investigating officers travelling to other countries to interview witnesses. "We recently had a murder and it was a Lithuanian on Lithuanian and it could easily have happened in Lithuania," she said. "But it didn't, it happened in Wisbech, so one of my staff spent a lot of their time in Lithuania trying to get underneath what was actually happening with the crime and criminality, which brings costs that you wouldn't have had before, which means something else has to give."

Speaking later on Sky News, Mrs Spence said her force had been "short changed" by 15m pounds over the past five years. Last year alone Cambridgeshire police spent 1m on translation - leading to "difficult choices" on where to find the money. "I think there's a London-centric, a metropolitan-centric view which says all the big issues happen in big cities, but we're not a sleepy rural county, if we ever were." She said government statistics underestimated the growth in the county's population and the police force was being denied a "fair slice of the cake".

David Smith, the chairman of Cambridgeshire Police Federation, said officers were becoming so stretched they were spending less time on the beat preventing crime. "Half of migrant workers in the east of England come to Cambridgeshire. That is obviously putting great pressure on resources," he said.

The shadow home secretary, David Davis, accused the government of a "shambolic approach to immigration". "The government estimated that 13,000 people would come from accession countries. At least 700,000 have now arrived," he said. "Labour's open door approach to immigration failed to consider, let alone cater for, the impact of this influx on housing and public services. Senior officers are now providing damning evidence of the strain Labour's shambolic approach has placed on the police and their ability to fight crime."

The Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, Nick Clegg, said: "The way ministers fund local public services, including the police, makes it incredibly difficult for communities to cope with the rapid changes in population that can be caused by immigration. "It takes years for the extra money to come through from the government for areas with high immigration, so it is no wonder the police can find themselves struggling."

The Home Office minister, Liam Byrne, said in a statement: "It's vital that we take the social impact of immigration into account when we make migration decisions. "It's because we want to hear voices like Julie Spence's that I set up the Migration Impacts Forum, so public services can help shape our tough points system which is introduced in around 150 days' time." A Home Office spokesman said spending on police services nationally had risen by nearly 5b from 6.2b to 11b since 1997. A spokesman for Gordon Brown said: "The chief constable has given her views but I think it's important that we keep this in context. "If you look at what's happening to total crime in Cambridgeshire, it's been on a clear downward trend."

Source