At first I thought the rise in reported sexual offences was caused by the historical investigations of the crimes of middle aged, affluent male celebrities, teachers and religious folk as Suffolk has always been a comfortable bolthole for these types – but the spike in incidents relates to urban Ipswich whereas richer people tend to settle in the semi rural Mid Suffolk district.
Allowing for the accidental double counting of crimes mentioned in the article (due to a change in the systems used to record them) I think the cops are to be fair telling the truth – Suffolk remains one of the safest bits of England to live in.
What i do also think is happening is a rise in crimes where the victims and offenders are both young, linked to the increasing use of digital devices. Its fairly obvious that during a bitter economic depression and rise in inequality which has gone on for some years robberies would increase when people openly use these high value items in the street; added to which arguments on social networks do often increasingly lead to real fights.
Young people need to make a Police report to make insurance claims, there is also a high level of Police monitoring of social networks here assisted by British Telecom at the world famous research centre, and more young people (compared with my generation) are prepared to report a crime to Police rather than try and take matters into their own hands.
This might not be a bad thing for overall public safety (rather than estates held to ransom by “gangs”) but is not unrelated to the Snowden revelations; amongst many less tech aware young people they now genuinely think “the feds are all over Facebook etc and there is nothing we can do about it (as we don’t want to give up using FB) so we may as well just try and behave/fit in with the system”.
Suffolk?s recorded crime grew at twice the national rate – News – Ipswich Star
