Police chief suggests burglaries shouldn’t be investigated if victims left their windows or doors open
Leicestershire Assistant Chief Constable Phil Kay slammed after saying he wants officers to spend time preventing crime
A POLICE chief has been slammed after saying his force should consider not investigating burglaries at homes where doors or windows had been left open.
Phil Kay, Assistant Chief Constable at Leicestershire Police, made things worse by comparing burglary victims and obese NHS patients.
His words come just one year after the very same force refused to attend call-outs at burgled houses with odd numbers in a ridiculous cost-cutting measure.
The money-saving pilot was introduced to assess the effectiveness of sending forensic officers to potential crime scenes, and ran for three months.
In an interview with the , Mr Kay said some students living in the town were victims of “preventable” break-ins because they thoughtlessly left doors or windows open.
He told the paper: “What the National Health Service will say is ‘we are not going to operate on you because your body mass is too high - they have not helped themselves to prevent an illness’.
“Yet if people leave doors or windows open there is an expectation the police will investigate."
He continued: “I would far rather my officers were spending their time preventing crime, protecting the public and focusing on other stuff than things that are preventable.”
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Kay said burglars often target student homes because of the high likelihood they will contain iPads, expensive laptops and smartphones.
He said: “I am not suggesting we have any plans to change what we do but I pose that as a question.
“If the health service are making decisions on whether someone has helped contribute to prevent something or not, should the police?
“It is right that we try and stop it but it is right that people take responsibility.
“If they knew we were not investigating it, they may take notice.”
A whopping one in four houses in Loughborough is rented by university students.
Responding to Mr Kay’s comments, Charnwood Borough Councillor Sandie Forrest said: “The comparison that the police are making with the NHS is a poor one because at the end of the day the NHS will intervene at some stage.
“I appreciate that the police have an enormously difficult job to do, but this would be extremely unpopular with the public.”
Meanwhile, local Richard George told the Loughborough Echo Kay’s comments were “absolutely disgraceful.”
He continued: “So if I go out and forget to lock a door or close a window and am unlucky enough to be burgled I don't deserve to have it investigated?
“Talk about being punished twice.”
Assistant Chief Constable Kay told : “We investigate every burglary and have no plans not to investigate such crimes.
“This line has been taken out of context.
“We want the public to take heed of our crime prevention message and take our advice seriously.”
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