One of the by-products of a relatively affluent city like Edinburgh is the vulnerability to housebreaking and acquisitive crimes, and it’s also one of the problems of an under-resourced local force.
According to the Police Federation, there were 17,496 officers when Police Scotland was formed in 2013, but now it’s below 16,000. Police Scotland say the real figure is 16,631, but either way, in Edinburgh it’s still far fewer officers for a growing population.
Once again the Capital has the unenviable place at the top of the housebreaking league, with 1416 break-ins in 2024, a rate of 27 crimes per 10,000 people, while neighbouring East Lothian is the third worst for number of incidents, with Midlothian fourth.
But what is just as worrying is the fact that only 18.1 per cent of the Edinburgh cases are solved, which means those responsible for over a thousand break-ins a year are never brought to justice, for those crimes anyway.
Police Scotland has only ever known one political master, the SNP, so the buck must stop with the Scottish Government which is responsible for making resources available to the force and weakened local accountability when the new force was established.
At a time of record public spending, it’s hard to understand why police budgets have been slashed, but it’s not difficult to understand why so few serious crimes like housebreaking in Edinburgh are solved.
It’s simply unacceptable that so many Edinburgh residents’ homes have been violated by heartless criminals who know the police can’t investigate every incident.
