The new police and crime advisor for Reform UK has said he believes the country is suffering from ‘gaslighting’ as the party rejects the Crime Survey of England and Wales.

Speaking on GB News Colin Sutton said:

“The country’s broken wherever you look and the police service is something that’s dear to my heart. I gave the best years of my life to it and to see us in the position where trust is breaking down and where law and order is breaking down, something needs to change.

“I’ve never been much of a person for sitting at the side and shouting; I’m a doer. So I thought, well, I’ll stick my hand up and see if I can help.

“If you get people inured with the idea that it’s not worth reporting crime then they don’t report it. And insurance is expensive. Many people, sadly, don’t have insurance. They lose something, something gets stolen from them, what’s the point? We know we’re not going to get it back.

“We don’t need a crime reference number to claim on insurance. It’s not going to do any good. We’ll just move on.

“There used to be ways of getting this dark figure, as criminologists call it, of unreported crime.

“I think we may even desensitised people to crime because that survey asked, ‘have you been a victim of crime this year?’ And if you don’t see it as being a victim of crime, despite the fact that you actually are, because somebody stolen something from you, I think it could be that.

“Certainly the perceptions on what we think and what we see is that crime is up and the measurable crime, the crime that always is reported, is up. If you look at it overall, I think it’s gaslighting again.

“Any kind of trust, when it’s lost, it’s much harder to regain it than it is to lose it. We’ve lost it. We’ve lost trust in police, we’ve lost trust in politicians, for that matter. And there’s something that needs to be rebuilt.

“The first step on rebuilding trust is engagement. Why do we concentrate so much on crimes that are suffered by a noisy minority? Why are we sending six police officers, around to arrest a journalist for a tweet when somebody living down the same street who’s had their bike stolen can’t get a police officer to come out for love no money?

“And that’s the kind of thing that builds trust, and once we start developing that trust will be a snowball and exponential rise, because people will realise it’s worth it, realise that if they report it to police, they’ll get competent, well trained, sympathetic officers who turn up and do something about it and so it’s they tell their friends.

“Nobody joins the police service to police social media. People who join the police service, by and large, they’re brave young men and women who want to serve their community and want to do a decent job.

“So how have we got to the situation where they’re not doing the things that their community wants them to do?

“And then you have to start looking, well, where are the influences on them? Because I know lots of current police officers still and I don’t know any one of them who wouldn’t want to turn out and retrieve your phone or your car or whatever your piece of property is and arrest the person who stole it, because that’s what they want to do.

“Why are these individuals on the front line who want to do the job and want to serve their community, what’s preventing them?

“I got a phone call yesterday afternoon saying, ‘we could have a task force as well’, because I’d agreed to be the advisor. So that’s not a conversation we’ve had yet. I don’t want I don’t want a cast of thousands. I don’t want something that reports over months.

“I’ve had some very encouraging responses already today, just with the publicity. I’ve approached no one but I’ve had half a dozen people come to me and say, I’m willing to help you. I’ve got something to offer.

“You can’t start with a blank sheet of paper because policing has to go on. But what you can do, you can say, what are the limiting factors? What are the things that are causing this mismatch? Because our police service has never in my view been further away from what the community wants it to be than it is at the moment and we need to narrow that gap.”