Police chief: Crime is being driven by an entitled generation that has never been told ‘no’ – and who instead take pride in not respecting others
- Stephen Watson said people these days take pride in not respecting others
- He warned the ‘sooner we correct that the better for all of us’
Crime is being driven by an entitled generation that has never been told ‘no’, according to one of Britain’s most senior police officers.
Chief Constable Stephen Watson said people these days take pride in not respecting others and when arrested for breaking the law complain to his officers: ‘You can’t tell me not to do that.’
He warned the ‘sooner we correct that – however we do that – the better for all of us’.
The tough comments by the head of Greater Manchester Police (GMP), who has turned around the country’s second-biggest force after years of failure, come amid alarm at the increasingly brazen behaviour of shoplifters, who are ransacking stores and attacking staff confident that they will not be challenged.
While a shop theft takes place every two seconds in the UK, The Mail on Sunday has revealed that one in eight bosses do not bother reporting the incidents because they say police are uninterested.
Chief Constable Stephen Watson, right, said people these days take pride in not respecting others and when arrested for breaking the law complain to his officers: ‘You can’t tell me not to do that’
Home Secretary Suella Braverman (second right) with Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police Stephen Watson (right) during a visit to Greater Manchester Police HQ in Manchester, as part of an announcement on police ‘pursuing all reasonable lines of inquiry to solve more crime’
It has led to calls for police leaders to take action and officers will now have to check CCTV from thefts against huge photo databases to hunt for suspects.
Asked at a fringe event at the Conservative Party conference what has made local communities more at risk of crime now, the GMP chief said: ‘I do think what has changed in large measure over recent times is we are growing a generation of people who have never had anybody say ‘no’ to them.’
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Mr Watson, addressing a Freedom Association debate on law and order, added: ‘The trust and respect for people in a hierarchy has broken down and I think people take pride in not respecting others because they somehow see it as demeaning to respect other people.
‘And we have seen a post-Covid feeling in the air where this strange sense of entitlement has become amplified.
‘So many of my officers will tackle people who are doing things that are demonstrably unacceptable, and the response will almost inevitably be, ‘You can’t tell me not to do that.’ ‘ Mr Watson – who in his two-year tenure at GMP has slashed 999 response times from 12 minutes to eight and more than doubled the number of arrests – said that more money should be spent on safeguarding ‘very young children’ before they join gangs.
‘I’m not talking about 16-year- olds. I’m talking about three-year- olds. By the time they’re 16 and carrying a gun they’re lost to us,’ he said. ‘It’s a tragedy… but my only interest is to lock them up because I need to safeguard the public from them.
‘We need to have fewer children entering the system. But for those who will not take no for an answer, we need to lock them up.’
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