Rural crime in Yorkshire: policing numbers are, frankly, shocking

Those living and working in Yorkshire’s rural communities will offer up not one iota of surprise at reading today this newspaper’s findings in relation to police resourcing of rural crime. More likely, hard-pressed farmers and farm hands, as they take in the fact that up in North Yorkshire just 18 police officers are dedicated to tackling around £2m-worth of rural crime per year, are likely to blurt out a three-word, alliterative exclamation that draws on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous detective.

Labour Leader Keir Starmer, Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper and Labour's York and North Yorkshire Mayor David Skaith (R) walk through the village of Cawood in April last year, promising a rural crime strategy. (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

By The Yorkshire Post

Leaders

Published 19th Apr 2025, 05:00 BST

Quelle surprise, then, might be a slightly less Yorkshire way, though infinitely more appropriate for the breakfast table, of responding to these findings, the consequences of which rural communities know about only too well.

That so little time, effort and resource is given to protecting the rural towns, villages and hamlets from unscrupulous, often organised, crooks is in and of itself proverbially criminal, serving only to invite increased malevolence as a vicious circle of isolation and vulnerability translates to criminal networks as opportunity.

Whilst, on this Easter weekend of all weekends, it remains sinful to covet thy neighbour, the sense of unjust, unfairness is only exacerbated by peering up the road to Cumbria, where – a much smaller, less populated place – it has 117 officers and staff dedicated to rural crime.

Whether it is hare coursing and livestock theft, satellite GPS systems, Land Rovers, quad bikes and the like going missing in the dead of night, or the complex, organised removal of sophisticated, specialist, costly machinery; each victim of such crimes is left having to do more with less. There can be no doubt in anyone’s mind when poring over the detail of how rural crime is policed, in North Yorkshire in particular, that it amounts to the shameful neglect of honest, hard-working people who deserve better.