Police Structures, Accountability and Performance I have read Owen’s paper and am impressed with the level and breadth of research that has been undertaken in its preparation, and with the general content and flow of the document. Whilst there are some ideas put forward that I am not necessarily in agreement with, if viewed as a thoughtful contribution to a strategic debate on the future of policing in England and
Wales, I think that the paper has real value.Paul West
Chief Constable
West Mercia Constabulary
IntroductionIn October 2005, I visited Monkmoor Police Station in Shrewsbury with my colleague Philip Dunne, MP for
Ludlow, for what we expected to be a routine visit to discuss local policing. We were astonished to learn, from senior and junior officers who were dismayed by the prospect, of Government proposals to impose the most dramatic change in British policing for over 100 years.I represent
North Shropshire, which is policed by West Mercia Constabulary. This is a force which was formed in 1967, as a result of the amalgamation of the police forces of Herefordshire, Shropshire,Worcester
City and Worcestershire. Covering an area of 2,900 square miles consisting of Herefordshire, Shropshire, Telford & Wrekin, and Worcestershire, with a total population of 1,173,200; geographically it is the largest land-locked force in England and
Wales. As an MP I have had no more than routine contact with the Police and as a Shadow Spokesman have never had a brief to work on policing. However, what the Government is proposing is so brutally wrong that I have found myself becoming more and more deeply involved in an issue which affects every citizen. Yet this process is being forced through with extraordinarily little debate either in Parliament or in the press.Although I have spoken three times in the House on this matter, the time has always been extremely limited. If I had been given more time, I would have liked to explore some of the issues which I outline below and which are relevant to every force in the country. These are strictly my private views that should have been put across in a debate had the Government granted enough time. I hope that my front bench colleagues will consider them as they develop Conservative party policy over the next eighteen months and especially hope that they will be of value to the Party’s Police Reform Task Force. BackgroundOn 16 September 2005, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) published a report called Closing the Gap from which the Government concluded that police forces needed to have a minimum of 4,000 police officers, or 6,000 police officers and staff combined, to provide effective “protective policing services” covering terrorism, major crime and civil emergencies.Without any debate at all, the Home Secretary wrote to Police Authorities on 22 September proposing that they bring forward plans to merge with a remit to create forces with over 4,000 officers within the Government’s regional boundaries. It rapidly became clear that the Government wanted to create 12 large forces based on its own regions. An extraordinarily short timetable was set, requiring final options to be sent to the Home Office by 23 December. The police had told me at the meeting in Shrewsbury that
West Mercia was considered to be “a very efficient force and it works” and that this would shortly be confirmed by the Government’s own auditors.Sure enough, in October the combination of HMIC Baseline Assessment and the Police Standards Unit Assessment of Performance (including level two performance), the most comprehensive independent assessment of British police forces, rated West Mercia number one in the country. Yet West Mercia, which already covers the fourth largest geographical area, was being rushed headlong into a vast new West Midlands regional force, with Staffordshire, Warwickshire and the
West Midlands.At a whole series of meetings it rapidly became clear that neither the West Mercia Police Authority nor their courageous Chief Constable Paul West were prepared to be rolled over.At an impromptu meeting with the Parliamentary under Secretary, Fiona McTaggart, the Chief Constable and the Chairman of the Police Authority, comprehensively roasted the Minister, who proved completely incapable of answering how the arbitrary figure of 4,000 officers was arrived at. Paul West told her that:It was nothing short of scandalous to reconfigure British policing in a few weeks … In my professional judgement as a Chief of a high performing force, in a regional structure it would be extremely difficult to give the same level of performance as at present in
West Mercia.Crucially he saidBCU commanders will have much less influence. The proposal is untested and the regional model is not supported by the people of
West Mercia. The way it is being imposed is outrageous; there is scant regard for professional advice on the ground. Most importantly he saidLevel 2 could be delivered by collaboration and joint working. In a final crushing comment he saidThis is not some superficial numbers game. The analysis of 4,000, if written by a GCSE statistics student, would have been returned.In the Westminster Hall Debate I asked the Minister of State, Hazel Blears, to publish the data on which Closing the Gap was based and to have them peer reviewed by independent assessors. Yet, despite the Minister saying in the debateI am always perfectly prepared to engage, discuss, challenge and consider the issues (29 Nov 2005 : Column 24WH)this has not been done. However, on the day of the House of Commons debate, Tony Lawrance, Professor of Statistics at theUniversity of
Warwick, published a statistically based opinion which completely undermined the HMIC review. Professors of statistics are not known for their colourful language but the following quotes give an idea of the devastating nature of his criticism:
This is an almost perfect example of how not to present a graph - no scales on either axis, no data plotted to justify the lines drawn. It is almost impossible to obtain any critical understanding from it, except that it is intended to prove that score for protective capability increases with force size. I can see very little hard evidence in page 30 and 31 to justify the 4000 figure.Effectiveness of smaller forces depends on arrangements they have to deal with policing matters which out stretch their resources, by collaborations with adjacent forces. If these are good then they are effective. This would apply to the larger forces and the most serious matters needing massive response. General knowledge seems to indicate that forces are always collaborating over major incidents, and often more widely than the envisioned amalgamations would cover.It is hard to believe that professional statisticians were heavily involved in planning, analysing and presented the quantitative information used by the report, or suggesting conclusions to be drawn from it. He concludes:The quality of the statistical information gathered for the HMIC report Closing the Gap is questionable. The statistical treatment of the data collected is largely unjustified and appears open to criticism in its combinations of scores. The graphical presentation of the data is poor and trend lines could be misleading; the use of computer-produced statistical elaborations in unjustified… The conclusions drawn in respect of the 4,000 minimum force size almost totally ignore the variability of protective services performance at each force size, and no evidence is provided that this will be small at the 4,000 level.Meanwhile, thanks to a piece by Christopher Booker in The Sunday Telegraph, the issue had begun to trickle into the national media, assisted by extraordinary public responses in many areas. The Prime Minister said on 22 November, to the House of Commons Select Committee on Liaison “I can assure you that we will listen very carefully. I personally think that the reorganisation of local police is something where it really is sensible to listen to local people.”In the
West Mercia area, not one of the 13 Members of Parliament wrote into the Police Authority supporting the regional proposal. All four County/Unitary Councils, all nine District Councils, 108 Parish and Town Councils, 11 police consultative groups and 15 community groups supported the alternative proposal that West Mercia should become a strategic force, i.e. capable of handling level two crimes. At over 100 public meetings there was overwhelming support for this idea as well as 96 percent of telephone responses and 94 percent of written responses to
West Mercia’s own survey.It is as well to remember at this stage that under Queen Elizabeth I, policing was a civic duty undertaken by citizens in a similar manner to jury service. The roots of the police services lie in their communities and it is not the first time that public reaction has shown a fundamental hostility to any attempt to create a more centralised police force which is not accountable to its local community. For example, despite the recommendation of the 1839 Royal Commission on Policing for a national police force, it was rejected by Parliament. This effectively upheld one of Peel’s Nine Principles:Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen in the interest of community welfare and existence.This principle is particularly relevant today when we face a terrorist threat from citizens who are members of our own community. The deadline of 23rd December passed without any police force bringing forward finalised proposals to create the vast regional forces demanded by the Government. We now have a real chance to have a national debate about policing. We can learn from other countries how to maintain and strengthen our tradition of policing in the community whilst confronting and defeating the current problem of terrorism and major crime. Twelve Chief Constables sitting round a table taking orders from the Home Secretary and slavishly following his centrally dictated prescriptive targets would have effectively created a national force, a gendarmerie or carabinieri. The Real AgendaStanding aside from my own personal experiences, it is quite clear that the government plans to amalgamate the nation’s 43 police forces, reducing the number to twelve or fourteen, structured within the current regional boundaries.That much is plainly evident from the Home Office’s website, introducing the plan. Although it refers to the Closing the Gap report – which addressed the overall efficiency of current forces - the Home Office emphasised that the HMIC report showed that the majority of forces in England and
Wales do not provide “adequate levels of protective service, such as counter terrorism services and dealing with major crime incidents.”It saidThe Government has a duty to ensure that the public is properly protected from the threats posed by terrorism and serious organised crime. In light of HMIC’s findings, it would be irresponsible not to restructure policing to provide the necessary capacity and resilience to respond to these threats.That this is at the core of the Government’s agenda is further evidenced by its endorsement of one of the findings by HMIC; the claim that forces with fewer than 4,000 officers or 6,000 staff simply do not have the “critical mass” to provide the necessary level of protective services. “The current 43 force structure is no longer fit for purpose”.It can also be seen that the emphasis is on “protective services” not routine policing, dealing with low level crime (which the Home Office terms “volume crime”) that affects the majority of people. The Home Office defines “protective services” as counter terrorism and extremism, serious organised and cross-border crime, civil contingencies and emergency planning, critical incident management, major crime and homicide, public order and strategic roads policing.If there was any validity in the 4,000 figure in relation to the provision of these “protective services” it has been comprehensively rebutted by Professor Tony Lawrance who has said that even with a minimum level of 4,000 officers, there would be an unknown number of good and poor performers. Evidence clearly demonstrates that this figure does not apply to low-level policing. Whichever assessment one considers, it is clear that West Mercia is rated as one of the best, if not the very best performing police forces in England and
Wales, with an establishment of only 2,380 officers. Where the argument for police restructuring departs from any semblance of reality though is the unprecedented haste with which these proposals are being pushed through. In what amounts to the most fundamental reform of policing in
Britain since 1829, the Home Secretary, using a report published on 16 September 2005, asked for firm proposals for restructuring by 23 December of the same year. There can be no justification, under any circumstances, for insisting on such speed.A Central FlawNo one will dispute that the Government needs to deal robustly with organised crime and terrorism. The British people expect no less and have a right to effective policing in these areas.However, when it comes to dealing with “organised crime” one of the principal objections to the restructuring of
Britain’s police forces is that there is already a major initiative in place, which has yet to take effect, in the form of the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA). Its formation was announced in January 2005 by the then Home Secretary, David Blunkett and the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith said at the time that he wanted to put organised crime “out of circulation”. With an establishment of at least 5,000 officers and support staff (larger than the minimum level for a force set up by HMIC), this single agency brings together the responsibilities currently shared by the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) and the National Crime Squad (NCS). It will also take over organised crime investigations currently handled by the Immigration Service and Customs and Excise.Styled as Britain’s new FBI-style agency, Goldsmith claimed that it should turn the
UK into “one of the least attractive places in the world” for crime, with statutory powers to bring previously untouchable “Mr Big” characters to justice. Additionally, there is to be a new specialist prosecutor service, based within the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and the Customs Prosecution Office (RCPO), to assist SOCA in areas such as extradition, obtaining evidence from abroad, recovering criminals’ assets and witness protection.Assisted by the Assets Recovery Agency, which acts under the powers afforded by the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, SOCA is arguably, in all but name, a proto-national police force, representing a major change in the nature of British policing. As importantly, it is not due to come into operation until April of this year and will require some time to bed in to achieve maximum efficiency.If the plans and objectives set for SOCA are sound, it makes absolute sense to allow them to be fulfilled and then assessed before embarking on a major restructuring of local police forces. Why create a new structure which appears, in some respects, to encroach upon the activities of the Agency?Furthermore, although not explicitly stated, there is nothing to prevent SOCA assuming a lead role in counter-terrorism, which is often bound up with organised and cross-border crime, providing a resource that can assist and support local forces.There is some value in recognising that, as crime is a multi-level phenomenon, so should policing be. On the basis of Home Office statistics, of the nearly six million recorded crimes in the UK in 2003/4, there were 853 homicides compared with 818,642 burglaries and 1,205,576 episodes of criminal damage, while recorded terrorist actions are, in fact, very rare.Crimes like criminal damage and others (including violence against the person) account for 955,752 offences. They are attributable mainly to local perpetrators. Given that the current rationale for force mergers is “efficiency and effectiveness”, with a strong emphasis on “protective policing” in relation to terrorist attacks, is the high-level policing “tail” wagging the community policing “dog”? Are these extraordinarily different functions at all compatible?This is an issue which has been skirted round, ever since the recommendation of the 1839 Royal Commission Report on Policing for a national police force was rejected.For many decades there was a classic British fudge where Scotland Yard became the de facto national police resource for dealing with serious crime and for relations with other national forces. Should this tradition be restored and properly formalised, with mechanisms for accountability and democratic control, the high-end policing could be vested with national agencies, leaving local policing to local forces.This was very much the view of David Ramsbotham of the Politeia Police Commission, 2005. He argued that, since the foundation of Sir Robert Peel’s force, crime has become “nationalised” as communications have eliminated purely geographical boundaries. He then argues:…other countries recognise that two separate types of policing are needed – one to detect crime and apprehend offenders and one to uphold law and order in the community. Both are at the heart of policing as a whole, but both have separate demands and require different types of people to provide them. The question is whether it is more sensible to maintain separate forces for each, or whether every police officer should be regarded and trained as a jack of all trades. I come down firmly on the side of maintaining two separate forces. We live in communities, which have the same fundamental needs to survive, but which will have different local perspectives.Looking elsewhere in the world, it is common practice in countries as far apart as Australia, Japan, the United States, as well as France, Germany, Spain, Italy and even Belgium, for a distinction to be made between “strategic” and local policing, where forces are organised on national and local levels with different functions.Arguably – and it is an argument that has found merit in most developed countries – if “strategic” policing is allocated to national or federal forces, calling on local resources as necessary, then the idea of organising local forces specifically to deal with strategic issues becomes a nonsense. If it is acknowledged that the tempo, the style of policing, staff allocations, the distribution of forces, even the equipment, training and experience of officers in local and strategic policing are profoundly different, then some separation of the two functions makes absolute sense.
The question of sizeWith a population of around 52 million and currently 43 police forces, the average population serviced by each force in England and
Wales is 1.2 million. Only seven of the English forces are over the 4,000 threshold set by Closing the Gap, so the average conceals the extremes.On the one hand, there is the largest force:
London’s Metropolitan Police Service. It has an establishment of over 30,000 officers (31,073) – which serves a resident population of 7.43 million and a transient population of many millions more. This compares with the smallest force, the City of
London police, which serves a resident population of under 9,000 but a daily working population around 350,000. It has an establishment of 1,200 of which around one third are civilian support staff, with 881 police officers. The second smallest territorial police force, coming just before the City of
London Police, is Warwickshire, with only 1012 officers, serving a population of 525,500 people.Taking these three forces, the officer to resident population ratios are, respectively: 1:239; 1:10 and 1:519 – huge discrepancies which, on the face of it, would suggest vastly different levels of service and capabilities. But each force, in its own way, is special and has its own unique functions. The City of
London Police, for instance, are primarily specialists in financial fraud and have assumed a lead role for fraud in the south-east. Their expertise in this is regarded as “almost unique”. Yet, in only one of two references in the 114-page Closing the Gap report, this expertise is dismissed. Not addressed is whether this “almost unique” expertise would have developed within the framework of the larger force that surrounds it and whether it would be allowed to continue its operations. Would, for instance, the team of specialist officers who work in a small, intimate setting, be happy to work in a larger force? With their expertise much valued by corporations around the world and by other forces, would that team survive at all in a larger structure?The Metropolitan Police Service is very different. Apart from the normal crime prevention and detection activities of a diverse metropolis, it takes on such huge tasks as maintaining public order, handling demonstrations of up to a million people, to the Royalty and embassy close protection duties, airport security and much else besides. Then there is Warwickshire – ostensibly poorly served with such a low officer to population ratio. However, it is a largely rural area, with lesser demands than a metropolis and a lower indigenous crime rate.The point is that, to make functional assessments on the basis of quantitative data alone is not only misleading; it is little short of fatuous. The data cannot be taken as a basis for public policy, involving massive, untried changes, huge disruption and unquantified expense. Nothing can be inferred as to performance and capabilities without taking full account of the local environment in which a force must operate and the demands made of it. This point is brought home with brutal force when other police structures throughout the world are examined. In populous
Japan – with 126 million people – there are 47 local forces and a national force. Currently, its police to population ratio is not dissimilar to that maintained in England and
Wales: 1:480 compared with 1:400.Yet, even with such a large population, there has been no attempt to organise local policing with such large-scale units as are proposed in the current round of British police restructuring. If the changes set out in Closing the Gap go ahead, the average population per police force will be in the order of five million, compared with Japan, which maintains a ratio of half that. Yet no one would suggest that the Japanese police forces suffer from not being organised on the gargantuan level suggested in Closing the Gap.Elsewhere, the picture is the same. In the United States, there are examples of large police forces, mainly serving metropolitan areas – such as New York City Police Department with 35,000 officers serving a population of 8.1 million - a ratio of 1:231 (not dissimilar to
London’s Metropolitan Police Service). However, the
United States is a land of extremes.
Huntsville, Alabama (population 165,000) boasts an establishment of 353 “officers and investigators”: a ratio of 1:467. Yet the police force in nearby Decatur (population 54,000) employs 51 full time equivalents, including support staff: a ratio of 1:1059. There were, incidentally, 66 applicants for the police chief’s job.It is absolutely the case that in no nation in the developed world is there any example of the police forces dedicated to “volume” crime being structured in administrative or command units of the average size proposed by the Home Secretary. Furthermore, nowhere in the developed world can it be said that the dominant criterion on which force capability is judged is size.Cited in a recent Policy Exchange report on policing is the view of an extensively researched report by the Heritage Foundation which states simply: The size of the force has no effect on crime. What matters far more is how forces are organised, led, equipped, and motivated. These and a host of other factors are not considered by Closing the Gap.On the other hand, according to Policy Exchange, research has shown that large departments are less efficient. They have a tendency to dilute uniform police presence as specialised units and bureaucracy proliferate. In bigger departments, fewer officers have immediate contact with the public. One interviewee told researchers:In big departments it is usually the case that there are many people who are doing nothing. In
Chicago, there were floors full of people doing nothing. Big agencies create the temptation of specialist teams while paperwork takes even more away from the job. On the basis of experience in developed democratic countries, it is evident that the Home Secretary is not only embarking on a restructuring exercise with unprecedented speed, he is also undertaking a unique experiment that has no chance of success. If there were a need to take another look at “strategic” policing, the Home Secretary might be better advised to revisit the structure of duties of the Serious and Organised Crime Agency before embarking on such radical changes.The need for localismIn terms of local policing, it was The Daily Telegraph that argued that the Home Secretary’s proposals threatened “the very spirit of the organisation”. To almost everyone in England and
Wales outside the metropolitan centres, the natural unit of local identity is the county - and that is all one needs to know about the proper boundaries of the police. The hypothetical benefit of efficiency is entirely discounted by the attenuation of accountability in the new arrangement. There is little point in having a dedicated local bobby if he answers to a chief constable 200 miles away.All of this is a far cry from Peel’s first police force, the “Peelers” of 1829, for whom he coined the nine points of policing, the core of which was that the police must secure the willing co-operation of the public in voluntary observance of the law to be able to secure and maintain the respect of the public. That “willing co-operation” is unlikely to be as forthcoming to anonymous regional forces.In the Policy Exchange report, this central point was addressed, with the comment that, “despite a forty-year centralising trend in British policing, its benefits are far from proven.” On the public’s part, fear of crime and lack of faith in the police have risen. Growing numbers of victims fail to report crimes, in the belief that the police are either unwilling or unable to do anything about them: 35 percent of violent attacks by strangers, 38 percent of burglaries, 42 percent of thefts from vehicles and 58 percent of muggings went unreported in 2001.A matter of equal concern, identified by British Crime Surveys and elsewhere, is the perception that forces are withdrawing from their communities. Particularly unpopular is the closure of local police stations and their replacement by “mobile” stations and distant call-centres. Similarly, the public continue to regard a visible uniformed police presence on the streets as a key part of policing and as basic evidence of the maintenance of law and order. Moves towards larger units and more specialisation - in other words towards fewer local stations and fewer “bobbies on the beat” - have clearly been counterproductive in terms of the basic police function of public reassurance. Whatever the statistics might say – which few people now seem to trust – there is anecdotal support to these observations. Many people simply do not report minor crimes in the belief that, if they do, nothing much – if anything will be done about them.What kind of policing?Beyond an instinctive preference for local policing, a demand for “more bobbies on the beat”, and “less crime”, it is not necessarily the case that the population in general has any very clear idea of what it does want from its police forces. Four years ago I visited
New York and spoke to senior officials in the city administration. When policing came under the control of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani he appointed William J. Bratton as his police commissioner to introduce a regime of “zero tolerance” into policing, turning a notoriously crime-ridden city into one of the safest large cities in the country. By 1997 crime had declined by nearly 43 percent and murders were down by over 50 percent. Overall crime levels were equivalent to that of 1968, almost 30 years previously. Guiliani’s police strategy was based on the precepts of James Wilson’s “The Broken Window” theory, which first emerged in the March 1982 edition of The Atlantic Monthly. As a core to the thesis,
Wilson asked readers to:…consider a building with a few broken windows.. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it’s unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside. Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars. The strategy for preventing vandalism was to fix the problems when they were small, a concept that was extended into crime prevention generally, arguing that if petty crime and low-level anti-social behaviour is deterred, major crime will be prevented. Key to his success, as described by a New York Times columnist, was the “Squeegee Watershed”: Before Giuliani, the squeegee guys who forcibly washed car windows when drivers stopped for red lights were considered inevitable. He was mocked for even suggesting that they should be banished. Columnists called it a trivial issue, a mean-spirited attack on the poor. But Giuliani ignored them and kept pressing the issue, and the squeegee extortionists disappeared. Giuliani, himself describes his success as also due to “another critical component”, an innovative style of police management called “COMPSTAT”. This used intensive crime analysis sessions, up-to-the minute crime statistics, and computer “pin mapping” technology as basic crime fighting tools. COMPSTAT transformed the NYPD from an organisation that reacted to crime to a Police Department that actively worked to deter offences. As he told a Congressional committee:Before COMPSTAT, the NYPD’s 76 precinct commanders were isolated from the department’s top executives. They rarely met their superiors at police headquarters. Under the COMPSTAT system precinct commanders meet with the Police Commissioner, Chief of Department, Chief of Detectives, and other top leaders at semi-weekly meetings where together they identify local crime patterns, select tactics and allocate resources. Precinct commanders are held accountable and every five weeks they return to face the panel. Before the COMPSTAT system, crime statistics were out of date, sometimes lagging three months behind current levels of criminal activity. Today the COMPSTAT system has brought crime statistics up-to-the minute. Computer technologies allow the mapping of patterns and the establishment of causal relationships among different categories of crime. In a truly interactive use of computers, crime pattern maps are displayed on large screens in the COMPSTAT meeting room, assisting and guiding the development of new tactics and solutions. The success of Giuliani’s tactics was best illustrated after he left office. The “zero tolerance” approach had attracted considerable opposition from left-wing activists and their pressure eventually led to a relaxation of the system. In 1999, there were 2,000 fewer petty-crime arrests and a sixteen-percent fall in gun arrests, swiftly followed by a six-percent increase in
New York city’s murder rate.Important though COMPSTAT was and the general strategy adopted, this was simply the technical detail. What really seems to have made the difference was Giuliani’s own attitude. Addressing the same Congressional committee, he told it:When I first came into office three and half years ago, there was the feeling on the part of many that
New York City was headed toward an inevitable state of decline. In this negative atmosphere, there was a deficiency of new ideas and certainly solutions were not in the offering. Most politicians sat back, complained, endlessly debated the issues, but offered no real solutions. And in the mean time our city had spiralled out of control. Times have changed. Today we’ve reinvented government, our city and our way of life. We’ve become a city where new ideas are welcomed and actually put to the test. Some of these ideas work better than others — but we are continually thinking and looking for solutions. And that’s what matters. It was the determination to do something, spurred on by local concern, that made the difference. Nevertheless, the COMPSTAT system was subsequently exported to
Baltimore, where it was used to manage police operations. Its transfer was successful, the benefit claimed for it being that it made the police “go back to basics, which is crime”. Police made a big impact on crime, as resources were targeted more accurately and patrol deployments were no longer random.On the other hand, when the Giuliani team was recruited by Mexico City to introduce
New York techniques to policing there, including the COMPSTAT system, they failed spectacularly. The homicide rate in Mexico’s capital slipped less than one percent and kidnappings, in which the victims were driven from ATM to ATM to withdraw money, were on the rise, with some security firms saying Mexico was now rivalling Colombia as the kidnapping capital of the world. This underlines a pivotal point. Policing solutions must come from the determination of the local communities to address the problems; solutions must be adapted to local conditions. This is borne out by the experience of
Chicago. There was the same local determination to do something, but a completely different approach was adopted, known by the acronym CAPS (
Chicago’s Alternative Policing Strategy).One innovative feature was the adoption of “city partnerships” with staff composed of civilian community outreach workers, some formerly employed by non-profit community organisations, who are charged with assisting beat and district projects and sustaining participation in beat community meetings. Some of these are former criminals, who mediate with known criminals such as gang-leaders, seeking community involvement in reducing crime. This has led to a remarkable dialogue between the police and the community, with Chicagoans attending beat meetings on about 58,600 occasions. In 2002 (the last year for which complete information is available), 67,300 people attended a total of 2,916 beat meetings. Adding together all of the meetings between 1995 and June of 2003, Chicagoans have turned up 551,700 times for beat meetings. In the surveys, awareness of the meetings has been surprisingly stable, holding steady at 60 percent of adults.Another tool is the district advisory committee. Known widely as “DACs”, these are groups of residents, community organisation leaders, business owners, representatives of local institutions and others from the community who meet regularly with the commander and other police district leaders to discuss district affairs. Their function is to assist the commander in establishing district priorities, to develop strategies to address them and to bring to the table community resources that could contribute to resolving local problems.In a study of the system between 1991 and 2002, it was found that violent crime had declined by 49 percent and property crime by 36 percent. The largest decline in crime was in robbery, which dropped by 58 percent between 1991 and 2002. Murder was down the least over this period, by 30 percent. Rapes declined 45 percent, and aggravated assault and battery by 41 percent. In the property crime category, motor vehicle theft was down by 47 percent.However, there are other, completely different ways of addressing the crime problem. In
Japan, the authorities lay greater stress on rehabilitation of offenders. This is in contrast to many policing initiatives which concentrate on detecting and arresting offenders. The Japanese system recognises that much of the criminality involves known offenders who re-offend on release from prison.This is confirmed by US Department of Justice figures, which indicate that recidivism can be as high as 79 percent for certain offenders (motor vehicle thieves), although only 1.2 percent of those who had served time for homicide were rearrested for this crime. In the UK, re-offending rates, according to a study byLancaster
University, approach 60 percent for all crimes, with the probation service increasingly over-stretched and unable to cope.The Japanese have addressed this problem in a novel way. They have established a system of Volunteer Probation Officers (VPOs), with a network of approximately 50,000 persons serving as VPOs throughout the country each year. Their expenses are paid and the VPOs are expected to supervise and assist the probationers and parolees, to inquire into the environment where an inmate of a correctional institution is expected to return upon release and adjust any problems there, to conduct preliminary investigation for a candidate for pardon and to promote crime prevention activities in the community. The system is currently under strain, with under-recruitment in the VPO establishment and special police surveillance systems are being adopted to make up the shortfall. However, against lower overall crime rates,
Japan reported that the number of re-incarcerated prisoners over a five-year period (1990 to 1994) as a proportion of all prisoners released over that period, was exactly 42.0 percent. One commentator remarks that:….over the past four decades,
Japan has reduced crime substantially in all categories except traffic-related offences. Japanese authorities have learned from experience that offender correction and restoration to the community are essential elements of an approach that has proven to be effective in correcting socially deviant behaviour. What has developed is a spiral of success, with law enforcement officials, community members, criminals, and victims working interdependently to prevent crime and reintegrate offenders back into the community. Closer to home, different problems require different solutions. In continental
Europe, where many countries share long land borders and there is freedom of movement across them, “cross-border crime” is a significant feature of criminal activity. Analogous to criminal activity spanning current police borders in Britain, this became a particular problem between France and
Germany, where a novel development was tried.The two national authorities set up a joint police/customs co-operation centre at
Offenburg. A stated aim of the centre was to lessen bureaucratic obstacles; thus, French and German customs and police agencies were brought under one roof. In the centre, officers from Police Nationale, Gendarmerie and Douanes for the French and from Landespolizei Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate, from Bundesgrenzschutz and Zoll for the German side, work together. Early reports of the experiment have been encouraging. What emerges from this is that there simply is no one style of policing which is appropriate for all circumstances. What might be successful in one area might not necessarily succeed in another.From the
US, what also emerges is the central tenet that local control over police forces means that different areas pursue radically different policing policies. This gives rise to the inescapable conclusion that the level of service and service priorities cannot be dictated centrally. Furthermore, central direction is often wasteful and ineffective, as instanced by the recent example of the US Federal “Community Oriented Policing Scheme” (COPS), initiated by President Clinton in January 1994.By 1997, $1.4 billion was being spent by federal government on the programme annually, but there was no clear evidence that this had translated into an actual increase in police numbers on the ground. On the other hand, when local forces do adopt new initiatives, they are much likelier to copy other forces’ successes. Translated into the British context, there is no reason to believe that the principles of policing in cities as disparate as Canterbury, Bristol, London, Bradford and Liverpool, or the rural areas of Shropshire and Warwickshire, or the City of
London should be any different. They too should be able to benefit from a regime that will enable them to respond to local needs and be accountable to local communities, engaging in experimentation and innovation to determine the right approaches for their circumstances.Clearly, this ethos should not only extend to traditional police duties and services. As the Japanese experience demonstrates, much can be gained from a multi-disciplinary, multi-agency approach to crime prevention, bringing in social workers, probationary officers and other workers into the mix, to deal with problems which arise. Thus, local control might extend to other national functions, such as the Probation Service, with local services free to transfer funds from direct policing to such functions as probation, if this yields better results.This general principle might with advantage, be applied to other neglected areas of policing. For instance, in some force areas, offenders with mental disorders absorb a considerable amount of police time and resource, often entirely disproportionate to the severity of the offences committed. In a target-driven regime, there is a strong temptation to “dump” such offenders on the courts and process them through the justice system and into prisons, where the costs are born by the prison system from central funds.Attempts have been made to redress this tendency by creating “Criminal Justice Mental Health Liaison Schemes”. However, these schemes vary considerably in the way they operate, the locations they cover and their hours of operation. For example, some schemes cover a variety of criminal justice locations, including the police station, the courts and prisons, whereas others work in the courts only. The schemes may be staffed by a single community psychiatric nurse or by a multi-disciplinary team, including psychiatrists, social workers and probation staff. The central problem, however, is often one of funding. The unwise allocation of resources in NHS facilities may lead to delays or difficulties in referring vulnerable patients to secure or supervised facilities through medical referral, leaving the police to sort out incidents that arise when appropriate treatment is not forthcoming. Similarly, local authority support services, under financial stress, may economise on services affecting those suffering from mental health problems, again leaving the police to expend their resources in dealing with situations through the criminal justice system which could best be dealt with by other means.The effect of this is highly detrimental to the individuals affected. A report of the Joint Committee on Human Rights on deaths in custody 2004 stated: “The evidence we have gathered suggest that prison actually leads to an acute worsening of mental health problems. By sending people with a history of attempted suicide and mental health problems to prison for minor offences the state is placing them in an environment that is proven to be dangerous to their health and well-being.”A national study of prison suicides found that 72 per cent of those who commit suicide in prison had a history of mental disorder. Some 57 percent had symptoms suggestive of mental disorder at reception into prison. In all, 20 percent of men entering custody said they have previously attempted suicide. According to the Government’s Social Exclusion Unit, more than 50 prisoners commit suicide shortly after release each year. A significant number of prisoners suffer from a psychotic disorder. Seven percent of male sentenced prisoners have a psychotic disorder; 14 times the level in the general population. A high proportion of prisoners have been treated in psychiatric hospitals - 20 percent of male and sentenced prisoners have previously been admitted for in-patient psychiatric care. One obvious solution here is to have a degree of flexibility in the way police forces are funded, with some of the finance that might otherwise be allocated directly to the police held available in a central “pool” accessible to bidders from community support services. Targeted expenditure on these services might save police time and in the final analysis, be more cost-effective (and conducive to fostering social justice) than money spent on police officers who are very often neither trained nor equipped to deal with people suffering from mental illnesses.This possibility reinforces the essence of policing (including crime prevention, in all its dimensions); that it should be localised, with local solutions developed to meet local conditions in such a way as to guarantee the participation and support of local communities. There should also be local control over financing and decisions as to the allocation of local funds. What is vital is that there should not be a forced culture of “perfection” dictated by central Government, with fixed targets and constant measurement. This turns forces into “target slaves” and leads to risk-averse strategies and a culture of denial in the event of failure.The essence of any strategy to improve local policing, therefore, cannot be to determine specific schemes or dictate to the police what they should do. Instead, the emphasis should be on creating a framework whereby chief constables – in conjunction with their own communities – can evolve systems and methods which work for their own localities. In other words, the freedom to experiment and to respond to the needs of their specific communities is the only imperative that should be determined by Central Government.Responding to communitiesThere can be no question that, in a democratic society, a robust system of local accountability, where failures can be detected early, addressed and remedied, is essential. Furthermore, such accountability has been demonstrated to improve local performance. It is accountability, more than anything else, which will ensure that forces are responsive to public demands. One example of this is cited by the Policy Exchange report, which recounts the experiences of theBaltimore
City police department. With 3,300 officers, it is described as “one of the larger police departments in America”, an interesting observation as it is about the size of the South Yorkshire police force, which is 14th in the size ranking of English police forces.
Specifically, in terms of accountability, the
Baltimore police commissioner is appointed by the mayor, who is directly elected. The mayor and commissioner work closely together and have very similar views on policing strategy. The chief does not discuss current investigations with the mayor but the chief does see himself as a city employee. Like the fire chief, he is “just another” chief officer. Police officers up to the rank of lieutenant have civil service employment rights and for the most senior officers, a six-year contract is usual. The contract does not overlap with the term of office of the mayor, so when there is a change of mayor there is no certainty that the chief will serve out the rest of his contract. All chief officers know that they serve at the pleasure of the Mayor. To balance their lack of job security,
Baltimore has put in place a system of a one year buyout (or severance package) which is seen as a part of the salary benefit of the original contract. In his bold speech on police reform on 17 January of this year, David Cameron declared that,
“Instead of police chiefs answering to central government, I want them to be formally accountable to local communities.” He continued:We would scrap the national Policing Plan and all of the associated apparatus of central control. The police would continue to have operational independence, which would be properly defined. Local politicians would under no circumstances be permitted to direct the arrest of an individual or the initiation of a prosecution. But they would be empowered to set strategic objectives for the police and ensure that those objectives are met, with the ultimate sanction of being able to hire and fire the Chief Constable. He gave various options for achieving such local accountability; the direct election of Police Authorities or their replacement with an individual who was directly elected, like a police commissioner. He even accepted that elected mayors could fulfil this role. The essential principle was that voters should have a direct relationship with the person or body who appoints the Chief Constable, matched by a direct and transparent funding arrangement so that they could judge the effectiveness of the policing they are paying for. There is a case for bringing policing back down to county or city units.Whatever the choice, with the institution of elected officials, the remit of the Home Office can then be virtually eliminated. There is no case for centrally dictated targets, procedures, or any other direction such as detailed guidelines springing from the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. Policy and operations will be determined by elected officials and judged by the local electorate. Where central government can help is by acting as a conduit to transmit details of best practice and general information that will assist operations. Generally, however, decisions on policing should be addressed locally.This should also relate to financing. While central government would be expected to fund any national police functions, local police forces have to be funded exclusively from local revenues, through the current local taxation system and by charges levied on businesses for services provided specifically for them. Again, flexibility and innovation should be the rule, with different forces coming up with their own funding solutions. However, the details of local authority finance reform go beyond the remit of this paper. The concept of “efficiency”Throughout the Home Secretary’s refrains on the restructuring of the police forces, emphasis is placed on the word “efficiency”, an issue which has been at the centre of this government’s obsession for “targets”, “performance indicators”, “best value” and other mantras in its pursuit of improved public services. We see newspaper reports such as appeared last year, informing us that Thames Valley Police were to be “given points for catching motorists”. They had given their 120 traffic officers “aide-memoire cards” which carry a chart awarding different points for catching different offenders, setting monthly targets of 200 points. Under this system, it was reported, officers were awarded ten points for stopping a drink-driver or five points for “pulling over someone not wearing a seat belt or using a mobile phone at the wheel”. Irrespective of the claimed administrative advantages of this system (it helped “prioritise workload” according to aThames
Valley spokesman) the public perception of such schemes is hardly calculated to improve relations between the public and the police. That much was confirmed by Paul Fawcett, of Victim Support, who was cited as saying: Target- setting is good but it won’t help public confidence in the system if low-level crimes are targeted at the expense of more visible crimes. It is vital that the public feel a sense of trust and engagement in what the police are doing so that they report crimes, get help and criminals are caught. If the public feel the police are chasing minor crimes at the expense of more serious crimes where a victim has been burgled, robbed or assaulted, their confidence in the system will drop.Small wonder that, when the prime minister launched his “Respect” agenda on 11 January and The Daily Mail website invited comments on it, one anonymous correspondent from Macclesfield made this comment:The reason that yobs rule many of our streets and respect has gone is because they hardly ever get punished. If somebody assaults someone else they should be put in prison. This will deter them and their friends in the future. When I was assaulted I went to the Police station to report it. The Police told me they were too busy to deal with it, even though I knew who had assaulted me and where they were. This is not an isolated case. It happens all the time. Keeping crime figures down is the governments top priority not fighting crime.The Police are just like the Inland Revenue. They gather tax. Crimes that pay fines, such as speeding are the most important to them as they gather revenue. That’s what all this about. Money. This may or may not be a fair or accurate comment but, in my experience, it accurately reflects the perception of the police in the eyes of many ordinary people.As an effect of better policing, we are told that burglary in many areas has declined. Yet, action by insurers and car manufacturers has had at least as significant effect on car crime as has police action through installing features such as immobilisers, steering locks and car alarms. There is also the insurance industry’s Vehicle Group Rating programme, which grades cars according to their security features and so encourages manufacturers to improve car security so their models will attract lower insurance premiums. Householders have bought the improvements in burglary figures through increased vigilance and security. In certain communities, where it once was the norm to leave front doors unlocked, residents can find they must now lock their doors even when they are in their houses, to guard against opportunistic “walk-in” thieves. They are investing upwards of £430 million a year in security bolts, locks, in thief-proof double glazing and burglar alarms. In many quite modest streets few houses are without alarms.Despite this, crime remains a huge burden on society. Insurers alone paid in 2003 £190 million in commercial theft claims, £437 million to victims of domestic burglaries and £438 million to victims of private car theft, but these figures pale into insignificance compared with the estimates for the total annual costs of crime, which range from £35 to £60 billion, the latter figure equating to six percent of GDP.Once result of the private investment in crime prevention is that urban environments are now polluted by the constant sound of warbling alarms; they are often false and frequently the police do not respond to them. In many urban areas, barely a night goes by without the relative peace of the early hours being punctured by the shrill sound of an alarm. So significant has this become that car and house alarms now rank eighth in the list of top 15 types of all noise nuisances which “bother, annoy or disturb” people and in the top three of external noises. The effect of increased security has been largely to displace crime onto the streets, so violent robbery is on the increase. This is borne out by the very latest figures for the three months to September 2005, when there were 315,800 violent incidents, compared with 304,300 in the same period in 2004 – an overall increase of four percent, with an 11 percent rise in the number of robberies. This is the biggest jump in street robberies for three years. By contrast, domestic burglary peaked in the mid-1990’s and fell by 47 percent in 2003/04, albeit at a still massive level; the level in England and
Wales then recorded at 943,000 incidents. Police attribute the increase mainly on “teen-on-teen” crimes in which children attack each other for desirable items such as mobile phones, iPods and bicycles but this beguilingly simple explanation does not do justice to the phenomenon. There is good evidence that half of all crime in England and
Wales is drug related, with abusers stealing to fund their habit. With the current street price of a “wrap” of heroin in the order of £10, it matters little to the drug abuser whether that money is obtained through the theft of a video recorder from a household or an iPod or mobile telephone stolen from a teenager.Evidence supports this contention, with a Home Office survey recording that, while the average value of property stolen for a burglary in a dwelling was £580, “this average masks wide variations between types of burglary”. The cost of property crime against the individual, on the other hand, was estimated at £150 (in the year 2000) which is likely now to be an under-estimated given the wider availability of high-value portable consumer goods.Similarly, increased car security, provided by car manufacturers and paid for by customers, has succeeded in reducing car theft, but this appears to have been offset by an upsurge in “car hijacking” – a crime normally associated with third world countries - as thieves have adapted their tactics to changed circumstances.In response to the welter of crime statistics, however, the Home Office responds to data from the current British Crime Survey for the year to the end of September, which suggested that overall crime had fallen two percent, and violent crime had fallen by 5 percent. In the latter category, sexually related offences are not recorded, which makes overall estimation difficult and violence against the person crimes are both notoriously under-recorded and acutely sensitive to variations in reporting procedures.As to crime overall, there is a huge gap in the reporting in that neither fraud nor “commercial” crimes are recorded in the Survey. Yet a study carried out by the Federation of Small Businesses revealed that nearly 60 percent of the businesses it questioned had been the victims of crime in its survey period and furthermore, over a quarter did not report a crime because they felt the police would not be able to catch the criminals. Some 20 percent of respondents said they did not feel the police were interested in crimes committed against businesses. The huge under-reporting is confirmed by further data that suggests that the police may record only between 1 in 100 and one in 1000 shoplifting offences. Data from the same source estimates over nine million fraud offences a year, while anecdotal reports suggest that internet crime (also not recorded by the British Crime Survey) is a major growth area which the criminal justice system is struggling to contain. Given the limitations of crime data and the propensity of criminals to adapt their criminal behaviour and the type of crimes they commit, it would be unwise of the Home Office to argue that crime is reducing or that current policing efforts are doing anything other than redistributing crime into different categories.The uncertainty in the crime statistics and the general perception that crime is on the increase is reflected in the gradual breakdown of trust and sympathy between the police and public. This cannot be measured and neither can the effects be measured directly. How do you record “trust” on a Home Office list of targets?What is recorded by the Home Office, however, is a concept known as “activity based costing” (ABC), a review of policing instigated in 2003, designed to show where and how police funds are spent. Although the results have not been published, a newspaper has recently reported that the Metropolitan Police Service spends more on paperwork than on fighting crime. Of £3.03 billion spent by the force in 2004/5, £101.9 million went on “non incident-linked paperwork” - defined as “general correspondence not related to any specific incident”, and a further £21.7 million was spent on “checking paperwork (supervisory)”. The overall paperwork cost amounted to 4.08 percent of the force’s overall spending. By contrast, the force spent £62.2 million dealing with robberies and £42.2 million on house burglaries.It does not take a PhD study or a learned report to understand the reasons for this. The Metropolitan Police Service is a vast bureaucracy and our experiences of such organisations, time and time again – whether they be the National Health Service, corporate entities or other state bureaucracies – is that they eventually consume themselves in their own administration. For those of an academic disposition, the dynamics of this process have been set out in numerous theses, not least in Selznich’s “functionalist perspective of the theory of organisations.” Despite our long experience and absolute certainty that bigger organisations invariably consume more resources while tending towards less efficiency, the Home Secretary wishes to create fewer but larger police forces.I was amazed to learn that just as the Home Secretary is driving through this agenda, the Labour group in the Scottish Parliament is reported to be planning to break up
Scotland’s biggest police force, in order to boost “the local accountability of law enforcement”. The idea is to break up the 7,300-strong Strathclyde Police, which covers nearly half the population of
Scotland, with large areas being transferred to other existing forces. A “party insider” was quoted as saying: We want police forces to be more accountable to the communities they serve. We have decided against going down the English route of having chief constables appointed by ministers, so, therefore, chief officers need to be accountable to local councillors. In most of
Scotland that works fine, because forces cover a small area.” Strathclyde’s 7,300 officers are responsible for policing 12 local council areas, a population of 2.2 million, 5,300 square miles and more coastline than the whole of
France. Labour, we are told, thinks the force, which stretches from Girvan in the south to Oban in the north, is simply too big and that many residents feel remote from their Glasgow-based chief constable. This is the ultimate “
West Lothian” question. If, as is likely, a number of police authorities resist amalgamation and the Home Secretary is still determined to compel them, he will have to rely on Scottish MPs to force through legislation at the very moment that Scottish politicians are choosing to make Scottish forces smaller and more accountable.This is a fundamental issue. The Home Secretary has no electoral mandate for his changes. The unprecedented public consultation by
West Mercia shows that there is massive opposition to the plan and that sentiment is reflected elsewhere. Suffolk Police Authority chairman Gulshan Kayembe, for instance, has confirmed that none of the six eastern forces wanted to merge. “The voluntary route to amalgamation will not be open to the Home Secretary,” she told her own Council. While we are experiencing a break-down in trust between the public and the police in the forces as they stand, the establishment of new, remote, regional forces, based on entirely arbitrary boundaries, can do nothing but increase the degree of detachment and alienation already experienced. That the Home Secretary will be seen to be imposing these changes on unwilling authorities makes it doubly unlikely that they will be embraced by ordinary people.On that basis, the Home Secretary’s claim to be pursuing increased efficiency is flawed. Measurable or not, the ultimate precursor to the efficient operations of a civil police force is trust. His plans will further erode that precious commodity, to the detriment of us all.
Checks and balancesWhile US-style politicised policing has unarguable merits, it also has drawbacks. Most importantly, the interdependence of local politicians and senior police officers can encourage corruption; a police chief dependent on a mayor for re-appointment might not be zealous in investigating allegations of bribe-taking in the mayor’s office. Several notorious cases are cited in the Policy Exchange report, where there has been corruption by elected officers, with the police reluctant to investigate officials on whom they are dependent for their own offices, or where they too have been involved in corrupt or illegal practices. Furthermore, in the
UK there are some electoral areas where one or other political party has a long-standing majority so that the area becomes, effectively, a one party state, albeit at local level.In any contest for electoral office, it is inevitable that the voters will tend to make their choice on party political lines. Elected officials may be chosen for their political allegiances rather than for their ability to improve policing. While elected officers and democratic accountability are a necessary precursor to a responsive and efficient police force, this in itself is not sufficient to ensure probity and efficiency. Additional checks and balances are needed.For this, two elements might be considered which work alongside the democratic element; effectively a “three-legged stool” where each of the elements complement each other and maintain a balanced system. Those two additional elements are the courts system and an independent complaints system.In the traditional force structures as devised by Peel, police were primarily responsible to the magistrates, to whom they reported. This was a tradition which led at times to an unhealthy relationship between the police and the courts, where magistrates were notoriously reluctant to challenge police evidence.However, it is in courts, at all levels, that police malpractice and inefficiencies often become evident and which often cost a great deal of time and money. The courts, therefore, should have a strong voice in the monitoring of police behaviour and the power to call individuals to account and sanction them as the need arises.The second additional element is the independent complaints system. For most people, who take very little interest in the day-day-day affairs of the police until it affects them personally, their main experience of the system occurs when the police either perform poorly or when they engage in malpractice and a complaint is made.This may dovetail with a democratic system as illustrated by the process employed in
Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Police Department not only deals with mayoral complaints but also with complaints made at regular town meetings. These meetings are usually televised and complainants expect issues to be taken up directly by the city mayor with the police chief. However, while this may work for general operational matters, now termed “direction and control” complaints, currently, for what are termed “minor” complaints, where dissatisfaction with the police may be at an entirely personal level, the system simply does not work.In the first instance, the police themselves have some discretion to decide on what is or is not a complaint. Then, if the aggrieved person continues to be dissatisfied with an investigation, an appeal can be made to the Independent Police Complaints Commission. Even though a complainant’s appeal may be upheld, the usual outcome of minor matters is that the same police forces end up reinvestigating their own investigations.Similarly, should the complainant decide to go to the IPCC with a low-level complaint, all that then happens is that the IPCC asks for an investigation to be carried out by the local police force. In other words, the system is a closed loop, with limited external input and oversight.Although greater scrutiny is provided for more serious allegations, a suspicion remains that the police on the ground know this and for certain categories of malpractice, they are immune from action. There is a danger that this could have a highly corrosive effect on the behaviour of the police and on public confidence.It is absolutely essential, therefore, that there is a properly functioning, impartial complaints system, even for what are currently termed “minor” complaints. Although the Police Service now considers the sharing of an investigator’s report with the complainant as good practice, so long as there is due regard for protection of the police and the public, all complaint investigation reports should be published.ConclusionsThere are many operational alternatives to the Home Secretary’s plans for force amalgamation. I am impressed by the suggestions offered in
West Mercia’s business plan, to which I have referred earlier in this paper. These include elements of “federation” and joint operations, which demonstrate that by working in conjunction with other forces, much of the claimed advantages of larger forces in relation to “strategic” policing can be and are being achieved by other means. Months after the events, West Mercia experts are still helping the Metropolitan Police on the
London bombings and the West Midlands Police in Lozells.It is clear that large police forces can fail – witness the self-same New York City Police before the arrival of Mayor Giuliani. What made the difference was his leadership and it is no coincidence that
West Mercia, rated as a top-performing police force, was given the highest rating for “leadership” by HMIC. Paragraph 5.5 of the Closing the Gap report itself says that:Being bigger is not enough to guarantee strong protective services… Able leadership can also be influential in that it allows smaller forces to punch above their weight. Arguably, the larger police forces proposed by the Home Secretary, under good leadership, might perform well but under poor or indifferent leadership, might perform extremely badly. The issue here is that, while one poorly-led small force affects a limited area, a large force poorly-led would have wider repercussions. Maintaining smaller forces, to an extent, helps spread the risk.It is absolutely clear that the police must be part of the community and identified with it if they are to engender the trust that is the sine qua non of effective and efficient policing.Nevertheless, I do concede that there are certain strategic police functions that might be better handled by dedicated – but not necessarily larger – organisations. I have noted that the Serious and Organised Crime Agency is shortly to come into operation to deal with precisely many of the tasks, the proper execution of which are being used, in part, as justification for creating regional forces.I find it utterly incomprehensible, therefore, that the government should proceed with a major reorganisation of local police forces, while SOCA has yet to prove its worth. Given that any process of reorganisation involves disruption, there will be a period of dysfunctionality while the new forces look inwards and attend to their own structures.What is also incomprehensible is the distorted logic of the Home Secretary, who argued that the amalgamation of forces could lead to improved local policing. His thesis was that the smaller forces could not maintain the specialist units needed to deal with serious crime so that, when a major incident occurred, officers were “sucked” away from routine patrol duties. The larger forces, taking advantage of their increased establishments, could afford specialist units which could deal with major incidents, leaving local police units unaffected. This betrays Mr Clarke’s obsession with “serious crime” and a concentration of resources that is not even warranted by the latest crime statistics. These show that more serious cases including homicide, threats to murder and serious woundings fell by 10 percent, while offences in a lower category involving crimes such as less serious woundings rose by 10 percent. Furthermore, although firearms data showed the number of serious injuries from gun crimes rose by 18 percent to 470, and slight injuries leapt 35 per cent to 3,600 in the year, the number of gun deaths fell 38 percent to 50 in the 12 months, compared with 80 in the previous year. As relevant, by displaying this obsession, Mr Clarke is focusing on reactive policing, contrary to the principle elucidated by Peel that“the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it.” In so doing, he is ignoring the experience of Mayor Giuliani who in New York achieved a 43 percent reduction in overall crime and cut murders by over 50 percent not by creating more specialist units but by getting his police back on the beat and by responding to local communities and dealing with petty crime.In fact, the experience of larger police forces tends to suggest that local policing suffers badly, especially in the current “target-driven” climate. My colleague, Iain Duncan-Smith attests that, in his outer
London suburb of Chingford, police are sucked into the centre to deal with incidents there, on the basis that they can deliver better performance figures where crime is more concentrated. This dynamic routinely leaves large areas of his constituency far less effectively policed. Equally, rural colleagues and police officers in my own area argue that the pressure to denude low-crime rural areas in order to staff local urban hot-spots will be irresistible.The ultimate deciding factor, however, must be the wishes of the people. As Peel was at such great pains to point out, the police are not a state instrument in this country. They are ordinary citizens themselves and are of the people. The local forces belong not to government or their chief constables but to the people themselves, on which understanding they agree to be policed by them.On 18 January, my colleague, Peter Luff MP for Mid Worcestershire, which covers West Mercia Police Headquarters, referring to an earlier assurance given by the Prime Minister that: the reorganisation of local police is something where it really is sensible to listen to local people” (Hansard, 7 Dec 2005, Column 860)elicited this response during Prime Minister’s Questions:It is important that we listen to local people, and I can assure the Hon. Gentleman that we will do so. Of course, many different things could happen, including forces coming together for certain strategic tasks that they are better able to fulfil on a common, rather than singular, basis. I can assure him, however, that we will listen carefully to what people say, including in his constituency. We would like to take him at his word but this contrasts sharply with my experience just an half an hour earlier when I went with Paul West, the Chief Constable of West Mercia Police and Paul Deneen, Chairman of the West Mercia Police Authority, to see Hazel Blears, the Minister of State. Although they put their case clearly and politely, it became very clear to me that she was unimpressed. I took the view that she attached little significance to their views and I came away with the conviction that the “consultation” being carried out by the Government is a charade.Nevertheless, when the Prime Minister was challenged on this issue by David Cameron, on 25 January, reminding him that he would listen to local people, Mr Blair stated that “the aim (of police reorganisation) should be the most effective way to police local communities with the greatest amount of accountability and effectiveness.” He added, “Obviously, we will listen carefully to what people say.” Minutes later, he replied to Bernard Jenkin“We will have to take a decision on what is best for local police forces, but we will do so listening to what local people say. In the end, surely what we both want to see is the most effective form of policing.” Despite Mr Blair’s protestations, the Government seems to have an underlying political agenda which militates against listening to the people. Having failed spectacularly to convince the people of the North East in their referendum for an Elected Regional Assembly, it is open to the charge that it is trying to achieve regionalisation by the back door, through administrative means. Having had so many powers passed upwards from local authorities to unelected regional bodies and having had their police, fire and ambulance reorganised, the government hopes that people will demand that these are made democratically accountable through elected regional governments. In addition to imposing the most profound changes on the police system in this country for over a hundred years, it will also have imposed the greatest revolution in local government for 1,000 years.As if that was not enough, on the same day, the Home Secretary presented a Bill aimed at setting up yet another agency, the National Policing Improvement Agency. Due to become operational in April 2007, this will directly specify the standards that police forces must meet, and enable the Home Secretary to intervene when he believes a force to be “failing”. This is a huge leap in centralisation, ensuring that Chief Constables look to the Home Office for approval of their actions rather than their local communities.Contrary to what the Prime Minister might say, therefore, every indicator points to the amalgamations going ahead, accompanied by even more centralisation and Home Office control. I sincerely hope that I am wrong but whatever the merits of the current proposals on police reorganisation, there should be absolutely no question of the Home Secretary’s plans going ahead as set out, until there has been the most thorough consultation and public debate on what is required by the communities served.However on 6th February, the Home Secretary placed a Written Statement in the House of Commons Library, announcing that certain forces were “suitable for merger”. Despite the unprecedented local opposition,
West Mercia was included in the list of forces to be merged into the new West Midland Regional Force. On 14th February West Mercia Police Authority met and unanimously decided to reject the Home Secretary’s call for authorities and forces in the
West Midlands to volunteer to form a West Midlands Regional Force. They again unanimously recommended that an enhanced, strategic
West Mercia police force is the best option for local people.Dismay has been expressed throughout at the manner in which the wishes of local communities have been ignored in the most brutal and arrogant manner. I have written to the Home Secretary warning him that, as he has ignored all their elected representatives, the people of
West Mercia should be granted a local referendum given the Prime Minister’s belief in listening to people. If they are not given the final say, an enforced merger will create a West Midlands Regional Force which will lack legitimacy and which will face being ineffective from its inception due to a lack of public support.
Owen Paterson MP
