Hail To The Chiefs

Thank you very very much to Temporary Chief Constable Mark Rowley (Surrey) Chief Constable Matt Baggott at Leicestershire, Chief Constable Sir Paul Scott-Lee QPM at West Mids and Chief Constable Christopher Simms at Staffordshire.

I have always been pretty swift to get the boot in where I see hypocrisy and / or cowardice, it behoves me therefore to be as quick at pointing out the good stuff when I see it.

These are the four brave men who have decided to take a hit in the Home Office targets in order to get back to common sense policing. You can read in my blog and many of the others about the desperate situation brought about by NCRS (National Crime Reporting Standards) which has seen us sallying forth to criminalise playground fights, snowball throwing and placcard carrying. Many of you will have formed a belief that we are now Policing by Judge Dredd style crime sweeps looking for crime, any crime, to lock up and arrest for. We are not of course, it just feels like that because if someone, somewhere (usually not a front line officer, often not any sort of officer) can perceive a hint of crime somewhere in the circumstances, there is a requirement to go the full nine yards in investigating it, detecting it and bringing the “offender” to justice.

I wait to see how far reaching this dose of common sense and realism will be in the field but it sounds good and I am hopeful. Surrey won’t stop being a high performing force just because HMIC and the Home Office find it has missed targets and kicked NCRS into the long grass.

It is a long way back. “It’s a long road, it’s a good cause.” With good luck and a following wind, somebody somewhere will soon decide to trial large Inspector led, Sergeant supervised teams supported by operational specialists (Dog / ARV / Traffic / CID). Have a bonfire of the bitty specialist departments and lets see how big we can really make those front line teams. I have a few ideas about those that would not be missed and I may just post about them one of these days. As a starter for 10 if you find you have time to go shopping at lunch, you probably don’t really need that warrant card.

I Know It's Over

Well here we go again with a Civitas Report picked up by the Telegraph into how we are picking on the Middle Classes and failing in our duty to the public by doing what we are told to do by their elected representatives.

Long ago when I walked the beat in Smallmarket, it was enough to come back on a night and find there had been no or little reported crime over the preceding night. We measured our success not in terms of sanctioned detections or arrests, but in terms of low numbers of offences and incidents of disorder. Our job, back then you see, was to prevent crime and keep order.

It really wasn’t rocket science.We ran uniform and plain clothed foot patrol of crime hot spots in the wee small hours. We deployed high visibility style at pub and club chucking out times. We went to the homes of suspected drug dealers and we put the door in. It was simple and honest work keeping Smallmarket reasonably well ordered and tolerably crime free. Seeing crime in single figures per month was a matter of great pride. Having an empty paperwork tray was a realistic ambition. Nobody ever came telling PC Nightjack (or anyone else) that the sanctioned detections were down for the month or that we needed a few more arrests this week. My Sergeant had a team and he knew who we were and what we did. That was part of the skill of being a good Sergeant. We knew that he knew us and he knew our strengths and weaknesses. We worked as a team, socialised as a team and knew each other.

I recall being “paraded on” day one at Smallmarket by my station Inspector. “Now then PC Night” he said (and I listened because back then Inspectors were a thing of real and present terror) “these fixed penalty tickets, the good people of Smallmarket do not like them. I know you young officers like them but I expect you to keep yours in your pocket for the next two years. Are you clear on that?” It was a clear and lawful order and rather than slap and run, I would take the time to find the owner of an offending vehicle and speak to them. Sometimes, most times really, I would be able to give words of advice and sometimes I would report for summons, issue a producer or issue a Vehicle Defect Rectification Notice.

That was the way of the world and I think it was better.

Now lets talk about your MOT

The Curse of The Green Biro

Reading back over my last few posts, well everything since the “Federation Conference Live” blog really, it has been brought to my attention that I have gone a bit “green biro” of late. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, there are a certain number of letters received by public bodies each year that are written in green biro. When you see that green biro writing, it is almost certain that the communication will be a pointless rant of epic proportions and usually anonymous.

If I start getting a bit green biro, let me know. I am trying for elegaic, sepia tinted  recollections of a long in the tooth career detective but every now and then, I find myself Fisking. Lord knows Fisking is fun and it’s ridiculously easy to do but I didn’t set out to do that.

I am minded of the words used by Jack Point the Fool in the Gilbert & Sullivan “Yeoman of The Guard”

When they’re offered to the world in merry guise,
Unpleasant truths are swallowed with a will -
For he who’d make his fellow-creatures wise
Should always gild the philosophic pill!

A Mark IV Ranting Biro

Anglican Jihad

So once more unto the breach for the Bishop of Rochester, the Right Reverend Dr Michael Nasir-Ali. Who said that the age of the polemic churchman was dead? As you might expect, his piece “Breaking Faith With Britain” has been a bit got at and sensationalised by the sensationalist press.

I thought I should give it a quick read. First thing is, he doesn’t mention the Police at all. Not once. Not even an oblique reference.

His basic thesis is that Christianity was increasingly treated as irrelevant by government (and nearly everyone else) since the 1960′s. The womenfolk started not going to church and the kids went Marxist at University. This sudden catastrophic end of any meaningful role for Christianity was a bad thing. There was no other system of values for society to fall back on except “I’m all right Jack” and “I want it all and I want it now.” He sees the following as destructive to society and stemming from the abandonment of Christianity as a thriving majority religion.

• Family units that are not Mum & Dad
• Loss of the role of father figure
• Abuse of substances
• Loss of respect for the human person
• Loss of communication between generations and social classes

Without Christianity, he says, you loose the underpinning for dignity of the human person, equality between people, liberty, welfare even hospitality.

He has a point. When society largely started to publicly disbelieve about the man in the sky and that donkeys could fly, there really wasn’t much left in the philosophy of life box except “All property is theft,” Omm, the Maharishi Yogi and various shades of Political and Social Science.

Me, I think the Bishop may have missed a point though. Why did we abandon Christianity? It’s because it was no fun and we could afford a ruinous alternative. In the immortal words of Ian Gillan in “Let Me Out of Heaven” “Up here we look solemn, pray and read extracts from the Bible, every hour on the hour…I said what? Let me out.”

The ruinous alternative was of course adopting the culture and lifestyle of my old friends “The Evil Poor.” They have been with us since time immemorial. Ask the Roman mob, hands out for bread shouting “Civis Romanus sunt.” Ask the residents of Hogarth’s Gin Lane. Ask the Bills, Nancys and Fagins of Dickensian London. There has always been a decent size chunk of society that has wanted nothing to do with Bishop Nasir-Ali, his religion or his morality. They have hung in there despite our best attempts to reform, incarcerate, transport or otherwise convert them. All that was wanted for their belief system to go mainstream was a proper, near unconditional welfare state. We got one and boy oh boy their day has now come and we can all live in their world, by their rules.

Don’t want to lift a hand to be housed? Either be born into money or join the evil poor. You’ll get somewhere to live, not too nice but nice enough and when (not if) you trash it and anything nice within 100 yards of it, we’ll fix it all for you. Don’t want to work a lick? Then be born into money or join the evil poor and we will give you money for nothing. Not a lot of money, but enough to add to the pot from whatever you are doing in the black economy. Nobody is going to come after you for income tax or national insurance.  We have built benign conditions for anti-social behaviour and lifestyles to really, really prosper in the hope, (never more than a hope) that nobody would take advantage and that everybody wanted a “nice” home, a “nice” family and a “nice” job. Turns out that given a choice, quite a few people are entirely happy not to make those choices and we have made it possible for them to opt out and throw a big V sign at the rest of us.

The problem is not that we have abandoned Christianity but rather that more and more people are able to get by by adopting the ways of the “evil poor” maybe not wholesale, but bit at a time, a creeping coarsening passed generation unto generation. It is a morality that allows for more sex, more partners, more kids, fewer responsibilities, more lies, fewer consequences, more stuff, more free stuff, more replacement free stuff, not having to care, not having to contribute, being forgiven almost any bad behaviour, having politicians venal enough to allow you to vote for more free stuff forever….I could go on.

I believe it is grounded in a personal conviction in the primacy of the self over everything and everyone. A sort of Me Me Uber Alles. It is un-enlightened self interest and it’s day has come.

The bishop worries about Islam becoming “radical Islam” but he should see that this is just an Islamic response to the same problem his religion is facing.

A Bishop, Pictured Alone

So Sorry Uncle Albert

Last night, apart from sleeping 12 hours straight for the first time in a long time, I finished reading a slim science fiction book from the 1950′s called Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein. It is a book I come back to every so often. Curiously for a science fiction work, it is required reading in the US Army, US Marines, US Navy and 4 out of 5 US Military Acadamies.

I went back to my dog eared 1986 copy because it has some things to say on youth crime that I think still hold true 50 years on. Here is a quote imagining a teacher telling his class about our times (which Heinlein was himslef imagining and extrapolating from what he saw in 1958/59 America.)

“Law-abiding (and there’s an old phrase you don’t hear much these days NJ) people hardly dared go into public parks at night. To do so was to risk attack by wolf packs of children armed with chains, knives, home made guns, bludgeons….to be hurt at least, robbed most certainly.”

“Didn’t they have Police ? Or Courts?“

“They had many more Police than we have and more Courts. All overworked” (Spooky NJ)

“Instilling social virtue and respect for law in the minds of the young did not appeal to a pre-scientific class who called themselves social workers or sometimes child psychologists…….the tragic wrongness of what those well-meaning people did contrasted with what they thought they were doing goes very very deep. They had no scientific theory of morals. They did have a theory of morals and tried to live by it, but it was wrong – half of it fuzzy headed wishful thinking, half of it rationalised charlatanry“

Which brings me neatly enough to the Children’s Commissioner Professor Sir Albert Aynsley-Green (or Sir Al to the kids). I am not here to beat him up or make cheap points, there’s been plenty of that in the blogosphere and the dead tree press already. He is clearly an intelligent and knowledgeable man who cares very very deeply and genuinely about the place of children in society. He cares so much it is painful to watch. Sir Al is a research scientist, much published. He is probably one of the cleverest men in England. When he made his now notorious comment about more stop search antagonising young people, he also said, (much less reported, but he said it) lets do more research into the problem before making comment or taking more action. This is what you would expect from a career researcher.

What does he really believe? Well Uncle Albert does have Tractor Factory style 5 Year Plan which is written in the particularly nuance rich but meaning light language of those stretching a couple of terse paragraphs into a multi page pamphlet.

Hello I’m Sir Al, his foreword begins. Then the bit about its everyone’s responsibility to raise children. It is clear from the rest that he believes we are demonising our children and  that punishment and control of them is disproportionate. He believes also that children should have a voice and a say in everything that happens to them.

Nothing here about teach your children well..nothing about instill social virtue and respect for law. Nothing about parental responsibility. To my mind it’s cruel not to address a child’s need to be taught and guided, to be given proper boundaries but maybe Uncle Al knows best. Maybe if we let the children set their own boundaries everything will be all right? Perhaps if we don’t punish, judge or control our children, they will grow up as well socialised non-judgemental non-controlling adults? Seems sensible on paper but in the world I think you end up with anti-social, lawless self centred people. I may be wrong……

Anyway, enough research is done and perceptions have been crystalised. That’s good enough for me because I have been told and better told that perception counts at least as much as evidence. Being blunt if you are young, male, Asian or black and living in some of our less pleasant inner city areas, your chances of being armed or getting stabbed are about as high as they can get. We are going to go and Stop Search where the knife crime is. That old maxim of ride towards the sound of the guns is all the intelligence led policing direction we need at the moment. Sir Al and the academic community, keep reading, keep researching and when you have a way to stop children carrying and using knives and you are sure it will work, get back to us. In the meantime, we’ve got some kids to antagonise.

“Don’t you antagonise me or I’ll knife ya”

C.

Today was a quiet day. Had a long chat with a Chief Inspector about the use of strong language over the radio system. Spent a lot of time thinking about Stop and Search. Spent quite a bit of time thinking about approaches to disclosure and how generally worthless the entire interview under caution system is becoming as well. Adverse inference? I could weep. Still it does fend off most ambushes.

Mostly worthless because there is nothing in the system to encourage anything other than a no comment interview from the guilty. If there is a defence, then you may get a pre-prepared statement. Either way, the interview as it stands allows the guilty to stand pat and not make any admissions or comment on the evidence against them. They then have from then until court to see if

a) The witnesses have a change of heart (very pernicious in wife beating cases)

b) The Police or C.P.S. mess up on the paperwork (sometimes pernicious in driven drinking cases)

c) They can come up with something that can be used in mitigation on a guilty plea like say a pregnancy, a job, a place in rehab…..you know the sort of thing.

In the mean time, a full file will have been produced on the basis of a not guilty plea.

For the Government that is casting around for a legal reform that would make a difference, I have this suggestion, leave the interview alone. It’s becoming more irrelevant by the day. What counts is the evidence available for the Court. All the interview does now is sometimes lets you do an abbreviated file. Admission is nice but trust me on this “The Cough” (verbal admission) is a false god. What you need is evidence.

It would still be nice to know that the guilty are going to plead guilty early on though. Without messing with the system of interview, disclosure and case management in an unfair way I can see a way of  getting this by concentrating the mind of the defendant and his advisors as to whether he really has a case worth arguing at court or whether he is just stringing the process out in the hope of a lucky break.

Where you should be looking at is sentencing on conviction. I can see no compelling reason for the massive discounts on offer for a guilty plea at Court at the moment. It doesn’t help me, I still have to do a full file. It doesn’t help the victim much, they still have to be court warned and worried. It helps the courts by saving them time and costs but the people it really helps is the defendant and his / her advisors by letting them keep their powder dry until the last possible minute.

I propose the following for Prison sentences

a) Direct plea bargaining with the C.P.S. The defence and the C.P.S. are both in the station at the same time. Let them talk in the presence of the defendant and if there is a deal to be done, lets get it done. This should shift the point of “advising the client with sufficient firmness” as it is called nearer to arrest and interview. The door should still be open as long as the C.P.S. wish to leave it open. They can also close it whenever they want to.

b) If there is no deal with the C.P.S. then no up front discounts or time off. In any case, the sentence passed is the sentence served.

c) Not guilty plea in the face of compelling evidence is an aggravating factor in sentencing. To be decided by the judge in the case. Tough on the Judges but that’s why we pay them big bucks and pensions. We pay them to Judge, thats what they are there to do.

d) All remission to be earned as “Time Off For Good Behaviour.” This allows the Prison system to have some encouragement for offenders to undertake self improvement activities rather than burning the prison down.

The future is bright, the future is principled and informed negotiation.

“So thats a s47 18 months maximum? OK deal”

Outside The Comfort Zone

As a starving student, I was never a particular fan of the “Suss Laws”. The Vagrancy Act 1824 was used on me a few times and I turned out my pockets as requested and went on my way with another tale of oppression by “The Man” for the Union Bar. Back then it was legal for officers to stop and search people on suspicion.

Then came Brixton, then came Scarman with his conclusion that racist use of the “Suss Laws” contributed to the Brixton riots and now we have a hooking great form to fill in and it’s all governed by PACE.

We have a current deep concern about weapons carrying and weapons use in the young. The standard approach of writing more law to stop them buying Rambo knives has been tried and errm it has failed. There is a generation that has grown up with Police officers with very nuetered Stop Search powers. I wondered if this knife thing was all a moral panic thing based on perception but the research has been done and somewhere between 30 and 50% of young men have carried a knife at some time or another for “self defence.” That seems to me to be too many.

I am coming round to the idea that an effective tool for Police Officers is an unconditional power to search people using force if necessary. It has some drawbacks as Lord Scarman pointed out at some length. It may be that we end up searching a disproportionate number of people from various minorities based on whichever proportionate set of figures you wish to choose. I remember there was a not well received Police Research Group paper that pointed out that the population out and about on the streets did not necesarily reflect the resident population and that some minority groups were “over represented” in the general on street population. This didn’t get a lot of press at the time. Maybe an inconvenient truth. In any case, we have spent the last 10-15 years going colour blind so maybe it’s time to trust us with the old power again.

I believe its another one of those situations where we turn to society and say, how do you want us to do the job? Do you want us to be able to search people on a hunch again or because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time, in possession of a bad attitude or have a known criminal record? If you do, this will involve an amount of unfairness and possibly some discrimination and stereotyping from us to you. Do you still want us to be able to do it? Do you understand that if you give us this power, we will use it and you will have to back us up because we are doing it for whichever working majority of you votes in a government? Bluntly, is it possible that in this area, PACE made us a lot fairer and also a lot less effective?

If nothing else, it would put a little risk back into the lives of those who currently carry weapons on the streets and will discourage some.

Is it in the interests of society as a whole that The Police get to act unfairly and search innocent folk like “student me?” I say again, I think it is. Being stop searched a lot in the 80′s did not make me feel so oppressed that I had to rush back to the squat and mix me up some Molotovs but it certainly made me very careful about what I carried around in my pockets.

Over to You

Policing By Imposition

(Further edited after I slept on it)

Thank you Newsnight. The last question tonight was about policing and a solid looking copper in the audience made the point that we have traditionally policed by consent. That got me thinking and I am sure that our abandonment of this underlying expectation goes a good way towards explaining why we are losing more and more of the public.

All too often we are seen as on the wrong side of the argument, from investigating documentary makers who are making valid points about religious hatred and intolerance through to locking up desperate and otherwise law abiding people for trying to deal with nigh unbearable local anti social behaviour that we haven’t sorted.

NCRS has ended up with us criminalising play ground fights and name calling.

Speed Cameras mean that we are penalising huge chunks of the otherwise law abiding citizenry

Officers are getting targets for arrests, detections and stops that are driving us to some fairly daft courses of action.

Discretion is largely dead. Where it exists is being used “under the radar” and against the rules.

We are having to document every time we stop someone to talk to them and ask them questions about their ethnicity, address, age, all sorts of personal stuff

We have steadfastly failed to get on top of Youth A.S.B. by getting on the ground and taking it back.

We have closed down or put on limited hours many local stations in a flight to edge of town “Operation Centres.”

We have replaced the drunk tank and the “Kick Out When Sober” disposal with a fixed penalty notice.

The beat bobby has been replaced by the response car, the pond watching (P)CSO, the “in it for a year or two CBT officers” and their supervisors the “not now I’m studying for my Inspectors exams CBT Sergeants.”

We are ringing people up to find out whether they are happy rather than leaving jobs sorted and knowing that they are.

Our strategic direction and management, even our public documents are couched in the language of the management consultant, not in the language of the communities we police.

We have been made gatekeepers to a right to protest.

We are seen and portrayed as over sensitive to minority cultural needs and whether this is true or not we have elevated perception to the same level as evidence.

We have ended up in partnerships with everybody except the actual population we serve.

We are busy building up a national DNA database that is about as popular as national identity cards.

We are seen as harassing and persecuting people for religious or political views. That’s not the British way…deplore what you say, defend your right to say it….free speech..you get the point I hope.

For a lot of this stuff, our hearts aren’t really in it, we know it is wrong and yet we collaborate because we have to. People can tell, it throws up huge blips on their emotional radar. “This cop who is doing me doesn’t want to do it but is doing it anyway..why?”

Less and less I think are we seen as policing by consent and more and more we are seen as just another part of the State. We are about policing by imposition. Once we stop being part of the communities we serve and become seen as “other” the game is over.

Can we get back to policing by consent? I am not optimistic.

Building The Imperfect Beast

When an over complicated file system gets hitched to an under-resourced, under skilled administration  team, the results are inevitable. Disaster. The C.P.S. role according to them is….to prosecute cases firmly, fairly and effectively when there is sufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction and when it is in the public interest to do so.

FAILED. They have been getting by on a wing and a prayer and hoping nobody notices. How do I know? It isn’t a secret any more but things are much much worse that I thought. I did think they were bad. Next Tuesday, we will all be able to download the very critical report into CPS File handling. It is downloadable by the press only at the moment. Sadly, by next Tuesday, the news cycle will have moved on and many people will have forgotten it in the slew of mis-management and maladministration stories flowing down the news stream.

This is however a serious matter for anyone interested in prosecuting crime. The worst I have seen first hand at Crown Court was in a fraud case. I had put a few months of my life into the file and everything had gone to C.P.S. on time for disclosure, then this happened at the plea and case management hearing.

HHJ Cocklecarrot “And has all disclosure been made to the defence as ordered?” (I suspect His Honour knew full well that a number of barristers on the defence side were whinging about not having had case papers.)

CPS Case Worker “………..shuffle of file sound………errrrm…….” (You could smell the fear)

Gloating Defence Barrister #1 “Your honour, I don’t have the papers”

Grinning Defence Barrister #2 “Nor I your honour”

CPS Case Worker “…….frantic paper shuffling noise….Errrrm….it isn’t clear from my file your honour” (At this point she was just fanning the papers in the file so fast she couldn’t possibly be taking any of them in)

Barrister #3 “I believe that I do have the papers your honour.” (Nice that someone was on the ball)

The case was adjourned and we were politely bollocked by the Judge.

The truth of the matter was that all the disclosure had all been done well before deadline by CPS but they hadn’t kept a proper record of that on the file. The defence team were the ones messing about with passing over paperwork which was either still with the solicitors or lost in chambers but we ended up looking bad in court all because the C.P.S. couldn’t keep a file straight.

It now seems that there is something amiss with about a third of all files in the C.P.S. system. Thats a scary big number. They report actually says that “The Majority of CPS files are not kept in a satisfactory manner.” Not satisfactory, little words with a big meaning. Crikey, that’s not good at all.

This is not isolated failures, this has to be systemic and cultural and it is very wrong. We rely on the C.P.S. to process and present our work and they are cocking up deluxe all the time.

• Every day, bad people get more time off before having to face court. That’s more free chances to offend. We all know about the likelihood of on bail criminals going on a “burster” because they know they are off to prison. The longer the bail, the worse the burster.
• We are embarrased at court and criticised when the failure is not with us.
• Witnesses are mucked about
• Bail conditions are lost in the ether and not enforced because no-one is sure what they are
• CPS decisions and actions taken are not documented.
• We lose confidence in the CPS

Sadly, the snotty memos from CPS lawyers requesting that you carry out 6 impossible or unecessary tasks before breakfast will continue to flow from them to us. Never mind that the requested actions will only move the likelihood of conviction up from 95% to 96%, the CPS demand the perfect file with the perfect presentation of evidence from us. Shame they don’t practice what they preach.

Maybe it’s time for an honest re-branding exercise for the whole shambling mess

A New CPS Identity

It's All Too Much

A FULLER TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN TRANSFERRED TO ITS OWN PAGE “CONF 2008″

The Fed Conference 2008

SPIN THIS – Jan Berry lets fly with a few choice quotes.

“I feel let down, too often the door has been slammed in my face and only opened when the decision has been made”

“Home Secretary, who speaks up for the Police in Government?”  “You betrayed the Police Service”

“How is it that you found £2.7 billion to dig out of a tax hole but couldnt find £30 million to honour our pay deal”

“You honoured the Teachers pay panel deal. What is it that Mr Balls has that you don’t?”

“There have been consultations but they have been paper thin”.

“Had our fill of partisan studies agreed in advance by the Prime Minister”

“Workforce Modernisation is workforce disintegration”.

Convert all 16,000 PCSO’s into sworn officers!!

“The inept management of modernisation is a scandal. Pilot studies are proclaimed a triumph before they have even started”

“We all joined up to make a difference. Home Secretary stop making us feel like the bad guys. There are more of us, we are better equipped and the prisons are full”.

“Get off our backs and let us get on with our role”.

MY THOUGHTS AFTER THE GLOW HAS DISSIPATED

Well that was an unexpected and welcome dose of the hairdryer from Jan Berry. Listening to the replies, I suspect it all fell on deaf ears.

Jacqui,

On sober reflection, thanks for the extra cash for our widows and the likelihood of better compensation and commutation. You must realise that you missed the point though. Standing up and saying in effect “We’re still shafting you but look, pretty beads and blankets” was dumb. Nobody in the room bought it for a minute but we do now know that every time the issue of police being shafted over numbers or wages or working conditions comes up in future, you and your colleagues will pap on about pensions and widows rather than answering the question.

Our world doesn’t work like you think it does. Giving us a sweetener does not make the problems of the injustice of the pay award and the chaotic nightmare that has been police reforms go away. We don’t want our backs scratching, we want what the arbitration said we should have and what you had already decided to deny us. You did not negotiate in good faith.

Please go away and come back with some proposals for

a) A year on year binding arbitration on a realistic basis

b) Consulting us properly and professionaly on the strategic direction of Policing over the next 15-20 years. At the moment, where we are going and how we are getting there changes every few years.

Ta lots

NJ