Can't Get There From Here

The comment so often thrown at Police as we haul the latest public order / minor assault arrestee away from their loved ones is “Why don’t you go out and arrest some proper criminals like murderers and rapists.” This makes it sound like there is some large pool of murderers and rapists that we could be bothering instead. There is no such pool and the arrest rates for murder and rape are pretty good. We put a lot of time and effort into murder and rape. I think people want us to do that. That cynical comment from the public is however a pointer. There is clearly a perception abroad that we work only to meet arrest and detection targets. There are meant to be desperate coppers thirsting to meet their monthly detections allocations and thereby criminalising matters that should have been left with a word of advice. A lot of people seem to feel that the Criminal Justice System has stopped producing any justice.

On a totally unscientific sample of readers over the weekend, one of the reasons for the developing fracture between the Police and the policed is the strongly felt perception that in order to meet arrest targets we tend to go after the easiest targets. I don’t think this is the case. I think the truth is that we are going after targets we never have before and some of them are very easy to pot because they comply. They comply because they are decent folk who don’t know any better.

At the risk of repeating myself, let me once again rail against the National Crime Recording Standard (N.C.R.S.) and the resultant automatic criming of many trivial incidents. This happened because those who govern the nation, those who control the law and those who manage us do not trust us. Why should they? We went political for Mrs. T over the miner’s strike, we generally don’t vote to the left, we tend towards an un-nuanced view of politicians’ expenses claims, we are harsh and blaming towards criminals and sceptical of non-custodial interventions. there are reasons enough. They began to suspect correctly that we cuffed crime. Here are some anecdotal examples.

• When I joined 15 years ago, it was acceptable to attend an incident of domestic violence where there had clearly been an assault and to mark it off as “no complaint” and “advice given.”

• There were towns where there were no windows broken by criminal damage, only accidents where a stone must have been thrown up from the road by a passing car. In 1994 I was bollocked by a local DS for criming such a broken window even though the window was broken with a thrown car jack.

• Youths attending certain stations would be offered bail in exchange for writing off a certain number of crimes. We weren’t too ethical about whether they did them or not, we just used “Taken Into Consideration” offences to bulk out the detected crime figures.

• Playground fights that the participants walked away from were never ever crimed. Heck where there had been any minor assault that was basically an agreed fight, we would hold off writing up the crime report, speak to both sides and see if we could persuade them to drop the matter, then write it all off as advice given.

• Excellent local performance in detections or in crime reduction could be the result of a little local book cooking. A new Detective Sergeant would realise that abandoning the bad old ways might mean a crime figures catastrophe that they would be blamed for. The system was thus to some extent self perpetuating.

Now perception is important, and over time, what with the McPherson Report and the like, those who employ and manage us became convinced that we were unfairly ignoring and otherwise failing to deal with crime allegations from minority groups and other socially disadvantaged types. They looked for a way to ensure that everybody got a fair shake of the stick and so was born the hated database specification and control procedures that we call N.C.R.S. It was signed by ACPO in April 2001 and fully implemented by 2002. It was designed, and has grown, to be an auditable straightjacket of procedures designed to ensure that every crime from a slap in the face to a bullet in the head got treated the same. Report, Record, Investigate, Arrest, Detect. Thus it was that the detection became King.

These are the principles in it.

2.1 All reports of incidents, whether from victims, witnesses or third parties and whether crime related or not, will result in the registration of an incident report by the police.

2.2 Following the initial registration, an incident will be recorded as a crime (notifiable offence) if, on the balance of probability:

(a) the circumstances as reported amount to a crime defined by law (the police will determine this, based on their knowledge of the law and counting rules), and

(b) there is no credible evidence to the contrary.

2.3 Once recorded, a crime would remain recorded unless there was additional verifiable information to disprove that a crime had occurred.

Note the language “will result in the registration of an incident report” “will be recorded as a crime.” You can take it from me that from 2002 onwards, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary absolutely hammered any Constabulary that did not have such a system in place. From then on, it was just a matter of time and ever increasing criminalisation of behaviours. As soon as Tracey realised that she could get “That slag Donna” properly locked up with a phone call complaint, guess what Tracey did? Better than going on Jeremy Kyle, nearly as much fun as Springer UK. Every green biro merchant and bitter ex with a grudge now generates an incident report and if the facts in the report can be shoe-horned into a crime, a crime is recorded and allocated to some an officer who is tasked to investigate it. That officer must either solve it or write it off somehow. The system of compliance auditing has tightened so much that even the old sweats (5+ years) with a black belt in writing off rubbish jobs find it is now more work to write jobs off than run them to conclusion. Writing a lot of jobs off is not a career move either.

So when your 12 year old daughter gets arrested for a playground fight, it likely isn’t some keen officer thirsting for an easy conviction to round off the month. It may be, but the likelihood is that for the officer it is just another complaint ground out of the N.C.R.S. sausage machine and s/he just wants to get it dealt with so they can move on to the next one.

Computer Says Lock Up