I don’t often post a direct reply to a question in the comments. I kind of enjoy reading everybody else kicking it about BUT I read Hopi Sen and he asked a straight question particularly about David Blunkett’s reforms to Policing.
“So here’s my question to Jack, genuinely meant. Since he knows that some of his colleagues dial it in, while most are dedicated and hardworking, that some constabularies are useless, and some senior officers worse than that, why wouldn’t a Home Sec look at this and come to the conclusion that their only viable option is to grab hold of the system and tell it what to do, even if that means wrenching the agenda away from the freedom of the frontline police to do what they will?” – Hopisen
The key phrase there Hopi is, I think, your last four words. “do what they will.” Was that really what was happening? Were an emancipated Police Service swanning around doing not much with all those extra resources? I don’t think we were.
In the wealth of statistics trotted out to show how great the 1997-2001 period had been in terms of Policing, the Home Office were asserting that recorded offences fell by 21% percent between 1997 and 2001. They also claimed that all types of crime from had fallen significantly. Public satisfaction with the police was around 66% (and how we would wish to achieve that barely 9 years later). The government already had it’s apparent result from the increased spend, a substantial reduction in levels of crime . So if it already had the result it wanted, why then deploy “The Blunkett” to crowbar through reform?
My proposition is that during his time at the Home Office, David Blunkett was not about making policing better. He was about doing things that seemed likely to be popular with
a) A Treasury with concerns that 20% of the bill for policing was for pensions.
b) That part of his political constituency that had been crying out for years that the Police failed the socially disadvantaged, women and various minorities.
c) That part of the floating vote that likes to hear strong rhetoric on anti-social behaviour.
David Blunkett addressed his perceived problems in ways that were not well thought out. His policy initiatives caused many of the problems in the relationship between Police and society that afflict us today. He is that most dangerous of things, a quick thinker and forceful advocate with no trace of self doubt.
Lets look at what David Blunkett did as Home Secretary between 2001 and 2004. What were the landmark Policing policies of his tenure? What were his big ideas? (I shall borrow heavily from Wikipedia, The Grauniad and Hansard and I may revisit old ground – sorry readers)
In 2001, right at the start in the Observer, he set out the thinking behind his version of Police reform. He came at it from a standpoint of making sure that the Police started providing a better service in terms of those crimes that impacted on the poorest and most deprived areas of our society. He explicitly saw Police reform as an arm of social policy. His talismanic image throughout was the repeat victim living on the sink housing estate in Sheffield. Policing was somehow failing these victims. His themes were that Policing was not convicting enough people and that Policing was not detecting enough crime. Never mind that Policing was reducing the actual levels of crime. He got us arresting more people alright and detecting more crime but I don’t think that the repeat victim in Sheffield is any better off today as a result and the cost in terms of public confidence and organisational confidence / morale just hasn’t been worth it. Anyway…..
Someone at the Treasury was not at all happy with the cost of Policing. We know this because early on in his career, David Blunkett mentioned the cost of policing quite a lot. He even fell out with the Police Fedaration about it when he decided to slash overtime, reform pensions, mess with working hours and introduce very large pay differentials all at the same time. It was too much too soon to force onto any working culture let alone the Police. He recanted at a Police Federation Conference when he realised that he had gone too far too fast but the damage was done in terms of trust between the Police rank and file and the Home Office. Too much, too soon. Consequences not properly thought out. Long term damage.
Exhbit NJ/01 Proposed reform to Police pay and conditions
His big idea White Paper was called Policing a New Century, a Blueprint for Reform. Amidst the rhetoric on increasing detection and convicition rates were a few choice phrases ( I cherry pick freely)
“The challenge of modernisation is to bring about the kind of improvements which are
welcomed by everyone – except those more concerned about protecting their comfortable
ways of working.” – Who could he mean?
“The Government intends to deliver a modern police service in which managers can make
the best, most flexible use of staff, and terms and conditions meet the diverse needs of the
workforce. Police employment regulations are a bar to efficient and effective policing, and
unresponsive to changing needs and pressures. They constrain the ability of police officers
to have modern career patterns and fail to meet the aspirations of those now entering the
employment market. The Government has asked the PNB to explore and agree ways of reforming the pay system and the current system of regulations. It is hoped that agreement in principle will be reached by the end of 2001. The PNB has also been asked to explore and agree
ways of delivering a fair and more consistent approach to early retirement due to ill health.” – We read this as “The shafting stick is coming to get you” and it was.
“Driving up standards is at the heart of police reform. Some forces and BCUs achieve high
standards, and proven good practice should be used for the benefit of all communities.
To help the Police Service deliver a better and more consistent service to the public the
Government is taking specific steps. These include:
• strengthening and developing HMIC to challenge the worst performers and recognise the best
• a National Policing Plan to set out the Government’s priorities for policing, how they wish
to see them delivered and indicators by which performance will be measured; and
• a new three tiered-approach to good practice – regulations binding in law, codes of practice
to which chief officers will have to have regard, and guidance which will be advisory.” – Hello and welcome to central targets and all the ungoodness that came with them
“There are, of course, particular concerns for women, members of ethnic minority communities,and other groups who are vulnerable to hate crime. Policing must deliver the same service and the same respect to the whole community. “ – Now hear this fringe voters, I’m going to make “The Man” work for you as well
I exhibit as NJ/02 Policing a New Century A Blueprint for Reform
April 2002 brought The National Crime Recording Standard. This was not about common practices of crime recording across forces. It said that on the tin but the label lied. This was about ensuring that every report of a crime was treated as a crime.
The noble aim was to ensure that the police stopped sweeping racist, homophobic, “bad on bad” and domestic violence crimes under the carpet. Did thatsort of thing ever go on? Of course it did. I remember it well. Shouty, criminal damage and common assault type domestic violence used to be a “look the other way” crime within my service. You might arrest “him” for Breach of The Peace to take the heat out of the situation but you would seldom prosecute for any criminal offence. The ethos was to take the heat out of the situation then and there rather than for the police to try and impose any long term solution on the couple. (That being said one of my first ever arrests was an ABH domestic assault that went to court and got a conviction).
Was N.C.R.S. the answer to those problems? Of course not. It was the bluntest of blunt tools, a quick fix machine bureaucrat’s response. Lets create a one size fits all system and see what happens. What happened was that the police got an unacceptably large bolus of criminal complaints that all had to be recorded as crimes and all had to be investigated. Goodbye increased Police numbers, hello more arrests and paperwork. The very best way to keep officers on the streets and away from red tape is to encourage us to use the power of arrest sparingly and to seek resolutions that do not involve recourse to the courts wherever possible. That’s where the paperwork is. Always has been. The case preparation that we had already was a massive chunk of that oft quoted 43% of time inside the station. How was adding more cases ever going to change that? There were never enough police to do justice to N.C.R.S., there never could be.
Matters of neighbour dispute, harsh words said, unwanted courtship, name calling, playground fights, petty acts of spitefulness, minor damage, marital arguments and revenge reportings that were never previously anywhere near the criminal justice system were now firmly within our remit as crimes. A social policy aim was served but at the cost of soaking up an awful lot of resources in pushing the NCRS boulder up the hill. This was entirely forseeable but it did not seem to occur to the Home Office at the time.
Now if you ally NCRS to inflexibly inspected, crude, centrally driven, quantity based performance targets in terms of arrests, detections and offenders brought to justice you get a Police service that is driven to do two things
1) Create a bureaucracy to ensure that no crime goes unrecorded, un-investigated or undetected. This must be done to pass the inspections. A whole audit trail industry has grown on the back of this central requirement.
2) Create Police Officers who lose sight of the the people involved and who see the world in terms of arrest and detection figures. A crime is just a crime. There is a process to be gone through. There is trouble in not following the process. Not reporting is not an option. Not arresting is not an option. Criminalisation follows given sufficient evidence.
The public have not enjoyed this new equal opportunity arresting face of policing. Just look at the satisfaction figures.
I exhibit as NJ/03 the National Crime Recording Standard and the systems that came with it.
I think that’s probably enough to be going on with for tonight. There are P.C.S.O.’s that don’t do much community supporting. There are his policies on moving law enforcement down a more authoritarian track really quickly in relation to ID cards, freedom of expression, freedom to protest and intrusion into private lives. There are his reforms to the sentencing system that have created a regularly expressed and growing dissonance between sentence given and sentence deserved to the point where the public look at some sentences and they see real injustice to victims.
I note with interest that the Home Office seems to be coming back to the idea that Police discretion is a good thing and central targets are not. It will be interesting to see how much else of his work survives reappraisal.
Just to re-iterate the point made above less crime is a good thing. More arrests and detections may not be a good thing. The more arrests we have to make, the more incidents we have to record as crimes, the less we can be outside policing. Processing arrests is the big number in putting police off the streets and swallowing up resources in the back offices. Please Home Office, try and remember that next time.
Bottom line up front: Can the police services readapt principles of discretion?
So the question begs, if the loss of discretion due to a “if A then B” system is a large part of the problem, and assume a perfect world where the power to use individual initiative is returned to the police, how do you change the individual PC and management.
I was a soldier for a long time. It was very easy to train a new soldier to follow a checklist and ask for guidance from a superior if circumstances arose outside of those foreseen who wrote the list. it was much harder to teach judgement and for a lack of a better term, wisdom.
You now have police who have served a significant chunk of their career in a SOP driven world. Are there enough old timers who can and are willing to train probationary PC’s when TO and when NOT TO to arrest? And how to tell that difference? What about the five year PC. Can he adapt on his own or will he need retraining?
What about leadership (or managers) who have come up in, or grown accustomed and comfortable with a system that denies subordinates freedom of action. Hard to get thrashed for the actions of PC who follows the procedure to the letter, even if the outcome is suboptimal. Easy to push and assess subordinates on a numerically quantifiable basis. Far harder to accept that the line troopies are operating in a grey area, with a greater risk of pooching it as a result and the pontential splash-back up the chain of command. Also far harder to truly lead in that environment.
With all changes there will be errors. From an outsiders perspective, police work appears particularly unforgiving. Given the social and political climate in England, would the public accept the difficulties in the change over period or would the bellows of outrage from gored sacred cows frighten leaders into reflexivley clamping back down the old restrictions. After all, the more constrained a system, the more predictable it becomes. And predictability reduces uncertainty and for many, uncertainty is uncomfortable.
Is it to late?
I think some labour reforms have been for the better;
1) The way hate crimes have been investigated (in particular homophobia) is certainly far superior to what went before.
2) The reduction of early retirement and general malingering that went on with long service Bobbies being the focus, those of us with enough service remember the old “26 years in” jokes.
3) PCSO’s- divisive I know but if used in the CORRECT manner can be beneficial, let’s face it they can be used to deal with some of the tasks that Bobbies have always found soul destroying. The problem is the boundaries have been blurred, often by Police managers, so it’s another case of Senior officers taking the government stick and using it in an act of apparent self flagellation.
Labour’s bad points;
1) Pay and Pensions- There is a simple logarithm that states “Ye pay peanuts and monkeys ye shall employ”. If you want well trained, quick thinking, well intentioned staff then realistic terms and conditions have to be offered. Policing really isn’t like any other job, i can never go to work with the full confidence that I shall be clocking off at the correct time.
Those on the side lines will say “Well you know what you went into when you signed up!!”- to those I say “well actually i didn’t” and i’m a second generation Bobby. No one can prepare the individual for what they will have to experience when they join the job, even after 6 years in the Army with Bosnia etc under my belt I found it a shock.
So far as pay and pensions go if I did have to work till I was 65 and retire on a mediocre pension then the police is not the place i would be working, there are jobs with a lot less resposibility out there for similar money (recession aside).
2) NCRS- creates more problems that it solves……..yes in Utopia everyone may be a victim, yes in Utopia figures will not get fudged by police officers. This is NOT Utopia……..THIS IS ENGLAND.
People report crimes for a wealth of reasons, mainly for the fact that they are a victim of crime. Brilliant, I’ll go and investigate, arrest and detect.
Not so, I find most of my time dealing with the manipulative and decietful underclasses who report crimes for the purposes of obtaining crisis loans or scoring points in civil courts during marriage breakups- Trust me when the victim is a liar it takes a whole lot longer to investigate.
So as a Detective I have proved overwhelmingly that my victim is a liar, crime written off?? Not so, because this person (liar) perceives THEMSELF to be a victim of crime, the crime still stands- UNDETECTED.
So what as a service do we do about this??? The figures are poor say the management, we need to raise detections.
Let’s lock up the children is the answer……. A full generation of juveniles has and is being criminalised in pursuance of easy targets.
The upshot??? A completely overworked and devalued CJS where the back end (the courts) are inadequately equipped to deal with the dross that has been sent through it’s doors.
I don’t personally think cops will ever get discretionary powers back, Knuckledragger is right there, anyone with less that 5 or 6 years in has never seen discretion and it’s the 5 or 6 year officers that are used as tutor Constables. That era is gone and i for one am resigned that rightly or wrongly i have to work in this Brave New World.
So, if I’m reading all this right, what the serving or ex-police on here are saying is that, on the whole, there is more emphasis on accountability through statistic, and that the “wrong” sort of statistics are being pushed to the fore.
Just out of interest, does anyone on here have anything to do with recruitment into the police service? I’d be interested to hear their opinion on the sort of people who present themselves as potential police. From the sound of it, there are more than a few ex-military going into the police, but I’m sure there’s more to it than that.
The reason I ask is that these discretionary powers – that’s probably the wrong word, but it’s early and my head hurts – that people are hankering after sound to me like something of a pipe dream in the modern world. To take the prevailing argument to its logical extreme, you’re talking about “Just leave me alone and trust me to get it right”. Well, yes, I’m sure there are plenty of intelligent, resourceful, even-handed and reasonable men and women working in the police who’d make an excellent fist of that sort of licence.
But then, anyone who works in any kind of environment whatsoever knows that, of your colleagues and peers, resourcefulness and intelligence are rare qualities. Lots and lots and lots of people, sadly, lack insight and intelligence and quick-thinking and all the other attributes that go to make up a useful functioning part of the workplace. The number of people in our daily working lives that have to be carried, worked around, managed and made up for probably outnumbers that of the competent, reliable and smart. Why should it be any different in the police?
As I think I might have said more than once before, oversight to the nth degree is a relatively modern phenomenon that won’t go away. Part of it is down to the fact that we are, more and more, becoming a litigious society. If someone is put out, someone else has to be blamed. To say that oversight isn’t the way to do that, or that the type of oversight you have is wrong or misapplied, is to miss the point. Who is to say that stripping the rules, stats, memos and kneejerk nonsense out of your lives wouldn’t empower a whole generation of cretins, workshy bastards, bigoted morons and whatever else to perpetrate their own brand of nastiness onto society under the badge of their local force?
Some of you may mistake the above for flagrant bumptiousness. It really isn’t. I just don’t trust people very much, and I don’t see why they should be any more trustworthy because they’ve decided to join the police. Besides which, I’m not entirely sure there was much in the way of quick thinking and careful judgement last night when the Met baton-charged a bunch of teenage girls in tents having a peaceful protest on Bishopsgate.
Jack,
First of all, thanks for a really intersting and in depth reply. I’m sure I won’t be able to respond properly, especially as I need to spend most of today writing a speech about manufacturing and I’m panicing abut my marathon on Sunday!
A few initial thoughts though: Don’t you do a bit of statistical jujitsu us front? You began your original post talking about the inexorable rise in violent crime figures as an indictment of New Labour home secs, but in this post you point out recorded crime was falling from 1997-01 as an endorsement of the “old way”.
But according to that data, recorded crime fell last year too (and according to BCS violent crime fell 10%). In fact, recorded crime has fallen every year since 2004 for a total decline in recorded crimes of 650,000.
On top of that, according to BCS overall crime is down by half since 1995, when it peaked. Personally, I think BCS gives a better general picture of overall crime levels, but I know others dislike it, so here I’ll stick to rec crime.
Even on violent crime, last year we saw a 10% drop in violent crime for the first time since NCRS came in.
Finally, if you look at the “serious crime” basket of recorded crime, the issues you’re talking about here, In the last 4 years there’s been a decline that almost exactly mirrors the Howard era fall, even with the NCRS figures. (fig 2.7 on same doc)
Does all that mean that New Labour reforms have been a success by your definition?
(BTW are you sure about the 20% drop in recorded crime – see p9 fig 2.6 of the BCS/rec crime report that seems to show an increase in recorded crime under the new counting rules – was there a parallel count going on at time? http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs08/hosb0708chap2.pdf )
We can debate all day about how much of the crime changes are down to government, general economy and “social ease” and so on. Suffice to say I would never claim the government of the day are solely responsible for rises and falls in crime in any particular year, which is probably going to be handy for me next year.
But that’s all stats and figure. In my defence, you started it!
On your more general point, I’d say this.
Let’s say recorded crime was falling through 97-01. You’re a home office minister and your civil servants are bringing you this great news, which you dutifully trumpet to the world as a triumph of the system. Trouble is, no-one believes you. You look at the fear of crime figures, you look at the headlines, Maybe someone even tells you about this exciting thng called blogging where frontline police officers tell it how it really is.
A gnawing suspicion begins to form that maybe the shiny new falls in crime you are trumpeting are a load of horse manure. You’ve a general election coming up. All the opinion polls and focus groups tell you that people are angry about two things. Crime and anti social behaviour. People shout at you in the street about it. You’re accused of being out of touch, of spouting tractor production figures that bear no relation to the reality of people feeling afraid, scared of young people, gangs, vandalism and all manner of things.
You turn to your civil servants and say, “people are worried about these things, what’s happening?” and they say… “Those aren’t _crimes_ minister, so we don’t prioritise them.”…
Maybe NCRS and increased centralisation was the wrong solution. I’m not enough of a policy wonk to know. But what I’m trying to explain is why it was an attractive solution. Could they be changed, improved, made less distorting? I’m sure it could. What is the correct approach the the management of the kinds of crimes you talk about as not needing to be recorded – I don’t know.
I can see why they should be left out, but I can also see that if you live above a man who fights with his wife regularly, and you call the police, you want them to take it seriously.
This btw is my gfs experience, a regular pattern of screaming rows and fights that would go on for hours, and would only stop once the police were called, no-one else ever getting an answer. (Eventually she left him, at which point he smoked huge quantaties of dope, which suited us just fine as his fits of giggles were far less frightening than the fights.)
Oh, and don’t let me get into a) the uselessness of council anti-noise units and b) what i’d like to do to the architects of most post war social housing and those who then administered them to make them decent places to live (*cough *evictions* cough – for which yes, Labour Councils should take as much responsiblity for as anyone, and probably more).
Finally, I’m not equipped to give a response with any depth to it to your knowledge of the nature of the police service, or how policing itself has changed as a result of those changes, so I’m not going to try. Never fight a battle you can’t win.
I do wonder though if all the reforms to police careers and structures were negative. I seem to remember police absence figures being a political issue, which they’re not any more.
Anyway, I’ve gone on. Back to the speech.
oh, and OT. I’d love to see Jack’s musing on the Wire, which is
a) the best TV series ever and
b) about exactly the battle between systems and good policing we’re taking about here.
H
NJ:
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Agreed with everything in your post bar this. Much like around a dancefloor on a friday night – there’s a new record playing, but so far nobody’s dared to step out onto the dancefloor for fear of the watching eyes and bright spotlights.
Guernican:
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I used to work for police recruitment in the dim & distant (over 10 years ago now so under the “old” system”. Ability to use adapt and improvise as well as use and common sense were tested as key and usually(it wasn’t foolproof, but generally) a combination of interviews and roleplays (particularly the roleplays) weeded out those that didnt have the ability to use either.
Discretion requires a curious mix of improvisation and common sense that can’t really be taught in a classroom.
Oddly, we saw many ex-forces people go in and become very successful – i suppose because they were used to taking order and operating within set parameters with a modicum of discretion.
People who came from very compartmentalised, task-managed roles or ones where they had no ability to act on their own initiative didnt seem to make it through the process that often (while their applications were usually better written etc, the interview and roleplay process culled them heavily), and when they did it was to beef up the numbers rather than as a primary choice. I remember a few batches of 60+ we put through were almost all ex-forces (predominantly RM & Army).
Now, the roleplays and testing is radically different. Shortly before i left, there was a marked shift away from operational competence and ability to adapt. They went instead towards training people to be mindless and unthinking in the execution of their duty.
To cite a good example, the roleplays that had previously been designed to test information processing, common sense and memory etc became about dealing with ethnic minorities or worse still (i’ve since heard although i’m long gone from there), became pre-scripted interviews allowing people to easily prepare stock PC answers.
Further to this – while the legal and procedural training provided to probationary officers at an early stage in their career was key, more important still was the training by an experienced PC, (usually of 10+ years) in the use of discretion and how to be an effective copper (i.e. proactive rather than reactive where possible).
As PRC quite correctly points out, no PC who’s been in less than 5-6 years stands a snowballs chance in hell of having received this key experience and knowledge – the concept that breaking out arrest forms at every available opportunity is not the way to police.
I work as a headhunter nowadays. Some skillsets are easily teachable in a classrom environment. Some are incredibly difficult to teach in such a way, requiring experience and the guiding of an old hand as their teacher. If you lose that difficult to teach/pass on skillset, it is gone for good and to be regained must evolve independantly over time as it originally did.
This is the situation policing in the UK is in – all but the last gasp of discretion has been choked out of PC’s over the last 10 years or so and it’s not going to come back on it’s own easily.
Hopisen -
Regarding your comments on the (mal)administration of social housing and the failure of the managers to live up their responsibilities:
Couldn’t agree more. This is a significant part of the problem society-wide, and a bloody major part of it if you live in social housing (like Blunkett’s hypothetical person-on-the-estate-in-Sheffield).
BTW NJ, over at my blog I suggest a couple of former Home Office and No 10 Spads who might be interested in this debate.
Which reminds me, don’t be surprised if this and other blogs _are_ being read at the centre and impacting the debate. I remember John Reids special adviser at defence telling me he got a more useful sense of the issues in the armed forces from reading the ARSSE forum than from most of his civil servants, and that was four years ago.
Though I doubt they’ll like the Klebb stuff, tbh.
Hopisen re: john reid’s special adviser – which is how it should be. If you want to know how to drive a race-car you don’t ask someone who rode a motorbike casually 20 years ago do you?
Then why on earth do they value the opinions of managers who at best have done it briefly 2 decades ago, and at worst have never done it!
Ask the management about what changes need to be made as well as the frontline troops, but remember that the frontlines need to be able to do their job and that the management is there to support them. Not the other way around(as it is now sadly)!
The same applies to my earlier large post – if you want to teach a new PC discretion, you cannot use someone who’s never had discretion to do it and expect to succeed!
Believe it or not, there are some forces who were recently “allowed” to use “discretion” again as part of a Home Office plan. I kid you not. They have to phone the ACC at home (not really, but you get my drift!) when they think that they have an oportunity to use it, mind, but they really think that it’s the mutt’s.
I find it headshakingly amazing that something as fundamental to front line policing as this has actually been regulated officialy.
Why are we in this handcart and where are we gouing?
No one is suggesting that police should not be accountable for their actions. Police officers are individually accountable for their actions. Accountable for every arrest and every use of force. Accountable for the appropriateness of communication (“go away mate” vs “f*ck off pal or I’ll lock you up”). Hiding behind policy is a comfortable place to be.
That does not mean it is the right thing to do.
The job of the police is not just to lock people up and record crimes. Incidents frequently do not fall into neat offences. Prosecution and court may not be in the “victims” interests. It may not be in society’s interest. The role of police used to be to attend incidents and using experience and common sense assess what the best course of action would be. That may involve arrests. It may involve crime reports. It may involve the officer telling the complainant to “grow up” and then leaving. It frequently involved “words of advice” to both parties. However the officer had to be prepared to justify the action he or she took and show that, on the information available to the officer at that time, it was reasonable.
By all means let’s keep statistics on crimes. But without the essential filter of common sense in the form of a police officer it can get silly. This is because a lot of the people we deal with are childish and silly in ways that only police, ambulance and Accident & Emergency staff (and a few others) can really understand. I don’t mean to sound condescending but a lot of people really have to be experienced to be believed.
Until seven or eight years ago officers were expected to exercise “discretion”. This meant making judgments, based on common sense and experience, about how to deal with incidents. For example to arrest/prosecute for a minor offence (minor thefts/minor assaults/name calling). This was an expected part of the job. Failing to show discretion and good judgment would get you into trouble. I am not talking about ignoring a murder or robbery but many minor matters should not be recorded anywhere other than in the attending officer’s notebook.
Please let me use an example.
I once got into trouble for digging my heels in over discretion. The “offence” was a report of an assault. The complainant was a well known local yob (familiar with the law and its workings). The named suspect was a “clean skin” – a young man (17 yrs I think) from a decent and respectable family who had never been in trouble before. Report and statement taken and suspect arrested. It transpired (and was independently confirmed) that the suspects father had very recently died from cancer. The yob had been shouting at him in the street and laughing about it. The suspect punched him once and told him there was more where that came from if he didn’t shut up (I would have kicked his bloody teeth in). The yob ran round the corner and dialed 999, which is where I came in. I refused point blank to prosecute him for the assault and talked the yob into signing my pocket book asking for no further action (I threatened to prosecute him as well under s5 Public Order Act if he didn’t). This led to meetings with the Detective Sergeant, Detective Inspector then Detective Chief Inspector as I had “lost them the detection”. I got every cr*p job going on my workload for the next six months. It only stopped when the DS (who allocated investigations) moved on. It was not a pleasant time. This was about five years ago. Now I am not sure that wouldn’t have just completed the paperwork and criminalised this decent lad from a decent family. Pressure is more intense now.
Another example.
Two thirteen year old girls steal a pre-packed sandwich from a major chain store. They are detained by store detectives. Police are called. On arrival the store detective apologises for calling police but explains that he had been unable to contact either of the girls parents. Both girls are crying their eyes out. The store detective only involved police because he couldn’t just let the girls go on their own and couldn’t contact their parents. This incident is a waste of his time. He is employed to stop high value bulk thefts by serial offenders not stop schoolgirl dares. The store does not want action. I take the girls home. Good normal working class homes. These parents work for the roofs over their heads. They are “proper old school horrified”. The girls are still crying. To both sets of parents I explain that I would take no further action but that the incident would be recorded so that if the girls did similar in the future the attending officer would know about this incident. Another Detective Chief Inspector got involved. He was furious. I had “lost the detection”. He wanted the girls arrested and a file submitted. This was months later. Arrests (still) cannot be ordered. I refused. This cost me a post on a prestigious force team. Imagine criminalising two little girls over a sandwich!!!!
I got so sick of it I transferred to an Australian force. There is a commonly used phrase in Operational Orders here “your discretion, as always, remains unfettered”.
I am not saying that all police officers have fantastic judgment or that there are not some lazy, work shy, people in the police but discretion and common sense have been all but removed form the equation and public dissatisfaction is soaring.
Policing policy is very complex and there are a lot of dynamics at work. Many are outside the influence of the police. Nevertheless at it’s most basic level it is simple. It was expressed to me in my first day in the police in these words “if something looks wrong it is wrong and it’s your job to do something about it”. I will remember that for the rest of my service and probably my life.
When the polititians get involved you can be sure of a few things.
1. They will want to create an illusion of getting more for less.
2. They will want to be saving money to do this and claim it is more efficient and effective.
3. They will create ever increasing things to measure so they can show how well they have done.
4. They will implement things that they consider will be vote winners.
5. They will talk about large figures in £££’s as an investment and as a way of convincing everyone that it is working.
6. When it does not work they will tell you they must ensure it never happens again.
7. They will undertake some form of review.
8. They think the problems are easy to sort out and do not understand the problems are a lot harder to resolve. This is not headline grabbing enough to get good press and promote their brand.
9. They will claim to support the victim and yet the results always appear to give ever more protection and rights to the offender.
10. They fail to recognise that everything in society is adversarial. From politics to crime & punishment.
They also will not consider that the best things are those that they cannot measure. It is not like a production line where corporate strategies and profit margins flow smoothly from a spreadsheet. The best work is the dirty stuff that happens on the streets and they know nothing about because it is immeasurable. The hours and committment of officers on the streets, in the communities doing everyday stuff that is not headline grabbing or glamorous and that they cannot measure.
Not everything that can be counted counts. And not everything that counts can be counted. Einstein had it just about right.
[...] nightjack added an interesting post today on Manoeuvres In The Dark « NightJackHere’s a small readingThe noble aim was to ensure that the police stopped sweeping racist, homophobic, “bad on bad” and domestic violence crimes under the carpet. Did thatsort of thing ever go on? Of course it did. I remember it well. Shouty, criminal damage and … There are his reforms to the sentencing system that have created a regularly expressed and growing dissonance between sentence given and sentence deserved to the point where the public look at some sentences and they see real … [...]
When I was in the navy as a warrant officer, I used to have the rank below me (CPO) as my watch leaders. At 0300 when a crisis erupted, I expected them to make a decision as to how to proceed. Sometimes they made the correct decision, sometimes they didnt. And sometimes it was a case of ‘shake the boss’ as they didnt know what to do.
The point is, I decided that as a watch leader they had to make decisions sometimes without me being around to ask for advise. That was their job and why they were watch leader. I trusted them to make the right decision. I defended them when I thought they made the right decision but the Operations officer didnt (usually because the captain didnt but the ops officer was too scared to go agains the capt!). I also bollocked them if their decision making was crap (to be honest this happened rarely.)
As far as I can see it is the same with a police officer. He or she who is in the house whereby the couple have had an argument but by the time police arrive the couple have kissed and made up. Why should the police officer have to justify the decision that there ‘no offences’ when the rules state that if the call comes in for a domestic, there must be an offence!
NJ,
“IMO the government believed that we were failing to record crime that impacted on the socially disadvantaged and minorities and that the only way they could quick fix it was to ensure that we recorded every single bloody thing”
Which sort of takes us to the crux. Did this have some truth to it?
A hypothetical. Lets say you’re an council enviro health officer judged primarily on the number of food poisoning cases reported. You know Hellholingham has a loads of of dodgy spinning elephant leg merchants and late night fried chicken outlets, while Veryniceville up the road has a wide range of organic cafes and mung bean wholesalers.
You split your resources roughly in line with population and encourage your health officers to exercise discretion about the sort of minor crimes found in rogue kebab van outlets and organic cafes. Since the former get out of line a lot more than the latter you find that without really trying, that a culture of benign neglect grows up in Hellholingham. Add in the known tendency of poorer, less educated people to feel less comfortable contacting “authority” when sick, being less able to identify their symptoms and less likely to go to hospital and a doctor, and you end up with massive under reporting of food poisoning in Hellholingham vs Veryniceville.
I grew up in a red light district and high crime area (The Forest,/Hyson Green Nottingham). Not to get into too much personal history, it made me a believer in very visible, in your face policing from a young age, but it also made me notice that no-one ever beat up the kids from Nottingham high school for boys, while we didn’t call the police when the drug addict from the house opposite threw a brick through our window or a guy tried to kerb crawl my mum (once when walking me home from school, WTF?).
I suppose what I’m saying is that what you describe, that refusal to ignore a single crime, no matter how insane it might seem, isn’t a million miles away from the sort of Zero tolerance, Broken window stuff that Blunkett was also so keen on. They came from the same well spring.
Nothing is as clear cut as it appears.
A true example of this was a bout of ‘low level’ food poisoning.
Over the period of a few months, the occurrence of a stomach malaise on a Sunday night/Monday morning was common on our RAF Station. I was one sufferer, and went sick one Monday am.
The SMO, took one look at me and said “Ching Chow last night?” (not the place’s real name)
Me, “Er, yes, why?”
Him, “A growing trend”
To cut a long story., he was ‘invited’ as an observer to a ‘raid’ on the above establishment by Environmental Health (mainly as he had reported his suspicions to them).
The next time I saw him, some months later, he told me about the ‘raid’
They entered the premises, and to their absolute amazement, it was spotless. He told me, that literally, you could have eaten food of any surface, even under the freezers. Much concern and embarrassment, until…..
They opened said freezers.
There was ‘Tiddles’ and ‘Fido’ and the wild ducks from the pond, Seagulls and anything else you’d care to name.
Oh and the food poisoning? Probably a reaction to animal medications. I do remember my nose being cold and wet and having shiny hair.
NightJack
What a well written piece. Good on you.
I refer to Exhibit NJ/01. Police pay and conditions should be a legitimate area of discussion. Police officers are well paid. Sorry. I’ve said it. I can live in a nice area and raise a family on what I make (plus pay for the fall-out of the last marriage, a situation so unique to myself within the Police Service, I wonder why I mentioned it). You’re not going to get better money anywhere else (outside the civil Service, I speak from experience) from a job which requires applicants only to have the basic qualifications of reading, ‘riting and ‘rthemetic. Plus, we have that most wonderful of things, job security. No matter how incompetent or lazy you are, there’s no reason why you can’t complete your 30 years provided you a) don’t steal anything, b) don’t shag anyone on duty and c) most crucially, avoid using a very small number of non-PC words within the hearing and sight of someone who will report you. Not hard to do, some might think.
Deep down, I think we all know this. What we object to is the fact that we’ve entered into a contract with successive Governments that they will respect our unique status. If they don’t want to, fine. We’ll unionise and they can bring in alternative service providers if they don’t feel that they can work with us. What very much sticks in our collective craws, I would suggest, is that we have a Government which not only ignores the agreed procedure for negotiating pay but then states that the average copper was actually grateful for this, given the possible adverse consequences on inflation. And then ignored this when it came to teachers. Compare and contrast the number of MPs from a teaching or lecturing background compared to those from a Police background.
But hey, that’s just whining on my part. Your Worships I refer to Exhibit NJ/03, NCRS and the multitude of evils that followed from it. Many officers who don’t use arrest as their first, rather than last, resort, find themselves in trouble. Not necessarily their fault. A classic example has to be domestic violence. I have attended several meetings in which the big nobs have told the troops that they are to arrest only one person in a domestic, not both. They are, laughably, to rely on their instincts and discretion (discretion in a domestic – now you are having a giraffe). Now the logic is sound. Speaking as Mr Shiny A***d Detective Man, I know that I won’t get a job to court unless we have identified a witness of truth – and we can’t really claim that if we were so convinced of Ms (as it will invariably be) Sh*tbag’s victim status, we had no choice but to arrest her. Of course I know that 50% of domestic complaints will not be pursued in the morning and that, say 10%, of abusers will actually be picked up in the morning by the victim, but of course human nature unfortunately impacts on the figures like that. At least, if you’re any good, you can squeeze an admission out at interview in the morning and we can chuck ‘em a caution.
Now unfortunately, it is also a legal maxim that “The law does not concern itself with trifles”. This is one of those incredibly common-sense maxims, like “You must come to equity with clean hands” (don’t commence cases if you’re obviously a wrong ‘un, unless you want people to tell you to bugger off) that now seems to generally ignored. My favourite has to be the four Romanian gypsies who were detained in the car park of a major supermarket chain by security (under what authority – history does not relate). They were selling gold coloured rings for a couple of quid each which a blind man wouldn’t mistake for real gold. Not that anyone actually complained they had been sold what purported to be a real gold ring. I pointed out that there was no basis for their detention, other than that they hadn’t obtained a peddlar’s licence. I was told to interview them anyway (with the additional expense of interpreters natch) on the basis that they were undoubtedly up to no good. I responded by pointing out that the last law enforcement agency which detained Gypsies solely on the basis that they were a menace to the general good was the Gestapo. They were then released (after the Inspector in question elbowed me in passing). An extreme (but true) example.
But day to day, what are we getting? Three mid teens youths in for taking some furniture from a pub garden. Not bad boys, just idiots. Rather than just telling them to put it back (which they were happy to do), they came in. The foreign lorry driver and his mate who opened the back of their load in a service station to find a million illegals spilling out (the lock had been sheered, which they could produce). The fact that they helped round the illegals up? Clearly facilitating illegal immigration. In you come. Why aren’t we catching murderers and rapists? Well, other than the fact that they don’t drive around with cars marked with “rapist on board”, there’s part of the reason.
Just to point out that Charles Clarke commisioned a report as soon as he took over home office that 16months later about the time Clarke resigned that the home office wasn’t fit for purpose something that Clarke himself said 8 months earlier and that Reid was only echoing Clarkes words, do you really think clarkes a career politician he turnrd down defence on his ousting from the home office and has turned down front bench jobs since, you are spot on about Blunkett though, regards
Big G,
I actually agree with what you say in the majority of your post.
I’m not involved in police recruiting but i am aware that it is a victim of number crunching.
Targets do exist for female, ethnic minority, Gay groups etc. I’m not against this as I do feel we should represent the communities that we serve, but this should be tempered with employing the CORRECT people for the job and not just letting someone be an officer because they tick a box.
I personally think that unsatifactory performance is not challenged within the service enough, if it was then we could return to the days of discretion with confidence. However once in the job, people think that they have a divine right to be there.
Ive enough years in the job, and the experience in various departments to advise probationary Constables on the “why’s and wherefore’s” of the job, however if the young upstart makes a complaint against me then I haven’t a leg to stand on.
My advice to a probationary Constable may be well intentioned and put forward in a perfectly reasonable way but if that person percieves it as “bullying” then “bullying” it is treated as.
As you have rightly alluded to we are becoming a litigious society- hence any officer on unsatisfactory performance regs instantly puts in a grievance against one or more persons that they work with. I have seen this on 4 occasions within my service.
I don’t hanker after the old days, I do however feel that change and progress should be made in a measured way.
Politicians often dont take the “law of unintended consequences” into account. If they did the stick of change would be used more sparingly.
Probably a stupid question, but if the complainant specificly asks for no further action on a crime, why does this come up as a lost detection?
is it just a wrong classification system or was it designed deliberately to stop a (percieved?) tendency of encouraging victims not to pursue?
Hopi,
This rears it’s head most often in the Domestic Violence area where the victim will not support a prosecution but the system demands that the crime is recorded win lose or draw. This area now has it’s own special courts and it’s own special procedures. Every domestic violence incident is subject to intense scrutiny and micromanagement by every possible agency all the way to court. We likely have world class statistics for recorded domestic violence now. However, even there we have hit a cultural problem. This is best seen in the workings of the recent legislation against forced marriage where the order is civil rather than criminal because, in part, it was felt that victims would fail to report rather than stigmatise the rest of the family by taking mum and dad to criminal court.
In the cases reported by Sunburn, if it is anything like where I work, the initial contact with the police where the store detective says the magic words “stolen sandwich” generates a skeleton crime report on the log and the unfortunate officer is then stuck with a crime enquiry. I spent an unloved year in Crime Management some years ago where I attained a black belt in the dark arts of writing off crimes and maximising detections. I would regularly be trawling custody records to ensure that every possible detected crime was squeezed out. I would send e-mails to officers chivying them to get their detections in before month end. I would trawl crime reports for every possible indication of a suspect and officers would get grief for not complying. It was not about the type of crime or the seriousness of the crime, it was purely about the detection rates.
Suffice to say that to take a crime off the recording system takes just as much investigation / evidence gathering and the like as keeping it on. I would argue that IME getting a crime declassified is actually harder.
The system was designed to ensure that everything that sounded like a crime on first report was treated like a crime and recorded as one from the earliest moment. IMO the government believed that we were failing to record crime that impacted on the socially disadvantaged and minorities and that the only way they could quick fix it was to ensure that we recorded every single bloody thing. When they built the beast, they built it very, very well.
Hopi,
I may never see eye to eye with Jacqueline Jill or her SPADS.
I’m pretty sure that the Klebb stuff won’t go down as well but it just appears to me that she has espoused some very authoritarian ideas on law enforcement and state collection of personal data. Klebb is iron curtain handy polemic. Also, she ‘peached (old word but it suits) on our pay agreement. They pay don’t much matter but the ‘peaching….. She has adopted very singular residence arrangements with the felicitous outcome that she has been able to furnish and equip her real family home on expenses meant to be available for subsidising residence away from home for those MP’s who live far from Westminster. Oh and it would also appear that she has hired herself an expense claimer of somewhat limited ability who must now wish he had not just bunged the sky bill in with the rest of the weekly expense bundle. Better was available cheaper outside her immediate family. There is something about the way she does business that brings out the abusive in me.
S’ademocracy.
I think you’re overly harsh on JS – esp regarding the pay agreement. Merits of the pay deal aside, she was given a hospital pass there, but I doubt we’re going to agree,.
Hopi, Not a bad post and your points are valid, i’d be livid if my was propositioned. The problem is with NCRS is that it was introduced as a hymn sheet with only the police service singing from it.
NCRS is ignored by CPS- when they refuse to prosecute someone for whatever lame reason and you dare to utter Lost detection the look at you as if you have 2 heads, CPS have their own targets to reach and this puts them largely at odds with the police. Home Office mandarins working in separate offices responsible for that I suspect.
NCRS has never entered the parlance of the rest of the CJS…..Why would the beak or M’lud ever ever interest themselves with our figures.
As a result officers do feel aggrieved and I think that some thing of a siege mentality spring in whenever the divisive subject of performance figures is raised.
Again Blunkett brought in NCRS for Utopia where victims never lie and the villains say “IT’S A FAIR COP GUV”, unfortunately we live in England where I struggle to separate the Victims,villains,bosses and politicians……….It seems everyone has an agenda.
All that said Hopi, IF IT WERE MY MUM I’D GO TO F***IN’ TOWN.
Much sympathy PRC
That’s an interesting thought experiment Hopi. That may indeed have been part of the problem. There were without doubts Hellholingham and Cannonrail Estate areas where the writ of law did not run too smooth. Omerta was and is the local code and everyone was and still are watching the walls whilst the gentlemen go by. They’re no better off now as a result of what DB did.
PRC makes the point on the disjointed approach and I think that the jury is now in even at the Home Office. Rigid national targets welded to an inflexible crime recording system drove activity in a direction that did little or nothing for Hellholingham and truly irritated the good burghers of Pleasant Valley. The Home Office is now making noises about not criming everything that moves. Central targets have been abandoned or shipped down a level and called Policing Pledges. Some forces, with Home Office approval are even experimenting with allowing officers discretion again. The public hate how policing has changed as evidenced by tanking public confidence figures. Things may have been going off-side for years and I have never subscribed to Dixon of Dock Greenism but after DB they got worse quicker. When we look back at the architect of these big society changing police re-organisations, no matter how saintly his motives might have been, it was DB and he got it very, very wrong.
As a light at the end of the tunnel, I do see the point behind the current idea for Neighbourhood Policing where you have a team with responsibility for a beat that are measured on visibility, where they get a chance to embed into the community rather than be “folks from somewhere nicer” passing through in a panda car. For that to happen, you need Police out on the streets and to get them there you need to keep them out of the station and away from paperwork. DB did a lot to put us back in the custody office or in the report writing rooms. I’m not sure he, or anyone else in government or at ACPO ever understood why all those extra police they paid for became instantly invisible. Ask with a big enough stick and it shall be given and he asked for arrests and paperwork. Let’s not go back to fetishising arrest rates and detection figures. They were false gods and the temples we built to them are now slowly crumbling.