Since the Police Act of 1964, policing in the UK has become increasingly centralised, increasingly expensive and increasingly inefficient and unresponsive. Decades of semi-detachment from normal society have convinced most serving policemen that they are crown servants in the same way as the armed forces, responsible only to the sovereign, and with a duty to exercise law and justice on a deviant populace. Forces have been amalgamated, chief police officers have formed their own quasi-legal bodies with exceptional and unaccountable powers and we are drifting towards an armed gendarmerie under the command of a Minister of Justice on the continental model rather than local bodies of unarmed Peelian law-keepers on the British model.
Look back to the days before the ruinous Police Act. The UK had 158 seperate police forces, under the control of local Watch Committees, 97 with fewer than 350 officers. The struggle between the Home Secretary and local communities for control of the police has been a long one - and the Home Secretary won big in 1964. Forces and Watch Committees were abolished and the Home Secretary took command, including responsibility for appointing the most senior officers.
And now, in the second decade of the 21st century, we have a police service not fit for purpose. Non-indictable crime is virtually ignored, gang culture has taken over our major cities and is leaving hundreds of young people exsanguinating into the gutters, computer crime and fraud is beyond their capacity and absurdities such as Cressida Dick's 'Hurty Words' internet squad just bring opprobrium on the entire police force.
It has all gone seriously wrong. And just like the dysfunctional EU, the answer from the police is always more of the same - greater professionalism, graduate only recruitment, salaries on a par with solicitors, greater centralisation, more power for police chiefs, more funding, more bling, more expensive gadgets, faster cars. None of which will result in one single fewer burglary, car theft, public order offence or gang stabbing.
The Telegraph reports on the most recent HM Inspector's report, and it makes ugly reading. The public have largely given up on Plod. We need to do something.
The first questions we need to ask are about what the 1964 Police Act and everything that followed got wrong. I once spent several weeks with a Met Police statistics and mapping team when we were looking at options to design-out opportunities for crime and it was a salutory experience. If you talk to a copper, they will have you believe that their entire time is spent dealing with dead bodies or facing down shotguns. This is simply risible fiction. Over 95% of police responses - yes, over 95% - are spent responding to non-indictable offences or CADs - call-outs to disturbances. It is, frankly, more the work of well-trained and inexpensive security guards under local control than the job of highly skilled, very expensive graduate police 'professionals'.
However, it's the 5% of police work that does need skilled policing that counts. The rapes, the murders, terrorism, serious and organised crime, mafia and mobs, armed response units and such like. Here there is a case for pooled resources, central control and such things.
And this is the first question I would ask. Do we need not one but two police services - one local, Peelian and responsive and another on the continental Ministry of Justice model?
14 comments:
I recall that Labour’s ambition for its last reforms was “ a continental style Ministry of Justice”. Yet Cameron did not seek to overturn the change. It was also underpinned by changes to the judiciary, including the “Supreme Court” which went into politics, guessing what was in the mind of ministers when it ruled against the prorogation of Parliament. The system of judicial appointments was also rigged to make it very unlikely that judges of traditional views might overturn the Blair revolution - for that was what it was. Cameron, of course, aspired to be “ the heir to Blair”. Michael Howard remarked more recently that the appointments system for judges was “ the perpetuation of a self appointing oligarchy” - or words to that effect.
The rot really set in when they took to police cars. When we complained we wanted to see Bobbies on The Beat we were told it was more efficient to have them in cars. They never told us what metric they were using.
They became distant and trust of the community was broken down. Vital HunInt wasn’t collected, not that senior offices cared, they had their big shiny HQs to play with and what did we plebs know about policing.
Tim Newman has pointed out numerous cases where not only did local people not step in to support police who were under attack, they stood back and laughed.
We no longer have a police force that polices by consent because they are part of the community, we have one which is just another arm of the State which is there to protect the Establishment.
"Professionalising" the police was all part of the Establishment's determination to foist a multi-cultural society on us. Does anyone seriously think that the Pakistani grooming/rape gangs would have been given carte blanche to carry out their activities for decades by a local police force?
What did we get from the CONs? Police and Crime Commissioners: more bureaucracy and more jobs for the "liberal" political/aspiring political class.
Asking what policing "we need" is pointless, Raedwald. We won't get it from the Establishment Parties.
I reckon this is something that can be maintained if desired, regardless of the technology involved.
In the USA, when the car became a practical tool for the police, they used it as an aid, NOT as a replacement.
So if you previously had 10 policemen on the beat, now that they had cars they covered ten times as much ground. In the UK they took nine of them away and instead put them onto lefty crime, thus at a stroke creating nine new policemen... hurray!.
Every single problem that we have in this country can be attributed to an overgrown civil service. It took over as WW2 began and it has never relinquished control. It is part of the reason why I don't think that Boris will get us out of the EU in anything but name, he doesn't have the strength of purpose.
It doesn't help when, instead of implementing existing laws, they create new laws to tackle 'crime'. Take drunk and disorderly. When have you ever heard of a barman being arrested for serving a drunk?
Yet we see granny arrested for throwing crumbs to pigeons.
We need simplification of Policing, not constant expansion and dilution.
Mercifully, I've lived a life relatively free of involvement with the police, so I'm not qualified to comment. But as for Radders' two speed idea I can offer the ambulance service here in Portugal as proof that it works.
Portugal has two, one that is local where the vehicles even have their town of origin displayed on the back, and is run and managed by the local Fire Service with volunteers. If you dial 112 for any reason, or are elderly and need transport to hospital, this is what you get; and you get it fast. The operatives know every square inch (sorry centimetre) of their territory so there is no getting lost. As with the fire service, there is an informal way of sharing resources locally if one area is stretched. The system is efficient, works well and is cheap to run.
The second service is a national one that only doctors or the police and fire service can call out. These guys are specialists, dealing with emergencies such as serious traffic accidents, heart attacks and so on.
It wouldn't take a great leap in imagination to design something similar in the UK for both the police and the ambulance service.
From Dixon to Dick
Raedwald: "We need to something "
Spoken like a true expat.
Glad you don't find any fault with my case, APL
Bloke in North Dorset...
Your post reminded me of a incident in Dorset circa 1965 which points up the difference between then and now.
I was attending a conference about calf rearing with two visitors from a Dutch firm whose technology we were using to start fattening calves for veal. The conference included local farmers and others who were residents in the hotel because they had come a distance.
There was a bit of a problem in the after-proceedings because of the licensing laws then. Residents could order drinks after hours ( 10.30 pm, I think) but the hotel was not allowed to serve alcohol to non residents after that time. I explained this rather odd arrangement to our Dutch visitors . The conference organiser was most insistent because because one of the attendees was a local farmer, a retired colonel, who was also Assistant Chief Constable in charge of Special Constabulary. At this point, the Dutchmen became even more incredulous. Surely with an officer of that seniority present, the police would not be checking up on us!
I have on two occasions one recently a neighbor who was a very high ranking police officer, on both occasions when in conversation one thing became obvious, that applying for another job with better pension provision was paramount, very little was ever said about'the' job but plenty was said about contracts, the input from the public of course, to the latest pension was the equivalent annually of the average median pay in this country.
As Auberon Waugh put it so succinctly many years ago "the obscenity of police pensions".
Broadly the same thing happened to the Nursing service. Auxiliaries went the way of SEN's and SRN's - which catered for different levels of academic ability but with the same commitment to healing the sick. If it's not broke why fix it? Old People's Homes, ditto. If you want something fucked-up ask a politician to look into 'improving' something and they're guaranteed to change it into something less workable and more expensive.
Steve
Common sense and initiative seems to have been eliminated from public service roles (and corporate jobs) mainly I suspect by over regulation, statistics and target driven agenda, which is open to manipulation, distortion and corruption.
M.
Bit tricky to carp about law and order when your pals did so much to undermine its very fabric.
Daily Heil …. enemies of the People …
Austerity-led reduction in size of police force ...
A fish rots from the head down.
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