Interviews

How police make ends meet

by Mark Rowe

Police are still grappling with how to make ends meet, as budgets in real terms are cut, as the Labour mayors of Manchester and London complained in a letter to the Chancellor of the Exchequer ahead of next week’s Budget. Meanwhile crimes are getting more complicated and going online, and new crimes altogether are making headlines such as ‘modern slavery’; which police forces are failing to recognise and protect victims adequately, according to a recent official report; with exceptions.

Also, counter terrorism requires funding to protect the public; hence steel and concrete barriers have been placed around the Christmas Markets in Manchester city centre for the first time this year and armed officers will patrol the area; the German market in Victoria Square in Birmingham city centre, which opened last night, similarly has more security. Each terror attack has to take up much time and effort in forensic investigation; Greater Manchester Police for example report 11,000 exhibits; and working through 16,000 hours of CCTV footage after the May 22 bomb attack on the Manchester Arena that killed 22 and injured more than 500.

In recent years Professional Security has reported on cuts to police services, in the north and south, city and rural alike, and how this affects police response to business crime, such as response times when called. Here we look at how UK police are working under what a recent official inspection described as ‘significant stress‘.

The Avon and Somerset Police like many closed many of its police stations, even in towns such as Weston super Mare, to centralise. Now Norfolk is doing something similar.

Norfolk’s Chief Constable Simon Bailey announced what he termed ‘radical plans’, ‘at a critical time when the police service is facing unparalleled growth in complex crime together with reduced policing budgets’. The county force plans to remove all 150 PCSO roles, and last month began formal staff consultation. In its most recent inspection, Norfolk got only good or outstanding marks for efficiency.

PCSOs date from the Labour Government and Home Secretary David Blunkett. Some at the time feared police community support officers as a dilution of the police officer, or ‘policing on the cheap’; yet as the Norfolk force pointed out, ‘the organisational cost of a PCSO is not significantly different to a PC’. Where the PCSOs did score was, as according to the original idea, PCSOs without the power of arrest were a different sort of bobby; getting to know local issues, and dealing with them, whether anti-social behaviour (ASB) or vandalism, without needing to make arrests. What will become of that work – the stereotypical youths hanging around a parade of district shops, fly-tipping around garages (and unused land of industrial estates, sometimes on an industrial scale), that all bother someone or some business? Norfolk answers in business-speak: the force faces an ‘overall reduction in resources and some service levels will need to change’. The talk is of managing demand and ‘higher risk will be higher priority’, as featured in the December 2017 print issue of Professional Security; local government and the Mayor of London’s policing and crime department MOPAC also speak in terms of ‘high harm’, which can boil down to whatever makes the biggest headlines and concerns councillors the most gets attended to first, or at all by police, and by implication whatever is less newsworthy and obvious – such as ASB – is swept under the carpet. Or, businesses are left to look after themselves.

Gone is the talk from the 2000s and Labour Governments of meeting targets. Those targets as in other public services such as hospitals might have led to warped working because only quantifiable things can have a target number put on them, not qualitative things like freedom of fear from crime. Hence Norfolk says soothing things like ‘engagement with our communities is still important but the way we do this will be different’.

As for buildings – something very quantifiable – like other forces Norfolk proposes to share some premises with Norfolk Fire and Rescue Service, shut some stations to the public but keep them for operations; and shut most of the Public Enquiry Offices (PEOs) altogether; and build two new ‘investigation centres’, thereby ‘centralising detective resources’. Norfolk’s new model is anticipated to go live in April 2018.

For the ‘Norfolk 2020’ brief visit the Norfolk Police website.

Another force with a mixed rural and urban beat, Hertfordshire, faces similarly a mix of new and old crime, including some frankly bizarre such as ‘Irish bowls‘ in a winding country lane; and anti-social riding of off-road vehicles. At a recent ‘barn meet’ in the county, Chief Supt Matt Nicholls spoke of ‘using drones to proactively patrol and deter criminals’.

As in Norfolk and elsewhere, one of the ways police try to make resources go further is joint working, in Hertfordshire’s case with Hertsmere Borough Council, the Environment Agency, the UK Border Agency, Trading Standards and HR Revenue and Customs, or in the policing jargon a ‘multi-agency problem-solving approach’. But the idea of ‘problem-solving’ also throws up the dilemma that the authorities can only hope to solve what they hear about, and if fewer human patrollers are on the ground – the fewer police are as in any other occupation simply driving from job to job, rather than building up relationships that can, given time, tease out items of intelligence – police don’t actually get to hear of problems. Drones flying over farms and villages that never see a police car are all very well but their human operators need to know where and when to fly as a priority. A recent Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary report found that some control rooms appeared to be struggling to meet demand, particularly in relation to 101 non-emergency calls.

While police are adding tools to their kit, including a new version of the Taser weapon, and hand-held devices for recording data to keep them on the beat longer, criminals are also using the same tools as the law-abiding, such as mopeds and bulldozers for ramming shops to steal cashpoint machines.

Such crimes are what you could call old-fashioned, physical acts. As for cyber-crime, criminals continue to come up with scams, not least by pretending to make official demands. A recent HMIC PEEL efficiency report found that most police forces still focus on current skills, rather than on the skills they are likely to need. And to quote the HMIC report on modern slavery, while ‘relatively small pockets of good practice’ are around, they are not ‘concerted and concentrated’. Or put another way; ‘weeks of action’, as by police in the Cheetham Hill area of Greater Manchester against counterfeit clothing as part of organised crime, are all very well, and make for good headlines, but surely it is better to make such operations business as usual?

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