The final report of the strategic review of policing in England and Wales is a fine and yet strange document. It sets out as fully and as authoritatively as you could wish, the crime problems that society faces, and how policing could be reformed to be fit to face the 21st century. Yet the review’s most practical proposal is sinister, writes Mark Rowe.
As the report opens, the stakes could not be higher: the country faces ‘a crisis of public confidence in our police institutions’. About 100,000 words later, the authors return to their starting point in the brief conclusion, having argued for ‘radical reform’ of policing. They quote again Sir Robert Peel and the founding of the modern police in the late 1820s: “The old system of the voluntary parish constable and the raising of hue and cry that went back to the Statute of Winchester of 1285 was simply untenable as a basis for public order during the raging tumult of the industrial revolution. Peel concluded that what was required was a ”new mode of protection”.’
From that comes the title of the review, ‘A new mode of protection: re-designing policing and public safety for the 21st century’. The document sets out three challenges; not only a ‘capacity challenge’, the forces of law and order simply not able (as when Peel was Home Secretary) to cope with demand; but a ‘capability challenge’ (besides the police lacking resources to tackle these challenges, also the police service ‘lacks many of the capabilities required to do so’) and organisational (the 43 forces are an arbitrary number).
As the report takes such a historical perspective, here is another; the report is like ones written in Spain in the 1600s by reformers (‘reformadores’). These public-spirited men wrote earnestly and at length about how Spain despite its global empire was declining, and what the country could and should do about it. The dilemma for them and any reformers in any time and place: those that see the need for reform are not in power to carry it out. As for those with the power to carry out reform, it’s not only that vested interests don’t want reforms in case it means change for the worse. The skills that you need to rise to the top of the tree in policing or politics – to become a chief constable or prime minister – are not necessarily the same skills required to do well in those posts, let alone make reforms to the tree that you spent your career climbing.
Another metaphor can be the football club at the bottom of its league, towards the end of a season. It needs to do much better to avoid relegation – to score goals, to win points. Yet that would mean it changing something drastically, that it has shown no sign of doing so far in the season – that’s why it’s bottom.
I recently was in conversation with a retired formerly quite responsible policeman who now has a quite responsible job in private security. He volunteered the opinion that the police will have to turn to the private sector if it wants to deal with cyber crime. Because you would be wrong to assume as I did that police have trailed in how they take on cyber crime – like a man who is short of a bus stop, sees a bus there leaving, and runs after it. In other words, police may be behind as cyber crime balloons, but there is a general curve of more resources towards it. Not so; the Met Police once had a cyber crime unit of about 60 persons; not much compared with the volume of crime, but considerable in the UK. In the austerity of the early to mid-2010s, that (the retired Met man said) was cut by 40 per cent.
My reply was, and is; is the private sector tackling cyber crime any better?!
None of this is to blame police officers or anyone – indeed, their goodwill and sense of service can be, arguably, part of the problem. Consider what the report has to say about missing persons calls, ‘a regular occurrence’. It is worth treating at length:
‘Almost half of all young people in care go missing at least once and for some it is much more common. Of course, it is important to track down missing persons but it is striking that the police spend three million investigation hours per year on these cases. That is the equivalent of 1,562 full time officers, all day, every day; incredibly that is more police officer time than we allocate to police the whole of North Yorkshire.’
The ‘of course’ is noteworthy; the report has however planted in our heads the question of whether the police (or anyone) should seek to trace missing persons (often vulnerable and young – that is, the very people most in need of protection, and high on the political agenda of VAWG, violence against women and girls, and safeguarding).
The report goes on:
‘The police picking up these cases often go far beyond the call of duty. For example, two officers told me that they returned a missing young man to his care home whereupon the home then asked them whether they could drop him off at his parents’ place which was more than 100 miles away; they said the home didn’t have the transport available. The police officers took the boy because they wanted to do the right thing by him; but is this really what people pay the police precept for?’
Again, strange that the report authors appear to query police going to such trouble about missing people. As the report does set out, and Sir Michael Barber says in his foreword he witnessed, ‘police increasingly find themselves acting as a public service of last resort, picking up the pieces where other social services have failed’.
Consider that while the National Health Service has on its books people unwell in ways that would have bewildered the founders of the welfare state – such as obesity – our bodies do not have any new bones, or organs to treat. Police have the online world of theft and fraud and hate to police. As the report rather briefly acknowledges, traditional forms of crime (burglary, car theft, low level assaults) have fallen. It is incorrect however to suggest that the police have the physical world of crime under control, but not cyber. There is no more physical-world crime than rape, and recently the police inspectorate reported that the criminal justice system (CJS) is failing victims of rape.
The report has only two mentions of retail, and has thus nothing to say about all the verbal and physical abuse of shop workers and lack of or inconsistent police response. Also striking is how little the report has to say about crime against business, compared with the case the review makes for ‘increased regulation, which may be required to ensure that businesses take steps to prevent crime or other harms’.
For here comes the sinister part: a proposed Crime Prevention Agency, ‘a flagship agency that owns the problem and is responsible for coordinating activity to ensure that strategic aims are delivered’; like the Health and Safety Executive (how well has it been doing, in a land of Grenfell?) and the Civil Aviation Authority. That Agency would not be a policing institution; because ‘all sectors of society should play their part in crime prevention’ and ‘crime control should not be seen as a ‘police problem’’. The CPA would ‘have an enforcement function in relation to a duty to prevent crime, with power to enforce’.
The report gives examples – the 2010 Bribery Act ‘which introduced a duty on commercial organisations to prevent bribery. Companies have a defence under the Act if they have adequate policies and processes to prevent bribery’; and the proposed ‘duty of care’ for social media companies under the Online Harms Bill that’s going through Parliament.
I would add other examples: under data protection law, if you don’t report a data breach or hack to the watchdog the ICO, you could be guilty of an offence, and fined, besides for data security failures that allowed the hacker to breach – meanwhile the hacker, if in Nigeria, let alone Russia, is untouched by the authorities and even untouchable. If you suspect someone is planning an act of terror, even your mother, it’s an offence if you don’t report them to the authorities (just like in Stalin’s Russia). Under Project Genesius, if you sell copying equipment – that can copy plastic cards for ID, for example – you better report to the police if you suspect you’ve made a sale to criminals who’ll use the copier to print fake IDs.
In all these cases, besides or instead of the state seeking to bring to justice the actual criminals, the state is looking to criminalise and punish businesses for harms others have caused (or may go on to cause). This is not reform, but re-engineering of what a crime is in society.
