Interviews

Crime prevention backed

by Mark Rowe

In his annual assessment of policing in England and Wales for 2019, HM Chief Inspector of Constabulary Sir Thomas Winsor has come out strongly for crime prevention.

The best victim of crime is someone who isn’t, he said. “Prevention is the first objective of policing. It saves lives from being shattered or lost. These are the lives of victims and their families, and they are the lives of offenders who could have been diverted from crime, and their families too.

“Effective prevention also saves colossal amounts of the time, energy and financial costs of the police and the many other public services concerned with the causes and effects of crime. It reduces demands on the criminal justice system, health, social services and education. And it enhances public confidence, the confidence of people that they are safe from those who would do harm.”

On the pandemic, Sir Tom said that COVID-19 has tested police forces in dealing with the lockdown, ‘the greatest curtailment of individual freedom this country has ever known’. “To its great credit, the service has responded well. The initial and rare inconsistencies and mistakes over how the lockdown measures were applied were soon eclipsed by the commendable sensitivity and proportionality of officers towards their fellow citizens, through explanation and encouragement well before enforcement.

“Very regrettably, as lockdown conditions have been relaxed, the police now face a harder task. In some cases, they have been faced with resistance and violence. They have also faced violence when policing public demonstrations. Nothing justifies violence. Police officers are our fellow citizens, doing the tough work we ask them to do, in hazardous and demanding conditions, to keep us safe. Hard enforcement against those who assault police officers and other public service workers should be firm and fast.”

As for the 43 forces in England and Wales, he urged ‘an effective and efficient single system of law enforcement, with clear local, regional and national components’, and ‘a much higher degree of single-system operation in the 43-force structure’. He calls generally for the overcoming of ‘parochialism’.

He welcomed the Government’s proposed 20,000 extra police; to return numbers to 2009 levels by March 2023. As at March 2019, there were 20,564 fewer police officers and 15,185 fewer police staff than in 2010; or terms of the total police workforce, 17 per cent below 2010, according to the report. On the ‘uplift’, Sir Tom appeals for ‘a debate about the disadvantages of viewing police effectiveness solely by the number of officers in the service, or by percentage changes in the volume of recorded or detected crime’, and the risk of targets leading to (as in the past) ‘perverse outcomes’. Over three years, due to officers leaving and retiring, forces will need to recruit and train a total of 54,000 people; which brings the risk of inexperienced bobbies.

As with other public services, the report recalls that personal protective equipment (PPE) was not available to all officers who needed it, particularly during the early stages of the emergency: ‘officers had to work without it, often placing themselves in harm’s way’. Nor was advice on its use ‘reliable and consistent’.

The report notes doubts about the ‘viability’ of the criminal justice system due to a backlog of cases and delays; ‘the criminal justice system – already struggling in many respects – will face displaced demands that it will find hard to meet …. just one aspect of a much bigger problem’.

Aside from, and dating even from before the pandemic, the report speaks of increases in people in custody with drug addictions, and the mentally ill and otherwise vulnerable; and more missing person cases; and serious and organised crime and terrorism are ‘major threats’. On cyber crime, Sir Tom says that under-reporting and not knowing the scale of such ‘cyber-dependent crime’ are ‘a significant problem’. The 43 forces don’t provide ‘an effective response’, he says.

For the full 202-page report visit the HMIC website. It includes inspections carried out between May 2019 and March 2020; during the pandemic the HMIC has stopped its inspections.

Comment

For the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, APCC Chair, Katy Bourne OBE, PCC for Sussex described prevention as a key objective of policing; and PCCs are making a real difference in this area, she said. “We are working successfully with partners across not just policing but fire and rescue services, health, social care, local authorities and charities to drive tangible results. By investing resources in prevention, including through Violence Reduction Units, we know we can keep our communities safe, improve resilience and successfully tackle the drivers that lead to crime.”

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