After the flak she got at the Police Federation’s conference, there may be few places where Home Secretary Theresa May feels safe. Cuts to police officer numbers mean the Conservatives are in danger of being portrayed as soft on crime.
There is a real concern about a diminishing police presence in many communities. But another aspect of the Tory-led coalition’s policing policy has the potential to cause far greater damage than the outraged headlines of right-wing newspapers. Policing minister Nick Herbert has promised a “fundamental redesign of the police force ”.
There are three key strands underpinning the various initiatives and reforms that are proposed. First, there is a belief in participative policing – giving local citizens and organisations an involvement in policing their communities. Second, there is a desire that neighbourhood police officers should make the public’s problems their priorities.
Finally, there is a move to a transparent service, with crime statistics and information made freely available.
Police officers agree with much of this. Many think the Government is right to ask specific questions about the purpose of the police. Clearly, a less interventionist force is envisaged and this would be welcomed by those officers who think they are sidetracked from fighting serious crime by having to deal with matters such as fly-tipping or stray dogs.
There is a case, as one leading criminologist has put it, for “not doing more with less, but less with more”. By pulling the police back from certain problems, some blue-sky thinkers at the heart of government hope that upright citizens will step in and fill the vacuum. If this sounds familiar, it may be because it is already the norm in many places. In Manchester, accepting that they cannot be everywhere all the time, neighbourhood police officers rely on an array of volunteers and networks to provide intelligence.
Resident-driven Homewatch schemes are springing up, beat meetings are important forums and shopkeepers are encouraged to work together to tackle anti-social behaviour. In essence, says one police inspector, it is about managing expectations. But she admits that these schemes only work if there is confidence that the police will always be there to step in if necessary.
In some ways, Conservative thinkers want to return to the principles of the first force set up by Sir Robert Peel. Yet there is one element in the Home Office’s reforms that Peel would not have accepted. This is the desire to address the “democratic deficit” in policing through the introduction of elected police commissioners, and crime and police panels, composed of members of the public and the local authority.
Under the Police Reform Bill, commissioners would have the power to allocate staff and resources, and produce crime and police plans which would be binding for the officers under their command. There is a real fear among the police that, without proper safeguards, the impartiality of officers deploying resources will be thrown into doubt.
In a review of the coalition’s bill, the Association of Chief Police Officers said that such a system would be anathema to the whole tradition of policing in Britain. Robert Peel was emphatic that a police officer should always put impartial service to the law above catering to public opinion. It is possible that elected commissioners may never come into being. The Government suffered an embarrassing defeat when the House of Lords voted in an amendment that commissioners should be appointed rather than elected. The Liberal Democrat Baroness Harris, who proposed the amendment, expressed fears that handing so much power to individuals would cause “irreparable damage to the police”.
Moves to make the police more democratic and accountable encompass more than the introduction of elected commissioners. As part of a broader initiative to base policy on “soft” statistics such as the mooted “happiness index”, rather than “hard” figures such as gross domestic product, the Conservatives plan to change how we judge police performance, measuring the impact of crime rather than how much of it there is.
There are dangers with basing policy on public perceptions. Ask any community what its priorities are and they are likely to include youth disorder, graffiti and litter – all of which are very hard to tackle. Asking the police to allocate more of their increasingly stretched resources to these areas is hardly compatible with doing “less with more”. Research carried out by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of the Constabulary, the police’s independent assessor, and Cardiff University, suggests that making the police directly accountable to the public might cause further problems. A test study measuring public perceptions in Cardiff found that the fear of crime remains just as high in areas with low levels of crime as it does in those places with high levels. At which area would a commissioner target resources? No one has thought about the need to reassure those who don’t actually suffer from crime.
The report also warned that more serious crimes such as race hate or intimidation, which affect a relatively small number of people, could be subsumed by more trivial concerns that affect the majority. Opponents argue that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with current outcomes.
Over the past 10 years, perceived and actual levels of crime have fallen, while neighbourhood police officers are broadly trusted by the public. The coalition has taken insufficient account of tensions that would arise from making neighbourhood policing directly accountable.
Faced with deep cuts, the police will have to allocate resources more carefully and sparingly.
Although attractive in theory, non-essential elections risk undermining impartiality and causing permanent damage to the police’s reputation.
