How does the beat go on?
Senior ex-cop probes future of the police
TIMES have never been tougher for law and order.
As reports of moped muggings and stabbings on our streets dominate headlines – figures show that since 2015 the rate of violent crime has almost doubled – police numbers are at their lowest level since 1985 thanks to Tory austerity measures. We have lost 20,000 police officers since 2010.
Meanwhile, figures show local police stations have also copped it, with 800 closing since the Tories came to power, vastly reducing police visibility in communities.
Here, ex-senior investigating Metropolitan Police officer Colin Sutton talks through the current situation facing police, and the pros and cons of modern policing.
What are the principal problems facing British policing?
We are facing the perfect storm. Because of cuts to resources we have lost 20,000 officers, but at the same time the demands on police have risen. We have new crimes like cybercrime, but that doesn’t mean old-fashioned ones like burglary have gone. They still need resources.
And because you have dragged away police on patrol there is more opportunity than ever for those traditional crimes to take place.
Have austerity cuts to other services also added to this?
When you factor in the NHS, social services and mental health services have had to cut back, police have to step into acute situations that would be better dealt with by others.
Response officers who should be there for emergencies are ending up in hospitals and dealing with mental health patients, and so on.
Sometimes they can spend their entire shift in a hospital. They have become society’s sticking plaster for the gaps in other agencies.
What effect does closing local police stations have?
The public is increasingly using the internet and social media to contact police – they are not necessarily walking into their police station. That’s true. But the police isn’t like Amazon – click and you’ll get it. You can’t get them if they’re miles away, stuck in traffic, because they are based in an industrial unit on the edge of town – because that’s cheaper to rent.
There is a geographical issue created here – literally time being wasted getting from A to B.
If you push your police resources into fewer bases that are further apart, those officers spend a lot of their patrol time driving from the base to the patrol areas. Perpetrators realise there is a window for them to commit crimes.
Are there other factors to consider as we lose community policing?
As stations go, bobbies on the beat and PCSOs are being lost too. Community policing is virtually dead – all the front-line policing is channelled into response policing.
Everyone rightly makes the point about lack of public contact, and reassurance, making a community feel safe by pure presence – that’s very true, it is being lost.
But the other important issue is the gathering of intelligence that is now not being done.
Community policing leads to better intelligence. And that has an impact on issues like terrorism.
How do police know the concerns within a community, or gain trust to gather tip-offs, if they don’t know their community?
Is less investigatory policing being done overall?
This is a real problem. We have fewer detectives now. This is because roles have been cut but also because investigatory roles are just not attractive enough in terms of hours and workload. Detectives find themselves overworked with bigger case loads, and those in the roles are often not people working at a high enough standard. We are seeing rape cases, for example, falling down because they have not been investigated as well as they should be. And we are seeing not only crimes unsolved, but simply going uninvestigated. The public will get a crime number and that’s it.
Does a computer deciding whether a burglary should be investigated make this worse?
I don’t think so. The trial being done by Norfolk Police, which sees a computer using sophisticated algorithms to determine whether there is any point attending a break in, doesn’t worry me.
Officers input various details, such as whether there are clues including fingerprints or CCTV.
It is simply doing what a human used to do – going through a checklist of questions to work out whether the crime meets a criteria.
There is a positive to this efficiency. The purpose has always been to prioritise resources so you don’t waste them on crimes that have little likelihood of being solved.
The real problem is the threshold of criteria is much higher because of the cuts to resources – that is
the issue, not the technology.
What are the positives we are seeing in modern policing today?
Social media is a definite positive. The use of this by police is growing and the public really engage with it. In terms of public appeals, missing persons, property recovery, the police can harness public help. And we are seeing police using it to reassure the public. When there were false rumours of a terror attack on Oxford Street, the police used Twitter very effectively.