‘Once the crime is in no-one seems to care’
In the final part of her analysis of the problems with Greater Manchester Police, Investigations Editor JENNIFER WILLIAMS is told there is too much to do and not enough officers
THERE is also a lingering sense among many police officers that simply by virtue of the force being open all hours – a little like the role A&E plays for the health service – it has borne the brunt of other agencies not doing what they used to.
“When the cuts happened, the agencies withdrew into themselves,” agrees one retired officer.
“The police are one of the few 24-hour services, after the cuts, so not only are you bearing the brunt of your own cuts, you’re dealing with everyone else’s.”
A serving constable says partnership working is great in principle, but has not always worked practically from a policing perspective in the years following austerity.
“This stuff works well 9am-4pm,” he says. “But outside those hours it falls on its a***, as the other services don’t have capacity to do shift work or a rota service.”
Out of hours, often the only agency left to pick up demand is the police. Ten or 15 years ago, if there was a noise issue on a Saturday night, someone in the town hall might have been available to deal with it. These days, not so much.
One such incident relayed to the M.E.N. by several sources a couple of weeks ago saw residents in Stockport tearing their hair out about a massive 48-hour house party that was shaking the street.
GMP told them to call the council. But the council was closed. So – at a time when the control room was failing to cope with demand – they rang 999. Nevertheless, the retired senior officer says none of that is an excuse for failing to communicate with the community.
Regular local meetings, be they public forums or conversations with councillors, are worth the time and resource, he believes. Rather than retreating into themselves, the cops are better off explaining what they can and can’t do.
People will understand they’re stretched, but they need that acknowledgement and an explanation in the first place.
“It takes a lot of heat out of the complaints in the community – and the councillors know exactly what position you’re in. I think that’s what’s been missing. I don’t think there’s been a dialogue with the community.”
Even the most empathetic cops may struggle to show compassion if they feel they are drowning, however.
GMP has for years faced a level of demand it simply did not understand clearly enough; it knew 101 and 999 calls were high and rising, but had notoriously poor data – made worse by failures within the new computer system – and didn’t properly analyse the information it did have.
In March PwC found that GMP’s front door, the Operational Communications Branch that houses the control room, needed to learn how to manage that demand ‘like many other forces have,’ ‘before embarking on further long term change.’ (OCB
was still struggling in July of this year, when average waits for 101 were 30 minutes in the third week of the month, against a target of 30 seconds; average 999 waits were two minutes and the longest a disconcerting 15 minutes.)
In the face of high demand, historically the force had effectively been finding shortcuts to stem an amorphous deluge of crime, rather than understanding what it was. Many crimes were deprioritised, downgraded or closed in order to hold back the tide, all of them with potential victims attached.
In the process victims were not getting the service they needed, but officers themselves, partly due to cuts, an exodus of experience, the new ‘omnicompetency’ model and eventually the troubled IT system introduced in 2019, still felt they couldn’t cope. Everyone lost.
Police officers have told the M.E.N. of being given targets for closing crimes, a blunt instrument to drive down backlogs. One email shows officers on overtime being told in the summer of 2018 to ‘clear as close to 100 crimes per day... or more as possible’ and being ticked off for having not hit that target. “Whilst I don’t want quality compromising completely, it is really important that you get through as many as possible as efficiently as you can so we can reduce the open crime queue,” they were told by a supervisor, who has since been promoted.
Many, many police officers know that isn’t a good approach. One retired senior officer explains the attitude is known as ‘cuffing.’
Cuffing is simply saying something isn’t worth investigating, even if it is – which began to happen ‘over and over again’ in GMP. “The trouble is, that becomes the culture and they can’t see the wood for the trees,” he says.
When the inspectorate finally found in 2020 that GMP had missed 80,000 crimes in the previous year – that it was both under-recording and under-investigating – the response was to swing the other way. Crime recording and increasing arrests are now top of the priority list.
“Our practice around recording has very much smartened itself up,” said new Chief Constable Stephen Watson a couple of months after taking post. “We obviously need to sustain that, but of course, the point of the exercise wasn’t to record crimes but to investigate them. If there is a viable line of inquiry, then it should be pursued.” GMP is certainly recording far, far more crime than previously. It currently has just shy of 80,000 open crimes, according to officers, three times times its previous levels. Nevertheless some of the structural changes needed to ensure the correct outcomes – the reorganisation of officers, the return to specialisms, the hiring and training of control room staff to correctly triage and risk assess crimes, the drive to improve cultural standards, a resolution to the broken computer system – will take longer. As a result, officers
were telling the M.E.N. over the summer, the crime recording drive was simply creating a bottleneck; piles of crimes.
“I’d say the biggest thing is that we’re unable to identify risk,” one officer said in July of the implications. “We have so many open crimes, crimes waiting allocation, open domestic violence incidents, ongoing problem solving, intel, but no way of pulling it all together to see where our greatest threats are, both emerging crime and actual victims. Once the crime is in, no one
seems to care; victims of sexual assault are getting no contact for 20 days.”
GMP is particularly short of trained detectives. One supervisor tells of being nagged by CID to allow the brightest and best of their newly recruited uniformed officers to transfer over, even when they have less than 18 months’ experience.
“You used to have to have done three or four years before the detectives would speak to you,” they add. “CID is full of youngsters only a few years in. They’re crying out for staff.”