Pay detectives bounties for crimes solved, police urged

DETECTIVES should be paid “bounties” to help boost crime-solving rates, the head of the police watchdog said.

Andy Cooke, HM chief inspector of police and former Merseyside chief constable, said forces should consider offering such rewards to detectives to combat a national shortfall of up to 5,000 investigators.

The number of detectives in major crime units has dropped by 28 per cent in the past decade at the same time as the proportion of crimes solved has more than halved from 14 per cent to 6 per cent.

In an interview with Policing TV, Mr Cooke, a detective for more than 35 years, warned it could take years to change attitudes to the job and train enough recruits, even with the 20,000-officer uplift.

Long and often antisocial hours have been blamed for reducing the attraction of the job. “If you’re trying to attract people into being a detective, should it carry a bounty as part of that? Should there be a bounty on the achievement of passing the various detective exams?” said Mr Cooke.

“It’s an issue that police need to consider because changing the whole mindset of people in a short period of time to allow us to have sufficient detectives across the country isn’t going to happen quickly. So there needs to be some different thinking by far more intelligent people than me.”

Mr Cooke has said the best detection rates come where police forces have set up specific teams to combat crimes such as burglary. It means every victim gets a visit to ensure a crime scene is scoured for forensic and other clues.

As head of Merseyside’s Matrix unit in 2005-06, he pioneered a proactive model where the team identified gang members, uniformed officers disrupted their business through stop and search, and evidence from “reactive” call-outs to all crimes was sifted for links to them.