Meet the cop whose force is solving the most crime – by putting bobbies on the beat!
WITH his pugnacious appearance and direct manner, Durham’s chief constable, Mike Barton, hardly seems the sentimental type. Yet remembering birthdays is particularly important to him. A few days ago, he posted a fresh batch of greeting cards, embossed with balloons and signed with a personal message. The recipients were not his friends or family members, however. They were hardened criminals who operate on his patch.
It is one of many little ploys he uses to remind serial house-breakers, habitual car thieves and their ilk that he’s keeping a hawk-like watch on them.
Or, as this assertive 61-year-old former detective puts it, in his broad Lancashire brogue: ‘To let them know that I’ve got my boot on their throat.’
Before anyone suggests these cards are a waste of the force’s money, Mr Barton hastens to add that he sends photocopies rather than buying new ones.
For inventiveness and fiscal efficiency have become hallmarks of Durham Constabulary, a provincial force whose remarkable success story belies the mantra from police unions and Left-leaning politicians that budgetary cuts must inevitably lead to a lower standard of service.
Since 2010, when the Cameron government slashed funding, the number of officers policing this sprawling region, which has a population of almost 600,000 and includes the university city of Durham, large towns such as Darlington and many depressed former mining villages, has been drastically reduced, from 1,507 to 1,132: a loss of almost 25 per cent.
During the same period, its budget has fallen from £129 million to £113 million.
According to a National Audit Office report on the impact of austerity on the 43 police forces in England and Wales, by 2015 only one other force — neighbouring Cleveland — had been hit harder by the cuts than Durham.
For the third straight year, however, the force has been rated as ‘outstanding’ by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services, which singled out its efforts in preventing anti-social behaviour, protecting vulnerable people, and fighting serious and organised crime.
No other police service achieved this highest ranking — and this week Durham won yet another accolade. At a time when the nation’s policing is in crisis, amid an epidemic of street stabbings and robberies by moped gangs in ‘Wild West England’, it has the best record for solving crime. AT 18 per cent, the proportion of cases it resolves might seem small, but Durham’s success rate is more than three times better than that of similar forces, according to a detailed breakdown of the 4.7 million crimes committed in England and Wales in 2017.
Mike Barton says he’s proud of detection rates but not complacent. ‘Eighteen per cent might be better than other forces, but it is still pretty c**p,’ he says frankly, though in the past, when statistics were reported differently, he reckons it would have translated to about 40 per cent.
How did Durham manage it? Surprise, surprise, Barton says that traditional bobbies on the beat play a crucial role in solving crime.
‘We have had the same cuts as everybody else, but we didn’t cut our police community support officers. We recognise the importance of boots on the ground in Durham and officers who know their neighbourhoods inside out.’
He puts special pressure on senior officers to catch burglars and car thieves because — as witness evidence is rare and they are difficult to solve — he sees these crimes as a litmus test of the force’s investigational efficiency.
Experience has also taught him burglars keep offending until they are caught, causing enormous public distress. Durham solves about 25 per cent of burglaries and 20 per cent of car crimes, he says.
He believes some forces fall into the trap of making these crimes the sole responsibility of detectives — ‘a job for the Sweeney’. In Durham, everyone is encouraged to play their part.
Durham’s figures look even better when you consider that a new study, drawn from computer-logged police data, revealed that police nationwide solved just nine per cent of all crimes last year — and fewer than five per cent of street robberies and burglaries.
That is a huge reduction on the number of offenders who were being caught and prosecuted five years ago.
Indeed, in more than 1,000 neighbourhoods where more than 30 crimes were committed, none were solved at all.
Durham is not immune. In fact, it has experienced the sharpest increase in crime anywhere in the country during the past year — 40 per cent.
Though this is partly down to a change in the way crimes are recorded, many more are undoubtedly being committed.
So what is it doing to achieve such superior results? To find out, I went out on patrol with the force’s officers and met the redoubtable Mr Barton.
I also toured its new HQ (funded by selling the old one to housing developers) where, in homage to old- school policing, rooms are named after fabled coppers such as Morse and Dixon of Dock Green, the lift is painted to resemble the bygone police boxes found on street corners and glass cabinets showcase Z- Cars style hats, leaded truncheons and other obsolete police paraphernalia. My visit proved uplift-
ing. It showed what can be achieved when even the most stretched resources are put to the best use, leaders inspire and grass-roots officers are resourceful, inventive and motivated.
Faced with losing millions of pounds and a quarter of their officers, Durham Constabulary might have lost heart. Instead, Barton says, it bit the bullet, deciding to cut once — but ‘hard and deep’. Those with poor attendance records were culled first (sometimes unfairly, he concedes).
Recognising the importance of face to face contact with the public, and maintaining a physical presence on the streets, however, the force strove to retain patrol officers and police community support officers (PCSOs), maligned by some but prized in Durham, as the force’s ‘eyes and ears’.
In a remark that might not please local Labour politicians and the Police Federation union, Barton says the purge was in some ways beneficial, producing ‘a leaner, more efficient organisation’ which could be developed in the right way.
To reduce bureaucracy and maximise the use of intelligence, an efficient in-house computer system was a priority, so talented IT geeks were recruited from Durham University, working with experienced officers to design a bespoke system.
The result is Red Sigma, an intranet system that provides a live snapshot of the criminal activity in the area, operations undertaken, information and photos of suspects etc.
On my visit, the giant screen revealed that a brickworks was being targeted by looters and a fugitive burglar.
This might not sound like rocket science, but according to Barton — a pragmatist who draws on the latest technology and criminology, plus lessons he learned as a young detective nicking crooks on Blackpool’s Golden Mile — some forces still rely on antiquated computers ‘designed for the gas industry’.
Barton is also a great believer in getting the public on his side so they have faith in the police, and feel inclined to help them.
So, in County Durham, you won’t be caught speeding by sneakily placed cameras because he believes — and many would agree — that they create resentment. Instead, Durham is pioneering a new way of dealing with dangerous motorists.
Those caught hurtling round a hairpin bend near one school are given a choice: accept a ticket or confront the pupils they might have killed with their stupidity. Those who take the latter option are sometimes reduced to tears by the children’s tough questions. Like many of Durham’s innovations, this was the brainchild of a low-ranking officer. Another initiative is the Mini Police Force, which operates in about half of Durham’s junior schools. Instead being raised to mistrust the police and feel alienated from them, young ‘recruits’ are given uniforms with badges saying ‘We’re Here To Help’, and encouraged to do their bit to solve community problems. The chief constable’s young grandson has enlisted.
Such alternative thinking also applies when it comes to detecting crime. At Durham’s cramped, dilapidated City Police Station, on Wednesday, I found Sergeant kay Howarth pondering ways of trapping a serial flasher alarming young women who walk along a footpath beside the River Wear.
Her fear was that he might commit more serious sex crimes, but as her team of officers has been reduced from six to two, she needed to think outside the box. Then she remembered how the CCTV camera fixed to a nearby bridge by bird- watchers had trapped a previous indecency offender. Perhaps it might also capture this flasher on film.
Since its crime solving rate is so good, we might think Durham is always quick to prosecute. Paradoxically, this is not the case.
Under a system called Checkpoint, some offenders are given the opportunity to avoid a criminal conviction by making amends to their victims by way of an apology, and perhaps compensating them in some apt way.
Then there is cannabis — a thorny subject after Lord Hague’s suggestion that it ought to be legalised.
Mike Barton has made headlines by airing similar views, and — though he cracks down heavily on dealers — he maintains it serves little purpose to land people with a criminal record for smoking a joint in private. Many would disagree.
Doesn’t this make him sound soft, I venture. After all, this is a hardened career detective who borrows crime-fighting tactics from the U.S. Prohibition- era FBI hero eliot Ness (on his promotion to chief constable, six years ago, the local paper photographed him glaring at a photograph of the man Ness brought down, Al Capone).
The suggestion infuriates Barton. ‘I can see that the public might see that as liberal, but I am probably one of the hardest-nosed cops you’ll meet,’ he barks. ‘For example, the organised criminals in my county — I don’t even let them breathe! That’s not soft. That’s not liberal.’
A story often quoted in Durham police circles, to prove the chief’s steely resolve and ingenuity, concerns a crime family named the Wrights, who effectively took over the Durham village of Burnhope a few years ago, terrifying residents, using their ill-gotten fortune to build palatial homes and renaming two streets after themselves.
Finding it difficult to nail them for the serious crimes they were undoubtedly committing, Barton remembered how Ness — unable to convict Capone for racketeering and murder because witnesses feared testifying — finally had the mob boss jailed for tax evasion.
So Barton enlisted the environment Agency and went after the Wrights for illegal fly-tipping and other minor matters. He ramped up the pressure by persuading the local authority to buy land beside theirs, where surveillance cameras were erected, and tore down the Wrights’ illicit street signs. Emasculated
by this relentless campaign, the family’s reign of fear abated. The figurehead, Alan Wright, and his son, were later jailed for a £3 million ‘cash for crashes’ motor insurance scam.
Another of Barton’s controversial — and we might think intimidatory — tactics is to send officers to the homes of well-known criminals with instructions to ‘ get in their faces’.
The aim is to remind would-be thieves that they are ‘marked men’ and ‘advise’ them they’d be wise to make themselves scarce. It sounds the sort of thing a Wild West sheriff would do, but the chief smiles and says: ‘Jabbing your finger in someone’s chest and delivering a stern warning isn’t illegal.’
Such methods are producing results, as I saw when out on patrol with PCSO Andrea Hodgson, and a rookie colleague, on Durham’s tough Sherburn Road estate. A few years ago, she told me, this redbrick warren was so lawless that residents sometimes burned barricades to keep unwanted outsiders at bay, like Belfast during the Troubles. even police officers feared walking the streets.
Now, apart from the occasional insults from local youths, 46-yearold Andrea finds herself being greeted with smiles and waves.
Her duties range from sorting out neighbours’ squabbles and visiting the old and sick to gathering useful gossip about local villains, and asking the area’s shoplifters — who are instantly recognisable — if they wouldn’t mind producing a till receipt for goods they are carrying.
This is the Durham way. The amalgam of good, old-fashioned beat-plodding and new-fangled ideas is proving so effective that senior officers from beleaguered forces are beating a path to the North-east to see how it’s done.
They leave with the knowledge that running a first-rate police service doesn’t necessitate breaking the bank.