‘Anti-terror teaching isn’t the police’s job’
Forces can no longer afford to give schools talks on extremism, warns Britain’s most senior woman officer
POLICE officers should no longer go into schools to warn children about the dangers of extremism, Britain’s most senior policewoman has said, as she called on teachers to perform the role instead.
In an intervention likely to cause conflict with the teaching profession, Chief Constable Sara Thornton said it should not be the role of police to give classroom talks under the Government’s counter-terrorism strategy.
The school liaison role in the scheme, known as Prevent, should be sacrificed as forces struggle with budget cuts that could see them lose thousands of officers over the next five years, she added.
She also said that police should also not be blamed when Muslim families travel secretly to Syria, because doing so was a “bad choice” rather than a crime.
Miss Thornton – often described as David Cameron’s favourite police officer after her eight years as his constituency police chief – made the remarks in her first interview since taking over as chairman of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC).
“It cannot be the role of the police to go in and teach children about terrorism,” she said. “It’s not our job.
“We currently do all the Prevent work. But it is not only a security response – it’s got to be a broader community response. We’ve got to make sure that teachers are able to do that. Because actually you want people to be given a much broader, rounded view rather than a police view of the whole thing.”
In April, the National Union of Teachers’ conference passed a motion calling for schools to be removed from the Prevent strategy, complaining that teachers were being forced to “spy” on pupils.
Miss Thornton claimed budget cuts could force chief constables to drop the work regardless. “If we’re trying to manage demand because we’ve got fewer people, we can’t really afford to do it anyway,” she said.
Miss Thornton pointed out that travelling to live under Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant is not in itself a crime. “People who want to just go and live in a caliphate, that’s not against the law,” she said. “We have to be careful when we say, if the family have chosen to go, that that is the police’s fault. In two or three of the recent cases it’s been suggested that the police should somehow stop them. There’s nothing to stop families choosing to go, though you might think it’s a very bad choice.” In her interview with The Daily Tele
graph, Miss Thornton admitted she was unable to give a definitive answer on whether crime was going up or down, amid confusion over official statistics. Latest data published earlier this month showed a 3 per cent rise in recorded crime, including a sharp jump in violent offences, while separate figures in the Crime Survey of England and Wales suggested crime had remained at a record low for the eighth year running.
“There’s not an easy yes/no answer. Traditional crime is clearly down,” she said. “But we have all these other significant types of crime which are putting great pressure on officers.”
Restoring faith in crime figures, and the police more generally, will be a key goal for Miss Thornton at the helm of the new organisation, which replaced the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) in April. She has admitted that Acpo had become “overly political” and the NPCC is designed to be a clean slate after a tricky period of Home Office-police relations.
Miss Thornton said she hoped a new police reform Bill, due in the autumn, would help restore confidence in the service, with reform of the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) taking a high position on her wish-list.
“We have officers subject to IPCC investigation for years,” she said.
“I’m not saying in any way they should not be investigating – particularly when someone has died and families are rightly concerned about wanting to know what happened – but it takes far too long.
“The IPCC would agree with me. They need to do something about it because it’s not fair on families and it’s certainly not fair on police officers.
“We need to look carefully at very lengthy investigations where the outcome is an acquittal or at the very lowest level.”