Police decide ‘within seconds’ whether to investigate

Training document shows how forces screen calls to assess which cases are serious enough for inquiry

POLICE staff are being trained whether or not to drop criminal reports “within seconds”, documents have revealed.

In a guide published by West Midlands Police, staff are told to make an assessment about whether officers should attend a call quickly, amid reports that forces across the country are failing to send police to an increasing number of crimes.

The document has fuelled claims that police are struggling to cope with demand as it emerged many forces are screening calls and closing cases without investigation unless they are violent, involve a vulnerable person or the perpetrator is likely to be identified.

An investigation by Channel 4’s Dispatches programme last night revealed hundreds of thousands of offences are dropped without being investigated.

The West Midlands Police training document explains how staff should grade calls on a scale of 1-9 depending on how serious they are.

It states: “THRIVE+ identifies the key considerations for evaluating any given situation, these being but not limited to, Threat, Harm, Risk, Investigation, Vulnerability, Engagement and Prevention and Intervention.” It adds: “Your THRIVE+ assessment can be made in a matter of seconds.” A spokesman for the force said: “Since April 2016, West Midlands Police has been using a new framework to assess each contact. Other police forces have been using the same model for some time.

“On the basis of the event information from the caller and what we know about the people, location and any property involved, our highly experienced call-handlers grade the call for an appropriate response.”

Staffordshire Police also use the call-screening method and said some reports are closed without investigation and called “telephone resolutions”.

Lisa Cope, head of Contact Services for Staffordshire Police, said: “Call-handlers are trained to risk-assess incidents using the national decision-making model, basing their initial assessment on the principles of THRIVE and the golden-hour principles such as preservation of evidence and safety advice.”

Tony Nash, a former borough commander with the Metropolitan Police, said: “The balance now I think has tipped too far the other way, in that things are being screened out that should be screened in. No one is going to look at 36 hours, because they’ve put time parameters on the amount of CCTV.”

Meanwhile, just six police forces have officers on their front desks, it was reported last night, fuelling claims police are struggling to cope with rising crime.

Ino longer trust the police. Hold the phone: I never thought I’d say that. It’s not quite as definitive as it sounds, however, because I would, of course, dial 999 if I heard someone mucking about downstairs in the middle of the night. I’m just not sure the police would actually turn up, or whether they might charge me with a hate crime against burglars.

I was raised with the myth – it was always a myth – of the community bobby who kept the streets safe by being visible and authoritative. Nowadays the police seem to react to crime rather than prevent it, and there’s no guarantee even of that. It turns out that the West Yorkshire force has set a target for “screening out” 56 per cent of cases brought to their attention. In other words, they won’t be investigating the equivalent of 145,000 offences per year.

One academic speculates that it’s probably theft, criminal damage and vandalism that will be ignored. This is both the pinnacle and the greatest depth of the target culture: imagine schools setting a target for churning out illiterates or the NHS for cancers gone untreated. Perhaps the West Yorkshire coppers are just being realistic about what they can and can’t do, but that’s little comfort to locals living with a recorded crime rate that’s gone up 11 per cent year-on-year.

It’s not all the fault of the police; the Government has cut funding. The kind of crime reported is also changing, becoming more complex and difficult to investigate (Dixon of Dock Green never had to deal with emails from generous Nigerian princes).

In times past I’d call for more cash and sympathy for those who put their safety on the line to maintain law and order – and I would leave the column at that. But there’s a niggling feeling at the back of my mind that what the police have become isn’t a product of only necessity but also of choice. That the millions spent on historic sex abuse cases or the obsession with hate crime or the endless celebration of diversity and equality represent a conscious decision to do one thing rather than another, to crack down on abusive tweets rather than, say, vandalism. And it’s motivated by ideology.

A lot of white, middle-class people are learning something that everyone else has always known: the police are political. We like to imagine that British institutions are run by objective public servants. The reality is that schools, hospitals and police forces are all arms of the state, and they reflect the values of those at the top of the power pyramid.

Remember that the original policemen, or Peelers, launched in 1829, were distrusted and feared as part of a war on the poor and the disorderly, which is ironic because the very first Metropolitan policeman was sacked after just four hours on the job. Why? Because he was drunk. The Peelers were given blue uniforms rather than the red worn by the Army, but many minorities have always seen them as an occupying force. Ask Arthur Scargill’s miners or the parents of any black child that died in custody.

Most Britons, however, have long regarded the fuzz as their friends because the cultural values of those in power have broadly corresponded to their own. But a change to the establishment that began in the Sixties has percolated slowly through the liberal welfare state and, increasingly, public services don’t do what many long assumed they existed to do: schools care less about teaching, universities discourage intellectual inquiry, Conservatives don’t conserve and Labour has little to do with the working-class. The police haven’t stopped policing – that would be a ridiculous assertion – but they do it in a different way than they did, shaped by new priorities. For anyone who doesn’t share their contemporary world view, they risk becoming, well, like an occupying force.

Haven’t you noticed how the police suddenly look like soldiers? Covered in Tasers and sprays, the uniform hidden beneath a luminous vest, often in shirtsleeves, they’re a confusing mix of the informal and the intimidating. One neither instinctively feels respect nor familiarity and, thanks to their well-advertised war on prejudice, I’m terrified if I ask them for directions I’ll give myself away as a conservative and wind up in prison.

One of the real miseries of political correctness is that it forces us all to pretend to be what we’re not, to obsess about saying the “wrong thing” and lose our natural relationship with those who we ought to feel totally at ease with. If I were married to a police officer, I guess what I’d be thinking is: “I can’t talk to you anymore. You’ve changed.”

I want to believe that beneath the surface, the police force is still stuffed with old-fashioned coppers who simply want to keep the streets safe – and maybe that is the truth. But when, on the one hand, you see crime going up and, on the other, all you hear the police talking about is political correctness, one has to assume they’re no longer interested in doing the job as it was once defined.

That’s a dangerous place to be because if the general public feels unprotected they will take the law into their own hands.