Policing needs a back-to-basics approach, says new service watchdog
As the new police watchdog, Andy Cooke makes no apologies about his “back-to-basics” agenda for forces. After all, his fictional detective hero was the straight-talking Flying Squad DI Jack Regan from the television series The Sweeney.
Mr Cooke, the former chief constable of Merseyside, a detective by trade and commander of Britain’s first “Matrix” gun and gang fighting unit, believes police forces need to get back on to the front foot to again instil fear in criminals.
He favours traditional methods that have lost currency in recent years: more covert policing, recruiting informants, neighbourhood policing “with teeth”, identifying and targeting criminals via stop and search and investigating, or at least assessing, every crime even if the value is under £50.
It is a “back-to-basics” message that won him the post of HM Chief Inspector of Constabulary from Priti Patel, the Home Secretary. It is a role where he holds forces to account through individual and national inspections but also increasingly provides evidence-based policy recommendations to ministers.
His views therefore count in reshaping a policing service rocked by low prosecution rates, the loss of 20,000 officers – now being reversed – and a series of scandals over misogyny and racism that have undermined public confidence.
He says charging and detection rates have fallen “far too low”, the “lowest I can remember”, at 11 per cent for all crime and 2 per cent for rape.
“Policing cannot forget what its core business is which is protecting people, reducing crime and catching offenders. There needs to be a bit of a back-to-basics approach to what is important in policing, how we can best keep our communities safe,” says Mr Cooke.
He blames a “loss of focus on proactively targeting those who are responsible for criminality”. By this he means accompanying a swift response to a 999 call with forensic analysis at the scene, where, for example, every burglary is visited or a £50 theft of goods is assessed for links and clues.
“You cannot just say every crime under £50 should not be investigated and it is just put away. That is where you miss your crime series. That is where you fail to understand the impact that crime has on an individual,” he explains.
“No matter what the value, it needs to be looked at individually to see if there is anything that links it to any other crimes, to see what the circumstances are beyond that crime, what the impact of that crime is on the individual.
“Someone stealing a plumber’s van with all their equipment might not be a
vast amount of money but it is their livelihood so those offences need to be treated seriously and properly. It is not just a car theft, it is their whole livelihood going down the pan.”
A veteran detective with 36 years’ experience, he says the best results come where police forces have set up teams specifically to combat crimes such as burglary.
As commander of Merseyside’s Matrix unit against gun and gang crime in 2005 to 2006, he pioneered such a proactive model where they identified gang members and uniformed officers disrupted their business through stop and search while the evidence from “reactive” call-outs to all crimes was sifted for links.
He sums up the approach: “Proactively targeting, proactively looking to link offences, knowing who the key offenders are, spending time and actively identifying what their offending is.
“If you look across the country we seem to have lost the ability in a lot of places to recruit informants. There has been a striking loss of confidence in undercover policing because of the current undercover policing inquiry. The results of undercover policing are absolutely fantastic.
“We cannot forget what works just because policing has got busier. We still need to spend time recruiting those informants. We still need to spend the time planning undercover operations.”
It is this approach that, he says, strikes fear into criminals. “Policing needs to be able to inspire that fear in criminals as well as confidence in victims and witnesses,” he says. “Targeting [criminals] through uniform disruption via stop and search, using your armed officers through covert approaches or maximising your reactive evidence.”
Neighbourhood policing has been one of the biggest casualties in the 20,000 cut to police numbers. With the Government’s extra officers, Mr Cooke says it needs to return but “with teeth”. “Not neighbourhood police officers who walk around smiling at people but actually make a difference ... identifying [those] who are causing the most misery and dealing with it,” he explains.