British police are failing because they have forgotten why they exist
The rising tide of ‘staff networks’ in the Met is emblematic of the problem, pitting identitarian politics against general interest
OChanging pressures from online offences help explain the police retreat from the streets and from investigating vehicle theft and burglary
nce upon a time, foreign actresses coming to London would tell reporters, “I think your British policemen are wonderful.” It is worth asking why they said it, and why it is not said much nowadays.
Obviously, the enthusiastic just-visiting film stars rarely knew any detail. They were picking up good impressions and illustrating the effect of good reputation.
Appearances mattered. The police were highly visible in the streets and people liked what they saw. In their distinctive hats and smart uniforms, policemen looked well. Because of height rules (now relaxed) and the headgear (now seen much less often), they stood tall. They were imposing authority figures.
Yet they also appeared kind. You could ask them directions, or the time of day. Their job was to keep the peace, and they seemed peaceful. In almost all circumstances, they were unarmed. They were the human equivalent of the old red telephone boxes – reassuring, solid, uniquely British.
Not much of this survives. As someone who walks round the “Westminster village” most weeks, I am struck by the appearance of the armed police (from the Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection group) who guard, for example, the entrances to Downing Street. They lounge against walls or railings, sloppily dressed, never alone and vigilant, always together and chatting. They do not emanate pride in their job. Therefore they do not inspire confidence.
Something similar applies at a deeper level. Citizens do not have confidence that the police know what is happening in their neighbourhoods, because they do not see them there.
Worse still, women find it hard to trust them. The cases of Wayne Couzens, the rapist and murderer of Sarah Everard, and David Carrick, the multiple rapist, both of whom served in the Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection group (see above), and both of whom exploited their status to commit some of their acts, showed that evil men can serve in the force for many years undetected. Several cases, often involving the use of social media, have revealed police officers making degrading jokes about women and sharing photos of women who are victims of crime, even of murder.
These cases are untypical, of course, but not untypical enough. They make it much harder, not only for visiting actresses, but for anyone, to think our British policemen are wonderful.
There are other problems. The public sometimes feel unsure whether the police are on their side. When Black Lives Matter mobs daub statues, or Extinction Rebellion/just Stop Oil hooligans attach themselves to roads, trains or motorway gantries, the police often seem neutral. Intimidated by alleged “rights” waved at them by the protesters, they pay little attention to upholding the right of the general public to go about our business. They seem to forget they are working for us.
An even stranger phenomenon is that significant groups within the police spend their lives attacking the service that pays their salaries. A new Policy Exchange report, Blurred Lines, draws attention to the more than 200 “staff networks” within the police in England and Wales. Some of these informal groupings do little harm. To criticise, for example, Cleveland’s small Police Vegan Network would be taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut-cutlet. But some staff networks see it as their business noisily to tell police and even politicians what they should be doing, pitting identitarian politics against the general interest.
In case studies, the Policy Exchange report singles out the Met’s Black Police Association (METBPA) for erroneously stating it is a charity without being charity-registered. Within the force, the METBPA was considered so negative that a separate black network set itself up to work more constructively. Another staff network, the National Association of Muslim Police, keeps trying to change the official language on terrorism to prohibit words like “Islamist” or “jihadist”. It also joins Islamic political campaigns outside the police force. The National LGBT+ Police Network publicly campaigns for officers to take part in Pride marches in their uniforms, thus breaking police rules of impartiality.
The highly professional Sir Mark Rowley became Met Commissioner last September. He is working hard to reform and lead the Met out of its defensiveness. The speed of modern politics suggests that a Royal Commission would be too slow a means of achieving the root-and-branch review he seeks, but neither party has much sense of direction on the subject. There does need to be some way of looking at the problems overall.
The first thing needful is to distinguish different types of change – the inevitable, the good, the bad. To pursue my analogy of the red telephone box, its reassurance was indeed wonderful but, in the era of mobile phones, no one needs it. What needs keeping? What needs changing?
During Sir Mark’s early career (he joined the police in 1987), policing consisted mainly of its public-based strand – crime and order in the streets. Then grew up the idea of public protection overall – far more investigation of domestic abuse and of issues like child sexual abuse, which are evidentially much trickier and therefore more time-consuming than “ordinary decent crime”. On top of that, exploding this century, have been online offences, which now make up almost half of all crime. On these, the police badly lag the criminals.
These changing pressures help explain the police retreat from the streets and from investigating vehicle theft and burglary. In the computer age, it can be argued, people are less dependent on their immediate environment and more vulnerable electronically than physically. This is partly true, but misleading. Citizens will never feel safe unless we know the police and they know us. That has to happen locally if it is to secure the policing by consent which must remain the basis of British policing.
Such a return to first principles is what the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, and Stephen Watson, the firm new Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, met to discuss in his bailiwick last week. It is sobering, however, to recall how often such principles have been restated only to fall away once more, as if they are just too boring for officers to stick to them.
It is also sobering to recall that Sir Mark’s four immediate predecessors have had to leave the job against their will, forced out by various scandals and controversies. Leadership is perhaps the biggest issue in the Met, indeed across all policing. In this century, its future quality was damaged by Labour when Tony Blair’s administration got rid of accelerated (“elitist”) graduate promotion, and by the Conservatives under Theresa May as home secretary, who abolished the police staff college, Bramshill, and made the recruitment of chief constables an almost exclusively local, and therefore nepotistic, matter.
Leadership has also been weakened at lower levels. The fearsome power of the police sergeant, for example, was the strongest model of street-level leadership. Nowadays, the sergeant is more like a trade union spokesman for those under him or her than a leader in action. And, as with so many public services, it is extremely hard to reward good performers and get rid of bad ones.
The Met is not a complete mess. Its elements which are clear about their purpose – counter terrorism, for example, and homicide command – have excellent results and high esprit de corps. But it suffers badly from the sickness of so many current institutions. It fails to hold fast every day of its life to the simple, but not easy, purpose of its existence.