Politics and Policing Where Do They Divide?

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In the wake of the riots we are bombarded with competing claims about who controlled them. The police are sure that the successful tactics were evolved by them while the politicians say that it all got sorted when they returned from holiday. I think that the riots stopped because the weather turned bad, but there is a serious issue about who should do what in keeping us safe from crime.

 

The government have said that they will scrap the costly and useless police authorities and replace them with elected commissioners. Well OK, but what exactly is a commissioner? The chief of the Met Police is called the Commissioner whereas the people who run all other UK police forces are called Chief Constables. If the Metropolitan Police Authority is to be replaced by an elected commissioner they are going to have to sort out the titles.

 

The real issue, of course, is what part of policing should be decided by politicians and what is decided by the police chief. The standard answer is that policy is for politicians and operational matters are the responsibility of the uniformed cops. But where exactly is the line drawn between these? Many libertarians support the idea of directly elected police control in some form because they want policing priorities to be responsive to citizen concerns and they also wish t oget policing to be closer to specific community conditions. These are legitimate aspirations, but I would suggest that focussing on election of a figurehead does not address the right issue.

 

Britain is unlike most other countries in its insistence on having a single police service in which personnel deal with everything from dropping litter to multiple murder, parking infringement to complex fraud. This is all done through 43 different police forces, roughly relating to counties, that are far too big to provide genuine local accountability and much too small to address large scale, organised crime.

 

The apprehension of criminals and even the prevention of crime is a technical process which most people would agree requires skills, experience, training and a high degree of efficiency. Quite obviously these are things which require stability and are not compatible with the turnover resulting from elections or the absence of appropriate background that election candidates are likely to have. Whatever title you give them, the operational head of any level of policing cannot and must not be determined by popular election.

 

At present, Police Authorities do not perform any worthwhile role. They are meant to be the means by which Chief Constables, or the Met Commissioner, are accountable for the performance of themselves and their force. The reality is that the Authority is composed primarily of Councillors selected by the local authority who have no knowledge of policing and no idea how to hold the professionals to account. Serving on the Police Authority is just another little source of responsibility allowance and a diverting couple of hours from time to time.

 

An elected person with specific responsibility for setting policy frameworks for police and holding the Chief constables to account would have more focus and authority and might gain sufficient insight to be able to probe the effectiveness of the force if s/he held office for long enough. The problem is that this doesn’t deal with the problem of getting policing organised on an appropriate scale to deal with the whole range of crime and public safety that is required. Also, in those places which have an executive mayor, particularly London, the elected Police Commissioner is going to be a competing figure to the mayor and a dilution of the executive mayor role.

 

A few years ago it was unquestioned that only the state could run prisons and handle prisoners. Now we have many privately owned and run gaols and prisoner transport is largely contracted out. Tiny steps have been taken to improve policing by de-criminalising some traffic management roles and introducing Police Community Support staff to deal with anti-social behaviour and petty crime. Even these micro moves have been met with implacable hostility from the Police Federation which, although they are prohibited from organising industrial action, is one of the most intransigent and powerful trade unions in the country. Apart from the rank and file union, the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) is a formidable barrier to reform. ACPO is the senior officers trade union, but at the same time it gets large amount of taxpayers money so it is one of those strange hybrid organisations by which the state extends its tendrils where they shouldn’t be. Financial pressures brought about change in the prison system and that will go further. The present economic constraints should be an aid to breaking the massive institutional barriers to police reform.

 

The way forward is to go ahead with abolition of Police Authorities. In those areas with an executive mayor policing should become part of his/her responsibility. In the rest of the country an elected police commissioner would be OK.

 

The real job though is to get the right sort of policing. Major crime and the contingency arrangements for large scale incidents must be coordinated nationally and internationally. All motoring offences, which does not include such things as manslaughter by use of a vehicle, should be de-criminalised. The task of enforcing the civil motoring laws needs to be contracted out to private providers. Local crime and crime prevention needs to be separated into its specialisms of theft and burglary, rape and sexual offences, fraud, etc. and delivered in the manner chosen by the communities they serve.

 

It is my view that the vast majority of policing and public safety would be best handled by private contractors, but there is no reason why mayors or commissioners should not keep it as a directly employed service or a mixture of public and private provision.

Don’t Whinge or Preach – Do The Job

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A district judge in Nottingham has said people should speak to the government if sentences seemed lenient.

Tim Devas, district judge at Nottingham Magistrates Court, also told Craig Cave, 26, of Burrows Avenue, Beeston, to “sort his life out”. Cave was found guilty of obstructing the police and was fined £60. Devas asked Cave if he now felt ashamed about being one of the “hundreds of yobbos” arrested. He went on “Let me give you a piece of worldly advice. Get a life, sort yourself out. Don’t you feel ashamed that you are now counted among the hundreds of yobbos arrested and now considered as scum by the public?”

He went on to tell the court: “If there are any criticisms of sentences handed down by the courts, if you want anyone to blame, then go and speak to the government. Do not blame the judges or the magistrates who do their jobs professionally and abide by the guidelines set down.”

Since you are keen on handing out advice judge, here is some from me. The maximum penalty for obstructing the police is one month in prison and £1,000 fine. The Prime Minister and the Home Secretary have been telling you for three days that the people responsible for the disorder that has killed people, wrecked businesses and burned people out of their homes must face the full severity of the law. Obstructing police who were there to restore order is a serious offence in that context.

Asking this criminal if he is ashamed and then whining to the public that they should complain to the government for your encouragement of crime just shows that you do not understand your role. I suspect that Cave might be rather more worldly than the judge. Sixty pounds is a penalty for parking in the wrong place or dropping a fag end on the pavement, not for contributing to terror on the streets.

OK, you take account of a guilty plea. That might justify the prison sentence being suspended, but you still fine him the full £1,000. A £60 fine is derisory and you are a disgrace Devas.

Tottenham in Flames

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Twenty six years after PC Keith Blakelock was murdered on the Broadwater Farm estate, riots have erupted in the same area after a man was shot dead by police.

Tonight there are buildings and vehicles burning and looting has taken place in the centre of Tottenham with reports of around three hundred people involved in disorder.

We do not yet know if the man who was apparently killed by a police bullet on Thursday was himself armed, but there are reliable reports that a police officer was struck by a bullet in that incident and he only escaped injury because it was his radio that was hit.

We are already being told that this is an area of ‘deprivation’ and a friend of the dead man’s family is reported as saying:

“They’re making their presence known because people are not happy,….this guy was not violent. Yes, he was involved in things but he was not an aggressive person.”

When she says ‘he was involved in things’ she means he was a criminal. There will be an enquiry to establish whether the police acted properly when they shot Mr Duggan. It may be no surprise that his friends and relatives do not have confidence in that, but it is very telling that some of them think it is OK that a person was involved in crime and that they are justified in taking to the streets before they know whether he shot at a policeman.

The people who are attacking police, destroying property and looting shops are not doing that because they are starving, oppressed or suffering from discrimination. They are doing it because they habitually hold their communities in fear and they think they can get away with intimidating anybody who tries to establish order and safety on the streets.

The sad truth is that a quarter of a century after Keith Blakelock’s murder, the police have made no progress in breaking the grip of violent crime infesting the estates of north London. It is impossible to stop the drug dealing, prostitution, unlicensed drinking and intimidation that is controlled by criminals. There are two main reasons for this.

The first is that people will always pay for sex when they want to and people will always get high. Trying to stop these things by making them illegal has no more effect than telling the tide not to come in and outlawing activity that cannot be stopped just passes that trade over to very nasty crooks instead of it being conducted with reasonable safety. The second problem in this specific area is the failure of the police and the local authorities to deal with black criminals. This is partly due to fear of the political consequences of doing it and largely because there are too few black people in policing and running the community.

We will be bombarded with requests for enquiries into poverty and deprivation in the area. Rather than producing masses of hot air and wasting time and money on post mortems of the riot, the real need is to immediately establish zero tolerance of the real crime which destroys residents tranquility and peace of mind.

Get in hard and fast on every mugging, burglary, assault and theft. Stop graffiti and littering. Ensure that habitual offenders are prevented from damaging this community any more. Do that well enough and people will stop being afraid to speak out about crime. They will become more interested in keeping their area nice and they will want to have careers in the police, fire service and other jobs that some are seeing as enemies at the moment.

Criminal gangs are not born out of poverty or deprivation, they come from fear and alienation. Fear must be driven from the streets so that decent citizens can safely build communities.

Related articles

• Tottenham in flames as protesters riot (guardian.co.uk)

Sorry Theresa. It Just Won’t Work

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The Home Secretary, Theresa May, has said that she is asking HM Inspectorate of Police (HMIC) to investigate the possibility of corrupt relationships between police officers and the press in the light of revelations about payments for information and the sale of sensitive security data about the royal family and their friends.

 

The HMIC might seem a logical place to go. After all it needs to be somebody outside of the Met Police and it really ought to be done by an organisation that understands policing. The problem is that the people who work in the inspectorate are retired police officers, police who are on detachment from the own force to gain career development experience or provide some specific skill for a special job or, worst of all, people who got themselves into a bit of a mess in their police job and they have been shunted off to the Inspectorate as an easier way of handling them than any other that is available.

 

All the instincts of the HMIC will be to get a nice tidy report together, after a very long enquiry, that will be just about good enough to avoid criticism and boring enough to put the nasty matter to bed with as few casualties as possible. Apart from the fact that they are police who will instinctively try to look after their own, the people at the HMIC lack any motivation at all. They are, with only one or two exceptions, either at the end of their careers due to age and they are looking forward to a very comfortable retirement or their career has stalled anyway.

 

To get to the bottom of police/press corruption it will be necessary to set up a judicial enquiry with the power to subpoena witnesses and require them to answer questions under oath. Under our present system, it will be necessary for such an enquiry to be headed by a judge, but it is essential that the judge takes advice from people with extensive experience of policing and journalism, but without connections current to the police service or the UK media. Much though it would go against the grain, the best way of doing this would be to buy in expertise from the USA, Canada, Australia or Europe.

 

It is slowly dawning on many people that matters have now gone way beyond hacking of celebrity phones. Some of the rot at the heart of our society is starting to be exposed. To avoid a major constitutional crisis which threatens the stability of government at a time when our economy is on its knees, there must be serious action to root out the disease and apply a radical cure.

Home Security

I have just had a letter from the police pushed through my front door telling me how to lock the door because recently some burglars have just walked into houses. This came at the same time as I heard on the radio that Greater Manchester police will lose a quarter of its staff over the next four years due to ‘savage’ budget cuts. That will be a big loss.

The letter also helpfully told me that it was not illegal to put spiked toppings, such as ‘Prikkastrip’ on my back fence so long as I displayed a small notice warning people of the danger of injury if they attempt to climb the fence. I am not sure whether the next thief approaching my house will be a person claiming to sell Prikkastrip  or one providing small notices. Without a Prikkastrip, anybody trying to climb my fences will be at risk of injury because they will collapse under the weight of a burglar. Should I rush out and put notices up explaining to people that it is dangerous to climb fences?

Perhaps I should even put up a truthful notice saying that if you try to climb over this fence there is a likelihood that the householder will rush out and nail your fucking hands to it.

I might be able to stomach a money wasting nanny state just a little bit if wasn’t just so totally stupid and patronising. Well, no I couldn’t. Privatise the police, scrap most of the stupid laws that have been passed over the last couple of decades, give citizens a proper right to self-defence and stop the state poking its warty nose into our private lives.

I am sure Prikkastrip are grateful for this taxpayer funded advertising. I wonder how much they are giving in kick backs to the prat that thought this one up?

Public Sector Pay Settlements

With the exception of the military, public sector workers are to get an increase in pay this year which is lower than the increase in the cost of living. No doubt there will be a lot of squealing, but this is long over due and does not go far enough.

For nearly ten years we have had an orgy of overspending by the government on the public sector. They have trebled spending on the NHS and made enormous increases in education spending. What has happened? Health provision and education are no better and they could even be worse. The reason is that publicly owned bureaucracies are always self serving bottomless pits in which money is consumed in the empires eternally built by managers and the waste which unmotivated workers are too lazy to avoid.

The inexorable rise in the proportion of the economy controlled by the government must be stopped. This country has been undergoing a creeping sovietisation for decades. Now that more than 43% of the economy is state controlled and stealth taxes have resulted in the government grabbing more of your money than ever before, our society is in danger of being strangled. Enterprise is over regulated, we are all over taxed and the only people who are secure are the public sector workers who have jobs for life, generous pensions and nothing to ensure that they do a good job and provide excellent service. The public sector is riddled with absenteeism and paper shuffling non-jobs rather than the nursing angels and firefighting heroes of popular imagination.

It is time to call a halt to the gravy train and return to an expectation that people will work for their living in enterprises that survive by being what people want and that we will all provide for our own lives and the well being of our families.

Those public sector workers who think that they should be paid more should leave and find employment in the private sector.