Policing has lost its way and is picking up the piece of a broken society. What’s the answer? We need a huge shift of resources to community-based services and a radical re-set of the role of the English and Welsh police services.
New Labour, from 1997, brought a new language and a new energy to social policy, not least in the hotly-contested area of law and order. It was as if a management consultant had been welded to a social worker. The party coined the phrase ‘social exclusion’ to replace the scary word ‘poverty’. ‘Joined-up’ and ‘community’ were popular adjectives. The public sector was blasted by business jargon and key performance indicators.
We owe the phrases, ‘community safety’ and ‘neighbourhood policing’ to this era. First term New Labour gave us the Crime and Disorder Act in 1998, community safety partnerships and anti-social behaviour orders, ASBOs – a fist in a velvet glove. The party was guilty, at times, of draconian responses to public order issues and of courting favourable Daily Mail headlines but it spoke to the social causes of crime and called upon a community response, beyond the boundaries and jurisdictions of the police – very different to now, when ‘victim blaming’ rules and the Daily Mail makes rather than merely influences policy.
The then novel concept of ‘joined up’ multi-agency working, bringing together police forces with council services, including environmental health, housing and social services can be seen, in retrospect, as bright point in decades of social policy decline. It was an approach that began to reduce long-standing inequalities.
Nixon of Dock Green
Jim Nixon, director of community safety for public protection software company, RHE Global, remembers those times well. In 1995, he was just starting out as a ‘beat bobby’ in Sandwell and Walsall, working in two tough areas of multiple deprivation, in the west midlands. Neighbourhood policing, he recalls, benefitted from ring-fenced funding. It was a key strand of well-resourced local authority regeneration projects.
Nixon says of his time in Smethwick, in Sandwell: “We were eight police officers, assigned to a very deprived beat, and dealing with everything. It could be low-level anti-social behaviour, or it could be burglaries, or armed robberies. We got to know everybody and everything that went on. We’d cover miles. We didn’t have a car. We would only use a car if we had arrest somebody.”
“Our role was to engage with the public and to get good quality intelligence. In terms of drug issues, we didn’t just tackle the dealers, we talked about rehabilitation with drug users. So it was a holistic service.”
Public sector budgets were slashed from 2010, with the austerity-led policies of the Coalition. More than a decade of continuing cuts have drastically reduced the footprint of local government to a faint shadow.
The ASB Crime and Policing Act of 2014 was a milestone. A tidying up exercise, it amalgamated 19 sets of ASB powers into only six, including public spaces protection orders, banning specific acts in designated areas, enforced by fixed penalties, issued by the police. It also attached civil injunctions to ASB measures, thereby reducing their evidential burden.
Many of the measures were opposed for impinging on civil liberties or even for criminalising lifestyles. But, to some extent, they were an inevitable response to a thinly-resourced policing system, in which community outreach could only be regarded as a luxury. They were also an attempt, suggests Nixon, to bring the English and Welsh police services under the firm grip of national control.
That attempt was doomed to failure, as it would be now. There are 43 police forces in England and Wales. They all have separate procurement and human resources arrangements and databases. They are all doing their own thing.
The latest iteration of national ASB policy, the Anti-Social Behaviour Action Plan, published in March, rings the changes on post-Coalition themes. It employs catch phrases, such as ‘hotspot policing’, ‘immediate justice’ and ‘zero tolerance’. It criminalises new behaviours, such as begging at cash points or cars at traffic lights and increase the upper limits of spot fines. The plan focuses on enforcement and punishment, rather than addressing the causes of ASB or even acknowledging that they should be tackled.
Police identity crisis
The youth services that were so successful in the late 1990s and early 2000s in keeping young people out of trouble are a distant memory and the concept of neighbourhood policing is virtually dead. Nixon reflects: “Police numbers are so low that even if you are on a neighbourhood team, you will invariably be used for response duties, on a daily basis.”
The police are normally the first on the scene when things go wrong – they are the experts in first response. Unfortunately, they are now sometimes the only ones on the scene. Nixon says: “You've often got police officers sat there for hours and hours in A and E departments, waiting for an entire shift for someone who is qualified to deal with mental health issues to arrive. That's why you're not seeing police officers on the streets.”
The police, Nixon says, are suffering from an ‘identity crisis’. Much-maligned, they don’t know what they are supposed to be, or to do, any more. In practice, they are picking up the casualties of the collapse of multiple public services. He argues: “Enforcement is only part of the solution. There needs to be a massive shift to early intervention, as far back as nursey school years, and a massively increased investment in preventive and reactive mental health services.”
Bring back the Peelers
The primary focus of community safety should not be enforcement, Nixon argues. That should be a last resort. It should be more about preventing problems from happening and nipping them in the bud. Tech should be used as a tool to facilitate this. We certainly have a lot of it – phones and tablets to share data, communicate with colleagues and access guidance on complex legislation, and, of course, lapel cameras, CCTV and drones. Unfortunately, local authorities, like police forces, are all going their own way – both institutions are only using a fraction of the potential of technology to ‘join up’ services.
Absolutely vital, at this point, many people believe, is a fundamental review of the role, accountability and governance of the police services. Why not a Royal Commission? With the police under increasing scrutiny, the issue is certainly large and important to merit one.
The Conservative politician Sir Robert Peel was there at the beginning – he established the London Metropolitan Police in 1829 – and he set some firm ground rules. ‘Peelism’ states that policing should “prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment; that the power of the police is dependent on public approval of their existence; that the police should exercise their powers with courtesy and good humour and that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action.” That, Nixon suggests, might not be a bad point to start from.
Will Hatchett has been a social policy journalist since 1986. He was editor of Environmental Health News from 1998 until 2018. The views expressed here are purely his own.
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