Crime and policing – whoops, we lost society

Labour's desired return to ‘neighbourhood policing’ is problematic. The infrastructure and shared values that once held communities together has been lost. But at least we can start to trying to rebuild.

UK politics are cyclical. For example, traditionally, the Conservatives remove rent control and security of tenure, Labour brings them back. Shifts of government bring dramatic changes of emphasis on criminal justice, from ‘bang ’em up’ to ‘hug a hoodie’ and back again.

Keir Starmer’s government, under the banner ‘take back our streets’, has promised to return to neighbourhood policing, delivered by 13,000 new neighbourhood police and police community support officers.

The ambitous plan is that Young Futures programme hubs will be staffed by youth and mental health workers and careers advisers. In the frontline of tackling ASB, new Respect Orders (a clever name) look like a re-tread of ASBOs. They will address issues including street drinking, noise, off-road biking and fly-tipping. Breaching them will potentially lead to fines or imprisonment.

The plan is well-judged and timely. It sounds utopian, compared to what we've got now. The measures look familiar. Both the rhetoric and mechanics of the new government’s approach, combining preventive programmes with unabashed punishment, strongly recall those of New Labour.

Jim Nixon, RHE Global’s director of community safety, a well-known podcaster and influencer on anti-social behaviour, has seen many changes of government and dramatic shifts in emphasis over the years. He began his career as a policeman in the West Midlands in 1995, reaching the rank of sergeant.

His days on the beat coincided with the implementation of New Labour’s far-reaching Crime and Disorder Act of 1998, which promised ‘joined up thinking‘ and brought the innovations of community safety partnerships and antisocial behaviour orders (ASBOs). Obliging councils and the police to work together, often for the first time, the act was designed to ‘tackle the causes of crime’, rather than to merely deal with the consequences.

Generous funding 

In that era, historically generous funding reached street level. Nixon recalls working in a team of eight police officers on a single beat in Sandwell, dealing with issues from graffiti to burglary and armed robbery, generally without cars. By the end of New Labour’s second term, the funding that had brought shiny regeneration schemes to blighted council estates and inner cities had run out. But some valuable legacies remained, at least as good practice – evidence-based policy making and partnership working.

The next policy milestone came just before Nixon left the police to bring his skills and knowledge to a large social landlord. Building on some elements of New Labour’s legacy and assumptions, the 2014 Crime and Policing Act amalgamated multiple ASB powers into six, including public space protection orders (PSPOs), enforced through fixed penalties.

Civil injunctions were attached to ASB enforcement, reducing its evidential burden and criminal behaviour orders (CBOs) were introduced, replacing ASBOs, which had been fixated upon by the popular media and trivialised, so that they were perceived as ‘badges of honour’ by offenders.

It’s common, in this area of policy, for governments to copy the good ideas of predecessors but to call them something else. The legislation that this Labour government has promised, will build on the Conservatives’ Criminal Justice Bill, introduced in 2023. It came with similar mood music – unsafe public spaces, needing to be ‘reclaimed’ by frightened communities.

Labour also inherits from the Conservatives elected police and crime commissioners (PCCs) which replaced police authorities in 2018. Most people would say that PCCs have failed to attract public support or interest. They have been largely invisible. Nor has the Independent Office for Police Conduct, set up in 2017 to improve public confidence in the police complaints system in England and Wales, demonstrated that it is genuinely autonomous and has teeth. 

Police at low ebb

Battered by cuts, and by allegations of excessive violence and racism, now provable by camera footage, and of ‘two-tier policing’ by recent short-lived but opportunistic home secretaries, the 43 largely autonomous police forces of England and Wales are currently functioning at an extremely low ebb.

Nixon admits: “Policing, from a reputational point of view, is the lowest I’ve ever known it.” In addition, he notes, our courts and prisons are overloaded, the probation service is “on its knees” and mental health services, for people of all ages, are stretched to breaking point. 

It’s not a great place to start from. Margaret Thatcher said “there's no such thing as society” – almost two decades of austerity-led Conservative government policies have helped to bring that about.

David Cameron's Coalition government in 2010 proposed the cozy oneness of the ‘big society’ – dog shows, the Women's Institute, jumble sales – to replace facilties and instiutions that were jeopardised or being shut down – libraries, youth services, community centres. Of course, it was nonsense. For those of us who are not rich, public serivices are the glue that unites us and makes life tolerable, or, in some cases, possible. Much of this infrastructure has simply been removed. What's left is creaking. In some cases, parks and museum are now run by volunteers – which is what Cameron's policy idea eerily forestalled.

Labour has mulitple problems that will take longer than five years to fix. The collapse of criminal justice is symptomatic of a far broader problem. Society has retreated in the face of a neo-liberal, low-tax assault whose objective were, ultimately, California-style private police forces and gated communites, with the poor camping on pavements,

Politician are viewed by the public as cynical, self-interested and greedy. The idea of ‘public service‘ is almost dead. We've lost the shared values that made possible policing by consent, the paradigm of the service inherited from Sir Robert Peel. We're at the bottom of a very deep hole. Multiple institutions need repairing and the largest – such as the House of Lords, the police, health and social care – defy repair becuase our sytems of governance themselves are broken. 

In the face of this unholy mess, it's a good job that some people remember the good old days before the expenses scandal of 2009, began to unravel UK politics, leading to a clown's parade of weird, no-hoper loosers leading or seeking to lead the Conservative party, since the collapse of the Cameron coaltion and the catastrophe of Brexit.

At a local level, some of the good ideas initiated during more progressive periods of policy, have surivived in a vestigial form in some places. For example, the partnership, multi-agency working that was introduced in public services in the late 1990s, is now accepted as the best way to get results, if not always observed. The problem is a lack of uniformity. There have no ‘big brains’ in charge of the major departments of state within the living memory of Gen Z. All they have seen is chaos. No wonder they have such low expectations.

In the case of the police, separate authorities largely ‘do their own thing’. The service is neither national or local and, tossed around as a political football, it has lost a sense of identity. Getting it back will require policy consistency and continuity and for politicians to move beyond gimmicks and slogans. It will take longer than the five years of a political cycle.

To get ‘neighbourhood policing’ right, Nixon says, we’ll need to genuinely listen to empower communities. It is a hard thing to do, he notes. Empowerment was the language of New Labour, but it wasn’t always the practice. The party adopted a top-down approach. It parachuted in well-paid consultants to interpret the wishes of the socially excluded or self-appointed ‘community leaders’. Some new infrastructure that was built was never used.

The government’s lavish final regeneration programme, housing market renewal pathfinders, delivered solutions that few people wanted across the north of England, including the demolition of popular housing. It ran out of steam and was abandoned. 

Tackling the causes

Nixon believes that the best strategy to reduce ASB, including noise, is to tackle its human, social and physical causes, rather than serving notices as a first resort. He says: “It’s important not to rush into enforcement. You’ve got to understand the problem first and the people you are dealing with to find the right solutions. You may need to have a professionals meeting and bring in other agencies to assess what is the best course of action.”

He adds: “In my view, short-term prison sentences don’t work. I would always look at other options to address what is causing the behaviour. Alternatives to prison are desperately needed. I’m a firm believer that people’s behaviour can change with the right approach.” 

Nixon welcomes the prospect of new legislation. He says: “We’re all waiting on the Criminal Justice Bill that will bring in a review of the tools and powers around antisocial behaviour, including Respect Orders. It’s imminent but, at the moment, everyone’s in the dark – we don’t know exactly what will be in it.”

At the same time, he argues that existing legal mechanisms to reduce pressure on courts and prisons are not being sufficiently used. He notes that positive requirements that can be included in injunctions and criminal behaviour orders (CBOs), for example to address drug or alcohol issues, are not being applied to their full effect. Community safety partnerships, a welcome innovation of 1998, have been patchily applied and there is no auditing of their effectiveness.

In addition, the victims of ASB, are being badly let down by statutory services, as argued by a recent report from Victims’ Commissioner, Baroness Newlove. Nixon says: “We’re now in the tenth year of the 2014 Crime and Policing Act which introduced the community trigger, now called the ASB case review, but a lot of victims of ASB who contact me say they have never heard of case reviews. In my view, there are far too few of them and there needs to be a standardised, uniform template for how they are conducted.”

Sniped at by right wing commentariat and the deluded far left of his party, Starmer is an adult in the room. Yes, he has needed to be as slippery as a dog toy to gain control of the levers of power – a new Harold Wilson. Health, the Home Office and the Treasury now have credible and intelligent people in charge and Angela Raynor gives Starmer the street cred that John Prescott provided to Tony Blair. There is less privilege and entitlement around the cabinet table that at any time in our history

The cabinet is far too big – it's dysfunctional. The Privy Council, the royal prerogative and bishops in the House of Lords are ludicrous survivals of Feudalism. England probably needs its own Parliament, in somewhee like Birmingham, as the post-Brexit union continues to diverge, But that's second term stuff. Maybe Starmer can at least start to fix the car of state. Broken, rusty and tucked away in some farmer's barn, this old classic is now only fit for the scrapyard.

‘Back to basics’ on law and order

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.