The Real Role of the Police
Earlier this week a group of gang members were taken to Wood Green Crown court to hear some home truths. Ten boys, all under the age of 17, were brought into the dock. They giggled and shouted abuse at the police. Five minutes into the session they’d fallen silent. They’d been shown stomach-churning photos of stabbing victims. A young mother told them about the death of her son. They heard from 20-year-old former gang member Jermaine Jones-Lawler, who went nose-to-nose with them; shouting, he told them they’d end up in a coffin or a jail cell. All very positive: but is this sort of thing the police’s job?
On Radio Four’s What Are The Police For? last week policing minister Nick Herbert said the police’s job was to “cut crime.” The show’s presenter Mark Easton was unequivocal in his reaction to Herbert’s answer. It really wasn’t very BBC at all, and certainly not very Radio 4. He dismissed it as a “soundbite, not a policy.” The image that Herbert’s words were supposed to portray seems pretty clear: cops catching baddies.
For those who’ve not seen the excellent Channel Four series Coppers, the words of Thames Valley officer Police Sergeant Graham Smith, also interviewed, should disabuse you of this notion:
Crime fighting is 75 per cent of what we do. The rest of it is putting a sticking plaster on society’s ills. We’re the only people available after 4pm to do that. Where are the social workers, the teachers and the mental health doctors? They’re generally at home. We pick up the pieces and wait for the professionals. It’s about preservation of life.
The crossover between crime and mental health runs deep - even in the most clear-cut cases of criminality. Back when I was researching gangs I was told early on by a psychologist to look at how many of the kids would be in a state of ‘frozen watchfulness’. Their faces would be expressionless, their eyes constantly shifting around. Within a week I’d seen it. It’s what the apprenticeship of domestic violence produces.
We also heard the words of Chief Constable Sara Thornton: “Last year we took about 1,000 mentally ill people to places of safety. I’m not talking about people committing offences. You might say why the police - who else would do it?”
Who else indeed? To get to grips with this issue, we need to go back in time. Right back to the 19th century, in fact. The streets are dirty and nasty. There are muggers and pickpockets lurking in the shadows cast by the gas lanterns and Sir Robert Peel has, in 1829, created a force of 1,000 bobbies to service the rapidly-expanding city of London. These men wear blue, and carry a truncheon, a lamp, and a rattle to attract attention (later a flintlock pistol too). What do they do, these men? Well, they just walk around looking for crime. It probably wasn’t that effective. This might be why they walked a long way: twenty miles a night, in fact.
In 1842 it all changes. The first detectives are appointed, and with them comes the birth of reactive investigation methodology. At the start of the Twentieth Century we get fingerprints; at the end we get DNA profiling. Along with all that we get things like investigation aids and systems of interviewing.
But at the end of the 20th century we see that all this still isn’t enough. Until 1995, crime is still rising (according to official figures). What’s gone wrong? A lot of things. Society has changed - it’s more mobile, it’s more numerous, it’s more anonymous, there are more things to steal, and there are more human rights so the burden of proof starts to make arresting tougher. On top of that, crime isn’t local - it’s now national and international, and the police has to think in different ways.
Criminals become more sophisticated. They seek to avoid leaving identification or clues. So a new technique comes in: intelligence-led policing. It means we’re in a new, third era. In the second era a manager in the police service looked at the day’s work and said: a hundred things have been dealt with - can we deal with a hundred things tomorrow? Now the manager looks at the day’s work and says: a hundred things have been dealt with - how can we have seventy-five things tomorrow?