Introduction
The purpose of this blog is to explore some of the issues that the next government may wish to consider as they develop their own strategic thinking with respect to the role of policing within the UK. The current discourse on policing is both complex and opinion heavy, with contributions from both informed and ill-informed commentators. Our contribution centres on three areas: leadership and its impact; crime prevention; and policing cultures.
The new leaders and managers
The current trust and confidence issues that surround UK policing are not new, nor are the causes a surprise to many who work within the service. Externally, the reckless damage done to policing and the structures that surround social stability (youth centres, drug prevention programmes, domestic violence centres, poverty support initiatives) will take a generation from which to recover. Internally, policing’s rapid expansion in officer numbers after challenging cutbacks evidence growth instability in the service. This is augmented by ongoing confusion surrounding the professionalisation debate or how best to train new recruits. In this period of excessive volatility, outdated sub-cultures have been allowed to manifest through inappropriate behaviours, all of which utterly frustrate the majority of police officers and staff, who daily deliver outstanding service, despite the growing risks and challenges confronting them. When officers and staff are one call away from community chaos, the last thing they need is further organisational disarray.
We suggest the next government needs to be brave and help create a strategic balance between assisting policing services stabilise around what works, as well as providing a mandate centred on fitness for the future. On the one hand government is going to have to listen carefully to those informed policing professionals (pommelled and frustrated by previous ideology), who understand their business; on the other, they will want to be reassured that sub-cultural behaviours highlighted in recent major reviews are rooted out and made redundant.
An understandable irritation around how policing is performing will be expected, yet new policing ministers need to get their focus correctly targeted. We argue that the attention should disproportionately centre on policing leadership and management and not necessarily just front-line practitioners. Too many leaders and managers have been allowed to hide behind the production of performance ‘numbers’ as sole evidence of their impact. That needs to stop.
When there is a demand for policing cultures to change it is often focused on front line cops doing their daily business. Yet here, we would argue something is being fundamentally overlooked in this approach. Who is looking at the normative practices of managers and their supervisors? How frequently is poor leadership performance being identified and then addressed? It is time to hold leaders and managers more accountable and not just those they lead! That said, as will be seen in the Policing Culture section, unless the recruitment and selection procedures are robust enough to weed out unsuitable applicants, rogue officers will continue to discredit the service.
Likewise, there needs to be a rapid focus on the College of Policing (CoP). If aspects of leadership and management are systemically failing and the CoP are responsible for policing standards, then it becomes axiomatic that their own future must be pointedly called into question.
In many ways the current demand for new powers to remove officers discloses the deep-rooted problem that sits at the very core of the policing leadership and managerial culture: that there exists too many leaders and managers who are inept at addressing underperformance. There needs to be intrusion around how the next generation of leaders are selected, trained, and developed once in post. Comfortable promotion courses that do not have credible level four assessment (Kirkpatrick) are simply not fit for purpose.
A strategic focus on ‘what works’ in policing leadership and management should be the first point of contact for policing ministers. Always remembering that some of the best officers and staff in policing are informal leaders holding no rank yet having disproportionate impact on policing provision. These are the people who have real influence on trust and confidence.
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Future Crime Prevention Strategy: ‘no need to reinvent the wheel’.
Crime prevention has generated a wide and extensive literature in both the academic and professional field [Bonnie et al 2010]. Directed very largely at situational crime prevention much has been written on the value of target hardening, developing safer cities and much else. Latterly the huge investment in CCTV has enabled the police to monitor street activity in real time. Most recently however the Metropolitan Police Commissioner has argued for the introduction of facial recognition cameras which would take crime prevention onto a new dimension that could raise fundamental concerns about public surveillance and the rights and liberties of the individual [ Weaver 2023; Townsend 2023; Sinmaz 2023]. This only reflects the real and potential danger of crime prevention moving from community to ‘public safety’ in which an individual’s right to privacy is overtaken by intrusive engagement by the local state. In some local authority areas this has already arisen generating a real threat to the basic rights of the citizen.
Value of local policing partnerships
And yet future crime prevention strategy does not need to threaten the basic liberties of the citizen. The recent past has, in fact, already provided clear evidence of an effective preventative measure that places crime prevention very firmly back into the world of community safety. This would be to resurrect the two most significant innovations undertaken by New Labour between 1997 and 2010. These were a commitment to the creation of local partnerships –primarily between local authorities and the police, but also including other agencies where appropriate. The second innovation came by way of New Labour’s Police Reform Act [2002] which, inter-alia, introduced the Police Community Support Officer [PCSO]. These two innovations proved to be the foundation of one of the great success stories of that government. Moreover, neither represented a threat to citizen rights or freedoms. Instead, they helped sustain a greater sense of community engagement while often releasing sworn officers to pursue more complex, organised crime.
Re-establishing the innovatory practice initiated by New Labour would however come at some cost. Currently, it would be a futile exercise to seek greater engagement in partnerships from local authorities as their resource base has been largely eliminated. This is the result of years of central government cuts which started with the now contested Coalition government ‘austerity programme’ in 2010. Many local authorities are now close to bankruptcy and are now only just able to fulfil statuary services. If therefore partnerships are to be resurrected, then that is only possible if local government is itself given the opportunity to re-establish its primacy in the delivery of local services.
Recognising the positive impact of PCSOs
This would need to be supported by a further commitment. This would be to provide a comprehensive strategy of sustaining a significant investment in PCSOs. As with a new partnership approach such a strategy would, of course, have cost implications. The Conservative led coalition government proved to be as hard on the police service as it continues to be with local authorities. Successive cuts in funding led to huge cuts by the police in non-statutory spending. A prime target for cuts, in a move to protect police establishment, was the decimation of both civilian staff and PCSOs. For a number of police forces this was not viewed with any real concern. This reflected a common professional bias in the police service against Community Support officers which had been most strongly manifested by the Police Federation.
Yet professional bias against the employment of PCSOs served, very unfortunately, to hide the very real effectiveness of these officers both to the community but also to police forces. One consequence of employing staff drawing across age, gender and racial backgrounds was to create a service that proved to be, for the public, highly approachable and for whom encouraging public reassurance was a major aim. This was to be reinforced by attaching PCSOs to dedicated geographic locations from which they could not be removed. It proved to be a singular success and it was not long after that local police commanders were to recognise the work of PCSOs as forming their single most important source of local intelligence within the police force area within which they worked. In crime prevention terms local intelligence enjoys an immediate primacy not least in enabling local police to intervene and engage by pre-empting criminal activity. Within the MPS some local commanders were later to describe PCSOs as the primary intelligence source for policing the London boroughs.
Future investment in an effective crime prevention strategy could be expected to pay big dividends if the resurrection of earlier innovations formed the base upon which further developments might be encouraged. Burden- sharing with local government would provide, as discovered a decade ago, a strong support to local policing. It would however require the revanche of both local democracy and service provision. Similarly, the expansion of local PCSOs might form the basis for the municipalisation of local policing. Municipal police have proved their worth elsewhere and this has been most evident in France, one of the most centralised states in Europe. These developments do not preclude other crime prevention opportunities that might come from specific situational crime prevention options. They may, however, other than providing effective preventative measures, also encourage greater social cohesion and public consensus. This, in itself, would offer an attractive alternative to the divisiveness which has characterised social relationships in the Conservative driven post -Brexit world.
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Policing culture
Recent events have shone a light on the toxic culture in operational policing. This was brought into sharp focus by Baroness Casey’s interim report on culture and standards of behaviour in the Metropolitan Police. As if that were not warning enough, the HMICFRS report on misogyny, misconduct and vetting painted a very sombre picture of British policing.
Rick Muir from the Police Foundation asserts, like many other authoritative commentators, that these reports expose the existence of a toxic culture in parts of policing. A significant minority of officers have been engaging in racist, misogynistic, or homophobic behaviour that has not been ‘called out’ by the majority.
There is now a vast body of literature on police culture, much of which helps to explain why it is often difficult, and sometimes dangerous, to be a whistle-blower as a police officer.
Reiner (2010) described the core characteristics of police culture as; an action-orientated sense of mission, suspicion, machismo, conservatism, isolation, pragmatism and racial prejudice and furthermore placed emphasis on cynicism, danger and solidarity.
Not all scholars see police culture in such a negative light. Indeed, some argue that it can be positive, as a means of coping with the stress of police work the positive aspect of police culture in providing solidarity and (Waddington, 1999; Foster and Newburn, 2003; Hobbs 2008). However, the examples of egregious behaviour highlighted by both Casey and HMICFRS suggest that the overriding aspect of operational police culture is its toxicity.
As Muir correctly identifies, vetting procedures are woefully inadequate to prevent wholly inappropriate and unsuitable candidates from being appointed. Clearly a major overhaul is urgently required.
Muir makes a powerful argument for change. There should be zero tolerance of racism, misogyny, homophobia and any other kind of prejudice in policing. The challenge now is do we bring about that change? Piecemeal or ambulatory measures will never of themselves be sufficient. The problem is far more urgent and serious for that to work. Perhaps what is really needed is a Royal Commission on policing?
Conclusion
There is considerable debate around policing professionalism and any new government will want to quickly influence policing practices as well as have a long-term strategic approach to progress. The government will need to listen AND act. At the core of our argument is the need for policing to sort out its internal cultural issues through a step-up in the performance of its leaders and managers. At the same time, we argue that policing needs to learn from previous success (the PCSO model), and that proximity policing (de Maillard et al) will restore the trust, confidence and legitimacy that is conspicuously absent at present.
References:
Bonnie et al [2010] Encyclopaedia of Victimology and Crime Prevention, Sage, London;
De Maillard, Jacques (2022) The enforcement turn in plural policing? A comparative analysis of public police auxiliaries in England and Wales, France and The Netherlands
Foster, J. and Newburn, T. (2003) Police cultures, in T. Newburn (Ed.) Handbook of policing, pp. 196-228. Willan , Cullompton
Hobbs, B. (2008) What causes police officers to become cynical? Is there any dislocation between themes in literature on police cynicism, and police officers in contemporary society?, Internet Journal of Criminology
Reiner, Robert (2010). The Politics of the Police. 4. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sinmaz E [2023] ‘Live facial recognition labelled ‘Orwellian’ as Met police push ahead with use’, The Guardian 5th April
Townsend M [2023] ‘Revealed: Home Office secretly lobbied for facial recognition ‘spy’ company’, The Observer, 2nd September
Waddington, P. A. J. (1999) Police (canteen) sub-culture: an appreciation. British Journal of Criminology 39:2, 287-309.
Weaver M [2023] ‘Facial recognition could transform police in same way as DNA, says Met chief, The Guardian 11th September