Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation

THE ROLE OF POLICE
“The strategic policing requirement is
curiously silent on the quality
and capability of each force’s
investigation teams.”
local forces in meeting the demands of
‘strategic policing’ and which led to the
abortive attempts to amalgamate police
forces. Subsequently, forces were required
to report progress towards meeting an
acceptable level of ‘protective’ services.
Some of that thinking has been
incorporated into the SPR. PCCs and
Chief Constables are required to show
that they have sufficient capacity to deal
with the identified threats and can respond
appropriately. They are particularly
reminded about their responsibilities
under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 to
co-ordinate and lead the response to any
major disaster or civil emergency.
Core capabilities
The SPR goes on to identify some core
policing capabilities – public order, police
use of firearms, surveillance and response
to Chemical, Biological, Radioactive and
Nuclear incidents – which forces must
sustain to agreed national standards. The
new College of Policing will be critical in
setting the standards.
However, the SPR is curiously silent
on one other key area of capability – the
quality and capability of each force’s
investigation teams. When policing fails it
has often been because of failures in crime
investigation. Such failures were central to
criticisms levelled at the police service after
the death of Stephen Lawrence. They
were central, a generation earlier, to the
failures that allowed the Yorkshire Ripper
to keep murdering.
On the other hand, the meticulous and
professional work of counter-terrorism
investigators has been crucial to the UK’s
ability to convict terrorists in the courts in
recent years. Their skills were formed and
trained in local forces and in major crime
teams.
Indeed, the UK has enjoyed an enviable
reputation for its crime investigation as
a result of learning from the errors of
the past. It was the Byford report into
the Yorkshire Ripper investigation that
spurred the development of the modern
Major Incident Room procedures and the
training of Senior Investigating Officers.
The service further responded to the
criticisms in the Royal Commission on
Criminal Justice in 1993 by reforming
the training of all investigators and
building a tiered system of qualifications
– Professionalising the Investigative
Process or PIP – which took a decade to
implement.
The development and training of
detectives and Senior Investigating
Officers does not come cheap and
sustaining the quality of their training
requires real leadership and attention.
Yet there are some serious threats in
the current reforms. The severe cuts in
policing have tended to fall heavily on
specialist units. The use of Regulation
A19 – a blunt weapon that allows Chief
Constables to dispense with officers who
have attained 30 years of pensionable
service – has had a serious impact on
the retention of experienced, trained
detectives. The abolition of the National
Policing Improvement Agency, which
was responsible for national training until
December 2012, has caused a hiatus in
the support for national training that
has not yet been taken up by the newly
established College of Policing.
It is almost certainly unwise for the SPR
to have neglected force capacity for crime
investigation in its priorities. By prioritising
public order, organised crime and
terrorism, it may already be skewing vital
decisions being taken by the new PCCs on
their first budgets.
It is difficult to measure the capacity
required to investigate serious crime in
a force. The numbers are small and one
major incident, such as a missing and
potentially murdered young child, will,
rightly, absorb all the capacity and more
of a small force, leaving it needing support
from its neighbours and from national
resources. If every force has cut their
capacity to the bone, then such assistance
will be harder to find.
Moreover, the more that major crime
investigations have to be resourced by
drawing down on day-to-day capacity
to investigate crimes such as burglary,
assault and sexual crimes, the more that
police forces’ capacity to meet ‘normal’
priorities will be eroded. These are the
type of rationing decisions that are likely
to become more and more prevalent as
the cuts bite deeper. The SPR is silent in
offering advice, meaning that there are
likely to be 41 different solutions.
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