Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation
Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation
Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation
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THE ROLE OF POLICE<br />
“The strategic policing requirement is<br />
curiously silent on the quality<br />
and capability of each force’s<br />
investigation teams.”<br />
local forces in meeting the demands of<br />
‘strategic policing’ and which led to the<br />
abortive attempts to amalgamate police<br />
forces. Subsequently, forces were required<br />
to report progress towards meeting an<br />
acceptable level of ‘protective’ services.<br />
Some of that thinking has been<br />
incorporated into the SPR. PCCs and<br />
Chief Constables are required to show<br />
that they have sufficient capacity to deal<br />
with the identified threats and can respond<br />
appropriately. They are particularly<br />
reminded about their responsibilities<br />
under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 to<br />
co-ordinate and lead the response to any<br />
major disaster or civil emergency.<br />
Core capabilities<br />
The SPR goes on to identify some core<br />
policing capabilities – public order, police<br />
use of firearms, surveillance and response<br />
to Chemical, Biological, Radioactive and<br />
Nuclear incidents – which forces must<br />
sustain to agreed national standards. The<br />
new College of <strong>Policing</strong> will be critical in<br />
setting the standards.<br />
However, the SPR is curiously silent<br />
on one other key area of capability – the<br />
quality and capability of each force’s<br />
investigation teams. When policing fails it<br />
has often been because of failures in crime<br />
investigation. Such failures were central to<br />
criticisms levelled at the police service after<br />
the death of Stephen Lawrence. They<br />
were central, a generation earlier, to the<br />
failures that allowed the Yorkshire Ripper<br />
to keep murdering.<br />
On the other hand, the meticulous and<br />
professional work of counter-terrorism<br />
investigators has been crucial to the <strong>UK</strong>’s<br />
ability to convict terrorists in the courts in<br />
recent years. Their skills were formed and<br />
trained in local forces and in major crime<br />
teams.<br />
Indeed, the <strong>UK</strong> has enjoyed an enviable<br />
reputation for its crime investigation as<br />
a result of learning from the errors of<br />
the past. It was the Byford report into<br />
the Yorkshire Ripper investigation that<br />
spurred the development of the modern<br />
Major Incident Room procedures and the<br />
training of Senior Investigating Officers.<br />
The service further responded to the<br />
criticisms in the Royal Commission on<br />
Criminal Justice in 1993 by reforming<br />
the training of all investigators and<br />
building a tiered system of qualifications<br />
– Professionalising the Investigative<br />
Process or PIP – which took a decade to<br />
implement.<br />
The development and training of<br />
detectives and Senior Investigating<br />
Officers does not come cheap and<br />
sustaining the quality of their training<br />
requires real leadership and attention.<br />
Yet there are some serious threats in<br />
the current reforms. The severe cuts in<br />
policing have tended to fall heavily on<br />
specialist units. The use of Regulation<br />
A19 – a blunt weapon that allows Chief<br />
Constables to dispense with officers who<br />
have attained 30 years of pensionable<br />
service – has had a serious impact on<br />
the retention of experienced, trained<br />
detectives. The abolition of the National<br />
<strong>Policing</strong> Improvement Agency, which<br />
was responsible for national training until<br />
December 2012, has caused a hiatus in<br />
the support for national training that<br />
has not yet been taken up by the newly<br />
established College of <strong>Policing</strong>.<br />
It is almost certainly unwise for the SPR<br />
to have neglected force capacity for crime<br />
investigation in its priorities. By prioritising<br />
public order, organised crime and<br />
terrorism, it may already be skewing vital<br />
decisions being taken by the new PCCs on<br />
their first budgets.<br />
It is difficult to measure the capacity<br />
required to investigate serious crime in<br />
a force. The numbers are small and one<br />
major incident, such as a missing and<br />
potentially murdered young child, will,<br />
rightly, absorb all the capacity and more<br />
of a small force, leaving it needing support<br />
from its neighbours and from national<br />
resources. If every force has cut their<br />
capacity to the bone, then such assistance<br />
will be harder to find.<br />
Moreover, the more that major crime<br />
investigations have to be resourced by<br />
drawing down on day-to-day capacity<br />
to investigate crimes such as burglary,<br />
assault and sexual crimes, the more that<br />
police forces’ capacity to meet ‘normal’<br />
priorities will be eroded. These are the<br />
type of rationing decisions that are likely<br />
to become more and more prevalent as<br />
the cuts bite deeper. The SPR is silent in<br />
offering advice, meaning that there are<br />
likely to be 41 different solutions.<br />
POLICING <strong>UK</strong> | 65