Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation
Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation
Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation
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THE ROLE OF POLICE<br />
Crime science<br />
<strong>Police</strong> focus needs to be shifted to<br />
preventing and reducing crime rather<br />
than catching and prosecuting offenders<br />
after the act, writes Nick Ross<br />
Nick Ross is a journalist and<br />
broadcaster. He presented the BBC’s<br />
Crimewatch <strong>UK</strong> from 1984-2007<br />
Charles Rowan and Richard<br />
Mayne, Britain’s first police<br />
commissioners, must be rolling<br />
in their graves. <strong>Policing</strong> has evolved very<br />
much as they feared it might, preoccupied<br />
by catching and prosecuting offenders<br />
rather than cutting crime. Worse still,<br />
police, politicians and the public elide<br />
two quite different aims, justice and crime<br />
prevention. They are both important<br />
but they have disappointingly little in<br />
common.<br />
ou do not have to be a sophisticated<br />
statistician to recognise that court<br />
disposals rarely correlate with crime, let<br />
alone determine its trajectory. Take any<br />
of the mass offences which plagued the<br />
industrialised world from the post-war<br />
period onwards shoplifting, burglary and<br />
car crime. They rose exponentially until<br />
the 1990s before peaking and then falling<br />
dramatically. Neither the surge nor the<br />
plunge owes much to sentencing changes<br />
or even to detection rates.<br />
Most of the different categories of<br />
violence followed the same rise-andfall<br />
pattern, albeit often a few years<br />
later. They did so more or less equally<br />
in jurisdictions with hard punitive<br />
systems such as Texas and soft ones<br />
as in Denmark. In England, homicide<br />
surged before falling to its lowest levels<br />
for well over a decade. Yet detection rates<br />
remained about the same and conviction<br />
for murder continued to attract a uniform<br />
life sentence.<br />
Does this mean policing is a waste of<br />
time Obviously not. Imagine a world<br />
with no sanctions for behaving badly.<br />
But it does suggest something almost as<br />
dramatic modern policing is surprisingly<br />
tangential to changes in victimisation<br />
rates. For me, as a broadcaster best known<br />
for helping police to catch offenders, this<br />
was a lightbulb insight.<br />
But if policing was not the big issue,<br />
what was causing these huge fluctuations<br />
in crime I turned to criminology for<br />
answers; but found that it had few<br />
convincing explanations. More accurately,<br />
it had lots of theories but they were<br />
rarely grounded in properly controlled<br />
experiments or in detailed statistical<br />
analysis.<br />
The books and journals were often<br />
politicised, either vehicles for liberals to<br />
convince themselves of liberal ideas or<br />
for conservatives to prove to themselves<br />
that they were right. Rarely if ever did<br />
either side have data to persuade the<br />
other. It was an ‘ology’ with precious little<br />
science. More disconcertingly, much like<br />
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