Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation

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