Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation

THE ROLE OF POLICE
“Society understands that it is not
enough to wait until the bomb explodes
and then find those responsible.
We need to get upstream.”
the judicial system, most practitioners
seemed more concerned with criminals
than victims.
Crime science
Hence the birth of a more tightlydefined
response. Crime science can be
thought of as an offshoot of criminology
that seeks practical answers to crime.
It has a special affection for two other
branches, which also focus on weaknesses
in the parent discipline experimental
criminology, which applies scientific
rigour; and situational criminology, which
studies circumstances which trigger crime
instead of the offender.
Crime science examines the chain of
events that leads to victimisation and
seeks to cut the weakest link. This tends
to prioritise critical features close to the
offence in time and place, like temptation
and opportunity, rather than remoter and
harder to influence factors like parenting
or personality.
It is multidisciplinary, recruiting skills
from architecture through economics,
engineering, geography and psychology
to oology. It aims to help design out
unnecessary flaws in products, services
and policies, and it designs in features that
make these things default to safe.
It is big on statistics – and a new
secure data lab planned at UCL will be
a breakthrough in number-crunching
anonymised police and intelligence
records to find patterns in what looks
like clutter. It embraces forensic science
and smart detection processes to make
offending more precarious. On the
other hand, it strongly favours POP, the
problem-oriented policing approach,
which seeks to shift the emphasis to
solving community problems rather than
improving arrest rates. It sees the courts
as a last resort, as in civil disputes, rather
than as the first device to reach for in
the toolbox. And it privileges inherent
solutions, such as natural surveillance
rather than high walls – target softening,
if you like, as opposed to target
hardening.
A different paradigm
This all adds up to a rather different
agenda, but it is one that is hard to put
across to policymakers and police. The
best ideas should be easy to express
simple, concise, or at least explained
by anecdote. Crime science is a whole
approach linked only by an evidencebased
and outcome-focus ambition to
cut crime.
Even those who are sympathetic tend
to regard it as an accessory to mainstream
methods rather than as a different
paradigm. They acknowledge that
opportunity makes the thief, and yet the
tautological belief that crime is caused by
criminals runs deep. Indeed, for frontline
police officers it seems axiomatic that
offenders are the problem rather than
a symptom. Their principal approach
to crime, indeed a large part of their
training, is to act as paralegals, precisely
as Charles owan and ichard Mayne
hoped they would not.
Meanwhile, the tidal flows of crime
are dictated by gravitational forces far
beyond the control of conventional
policing. The reckless manufacturing of
high-value cars or mobile phones with
no inbuilt security was tackled only when
they had spawned crime epidemics.
Now, as crime migrates from physical to
virtual, the police are ill-placed to prevent
the next pandemic.
As fraud becomes endemic most forces
have no fraud squads, let alone decisive
understanding or control of crime, which
has no clear physical location. They
certainly cannot be said to have their
hands on the levers that will dictate the
next crime surge.
Politicians, failing to comprehend
the forces that dominate crime rates,
argue at the margins and rearrange
the furniture. Many of them really did
believe that introducing police and
crime commissioners instead of Police
Authorities was the most radical idea in
crime fighting since the days of obert
Peel. Bless them.
On the contrary it might entrench
populist, parochial and old-fashioned
ideas of policing and is likely to measure
its success in detection rates rather
than outpacing other countries’ falls in
victimisation.
Prevention better than cure
Paradoxically, terrorism may help to
change things for the better. Society
understands that it is not enough to
wait until the bomb explodes and then
find those responsible. We need to get
upstream. We need the finest intelligence
to understand who is planning what and
to discover where our vulnerabilities are.
We have to drive the bad guys away from
their prime targets to ones that cause us
less harm and give them less satisfaction.
And we need to pursue their recruiters
more than focus on their foot soldiers.
All this calls for the police to be pushed
higher up the food chain. As owan and
Mayne always realised, prevention is
better than cure and is a very great deal
better than relying on the cumbersome,
costly and recidivism-plagued criminal
justice system.
There are answers to crime lying
around waiting to be picked up. Crime
science can point them out and help
exploit them. But how long will it be
before it is brought centre-stage
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