Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation
Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation
Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation
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THE ROLE OF POLICE<br />
“Society understands that it is not<br />
enough to wait until the bomb explodes<br />
and then find those responsible.<br />
We need to get upstream.”<br />
the judicial system, most practitioners<br />
seemed more concerned with criminals<br />
than victims.<br />
Crime science<br />
Hence the birth of a more tightlydefined<br />
response. Crime science can be<br />
thought of as an offshoot of criminology<br />
that seeks practical answers to crime.<br />
It has a special affection for two other<br />
branches, which also focus on weaknesses<br />
in the parent discipline experimental<br />
criminology, which applies scientific<br />
rigour; and situational criminology, which<br />
studies circumstances which trigger crime<br />
instead of the offender.<br />
Crime science examines the chain of<br />
events that leads to victimisation and<br />
seeks to cut the weakest link. This tends<br />
to prioritise critical features close to the<br />
offence in time and place, like temptation<br />
and opportunity, rather than remoter and<br />
harder to influence factors like parenting<br />
or personality.<br />
It is multidisciplinary, recruiting skills<br />
from architecture through economics,<br />
engineering, geography and psychology<br />
to oology. It aims to help design out<br />
unnecessary flaws in products, services<br />
and policies, and it designs in features that<br />
make these things default to safe.<br />
It is big on statistics – and a new<br />
secure data lab planned at UCL will be<br />
a breakthrough in number-crunching<br />
anonymised police and intelligence<br />
records to find patterns in what looks<br />
like clutter. It embraces forensic science<br />
and smart detection processes to make<br />
offending more precarious. On the<br />
other hand, it strongly favours POP, the<br />
problem-oriented policing approach,<br />
which seeks to shift the emphasis to<br />
solving community problems rather than<br />
improving arrest rates. It sees the courts<br />
as a last resort, as in civil disputes, rather<br />
than as the first device to reach for in<br />
the toolbox. And it privileges inherent<br />
solutions, such as natural surveillance<br />
rather than high walls – target softening,<br />
if you like, as opposed to target<br />
hardening.<br />
A different paradigm<br />
This all adds up to a rather different<br />
agenda, but it is one that is hard to put<br />
across to policymakers and police. The<br />
best ideas should be easy to express<br />
simple, concise, or at least explained<br />
by anecdote. Crime science is a whole<br />
approach linked only by an evidencebased<br />
and outcome-focus ambition to<br />
cut crime.<br />
Even those who are sympathetic tend<br />
to regard it as an accessory to mainstream<br />
methods rather than as a different<br />
paradigm. They acknowledge that<br />
opportunity makes the thief, and yet the<br />
tautological belief that crime is caused by<br />
criminals runs deep. Indeed, for frontline<br />
police officers it seems axiomatic that<br />
offenders are the problem rather than<br />
a symptom. Their principal approach<br />
to crime, indeed a large part of their<br />
training, is to act as paralegals, precisely<br />
as Charles owan and ichard Mayne<br />
hoped they would not.<br />
Meanwhile, the tidal flows of crime<br />
are dictated by gravitational forces far<br />
beyond the control of conventional<br />
policing. The reckless manufacturing of<br />
high-value cars or mobile phones with<br />
no inbuilt security was tackled only when<br />
they had spawned crime epidemics.<br />
Now, as crime migrates from physical to<br />
virtual, the police are ill-placed to prevent<br />
the next pandemic.<br />
As fraud becomes endemic most forces<br />
have no fraud squads, let alone decisive<br />
understanding or control of crime, which<br />
has no clear physical location. They<br />
certainly cannot be said to have their<br />
hands on the levers that will dictate the<br />
next crime surge.<br />
Politicians, failing to comprehend<br />
the forces that dominate crime rates,<br />
argue at the margins and rearrange<br />
the furniture. Many of them really did<br />
believe that introducing police and<br />
crime commissioners instead of <strong>Police</strong><br />
Authorities was the most radical idea in<br />
crime fighting since the days of obert<br />
Peel. Bless them.<br />
On the contrary it might entrench<br />
populist, parochial and old-fashioned<br />
ideas of policing and is likely to measure<br />
its success in detection rates rather<br />
than outpacing other countries’ falls in<br />
victimisation.<br />
Prevention better than cure<br />
Paradoxically, terrorism may help to<br />
change things for the better. Society<br />
understands that it is not enough to<br />
wait until the bomb explodes and then<br />
find those responsible. We need to get<br />
upstream. We need the finest intelligence<br />
to understand who is planning what and<br />
to discover where our vulnerabilities are.<br />
We have to drive the bad guys away from<br />
their prime targets to ones that cause us<br />
less harm and give them less satisfaction.<br />
And we need to pursue their recruiters<br />
more than focus on their foot soldiers.<br />
All this calls for the police to be pushed<br />
higher up the food chain. As owan and<br />
Mayne always realised, prevention is<br />
better than cure and is a very great deal<br />
better than relying on the cumbersome,<br />
costly and recidivism-plagued criminal<br />
justice system.<br />
There are answers to crime lying<br />
around waiting to be picked up. Crime<br />
science can point them out and help<br />
exploit them. But how long will it be<br />
before it is brought centre-stage<br />
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