Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation

THE ROLE OF POLICE
Following the
evidence
The challenge of evidence based
policing. By Alex Murray
Alex Murray is Superintendent,
Crime and Operations,
West Midlands Police
How effective as a police service
are we? Can we answer this
question with any integrity?
A recent definition of integrity defines
it as ‘having the courage to meet the
demands of reality’. In other words
‘no spin’.
This suits the arguments behind
evidence based policing very well. If
the police or any party claim success or
failure about crime without the evidence
to back it up, they are guilty of either
being naïve, or worse, lacking integrity.
Evidence based policing and integrity
therefore go hand in hand.
Evidence based policing then does not
refer to the evidence the Crown places
before a court to satisfy the criminal
justice system. Rather it is the grounds
on which policing decisions are made to
achieve a particular objective. Professor
Lawrence Sherman, the Wolfson
Professor of Criminology at Cambridge,
defines evidence based policing as the
use of the best available research on the
outcomes of police work to implement
guidelines”.
The benefits of an
evidence based approach
The value of evidence based policing to
police is demonstrated in two ways.
Firstly, it can unravel what we do,
in which case we change our tactics
and try something different. With the
current fiscal constraints it is no longer
acceptable to do things that might be
ineffective. For example, we often hear
that police tactics that focus on hot
spots, rather than general patrol of an
area, pushes crime around the corner.
Recent strong evidence in this area
demonstrates that often the opposite
is true. Policing a hot spot causes a
‘diffusion of benefit’ into areas not
receiving the attention and is unlikely to
cause crime to shift to the next street or
town. Next time we hear the cause of a
crime spike being that all policing efforts
were concentrated in a neighboring
hot spot we can rightly question the
assertion.
Similarly we assume that prosecution
is effective. What then should the
reaction be to systematic evidence
that suggests putting a younger person
through the criminal justice system
causes an increase in their offending
behaviour that outweighs the benefit
realised through their prosecution? Or
that prison can cause more crime?
When, as Peel proposed, the
effectiveness of policing is measured
in the absence of crime and disorder
rather than a reaction to it, then taking
an evidence based approach can force us
to challenge basic tenets of our practice
like patrol and prosecution.
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