Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation

OVERVIEW
“Whatever strategies the police
deploy, they must pay close attention
to their legitimacy with the public.”
to Parliament; in Northern Ireland,
a single police force accountable to
a board of democratically-elected
politicians. There are some obvious
reasons for such differences. It would,
for example, be difficult to imagine a
single elected individual police and
crime commissioner being able to
establish legitimacy in the divided
politics of Northern Ireland.
However, police ‘reform’ did not
start in 2010, with the election of the
coalition government. There have been
nearly 20 years of police reforms in
the UK, which started with the setting
up of the Sheehy Inquiry in 1993 by
the then Home Secretary, Ken Clarke.
Sheehy, like Winsor in 2010, was asked
to make recommendations to modernise
the police. Although many of his
recommendations were discarded, there
were significant impacts on the contracts
and performance pay of chief officers.
Further reform
Through the Labour government
between 1997 and 2010, there were
several further phases of reform:
streamlining of the selection processes for
chief officers extending civilianisation,
including the creation of police
community support officers the creation
of the National Policing Improvement
Agency and the Serious Organised
Crime Agency; a national system
of accountability through the Police
Performance Assessment Framework.
At the same time Labour made
significant investments in the police
and, particularly, in neighbourhood
policing. The main thrust of this series
of reforms was to improve the efficiency
and effectiveness of the police through
managerial accountability, while
enhancing their responsiveness at a local
level.
The limits of ‘managerial’ reform
became clear in Sir Ronnie Flanagan’s
review of policing in 2008. The
burgeoning bureaucracy and plethora of
targets had crowded out the flexibility to
meet local needs. Labour responded by
shifting away from targets and towards a
more service-based contractual approach.
The incoming coalition in 2010
announced that it was abandoning all
targets apart from one – crime-fighting
– and then set out a new phase of police
reform, which would be centred on
substituting democratic for managerial
accountability.
Policing past, present and future
In the articles that follow, key elements of
the past, present and future of policing
are explained. A substantial part of
this Review is centred on the coalition’s
reform programme. There are many
dimensions to this programme, not least
the accompanying deep cuts to core
police budgets. Some aspects of this are
highly controversial, provoking strong
criticism from within and without the
police service. In the second half of the
Review, the focus turns from reform to
the challenges of policing and the nature
of police work.
There are a number of important
themes, which are worth highlighting as
you work your way through the articles.
First and foremost, the role of the
police remains a matter of hot debate.
On the face of it, it is obvious that the
police role should centre on crime.
However, from that point on there are
sharp differences between those who
argue that the police should take a wider
social and preventive role and those who
advocate a narrower focus on ‘catching
criminals’.
Indeed, there are also arguments,
presented here, that an even narrower,
emergency service role would be better.
These debates are important, but in the
past have often been uninformed by the
body of knowledge about how policing
can be effective.
Over the past 25 years research
has moved policing a long way past
the ‘nothing works’ of the 1980s and
provided a new vision of a police service
targeting high-crime places, tackling
high-harm offenders and protecting
vulnerable victims.
On top of this, the latest research has
shown that whatever strategies the police
deploy, they must pay close attention
to their legitimacy with the public.
Legitimacy matters because it sustains the
law keeping of the law abiding and may
discourage law breaking in the rest.
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