Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation
Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation
Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation
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OVERVIEW<br />
“Whatever strategies the police<br />
deploy, they must pay close attention<br />
to their legitimacy with the public.”<br />
to Parliament; in Northern Ireland,<br />
a single police force accountable to<br />
a board of democratically-elected<br />
politicians. There are some obvious<br />
reasons for such differences. It would,<br />
for example, be difficult to imagine a<br />
single elected individual police and<br />
crime commissioner being able to<br />
establish legitimacy in the divided<br />
politics of Northern Ireland.<br />
However, police ‘reform’ did not<br />
start in 2010, with the election of the<br />
coalition government. There have been<br />
nearly 20 years of police reforms in<br />
the <strong>UK</strong>, which started with the setting<br />
up of the Sheehy Inquiry in 1993 by<br />
the then Home Secretary, Ken Clarke.<br />
Sheehy, like Winsor in 2010, was asked<br />
to make recommendations to modernise<br />
the police. Although many of his<br />
recommendations were discarded, there<br />
were significant impacts on the contracts<br />
and performance pay of chief officers.<br />
Further reform<br />
Through the Labour government<br />
between 1997 and 2010, there were<br />
several further phases of reform:<br />
streamlining of the selection processes for<br />
chief officers extending civilianisation,<br />
including the creation of police<br />
community support officers the creation<br />
of the National <strong>Policing</strong> Improvement<br />
Agency and the Serious Organised<br />
Crime Agency; a national system<br />
of accountability through the <strong>Police</strong><br />
Performance Assessment Framework.<br />
At the same time Labour made<br />
significant investments in the police<br />
and, particularly, in neighbourhood<br />
policing. The main thrust of this series<br />
of reforms was to improve the efficiency<br />
and effectiveness of the police through<br />
managerial accountability, while<br />
enhancing their responsiveness at a local<br />
level.<br />
The limits of ‘managerial’ reform<br />
became clear in Sir Ronnie Flanagan’s<br />
review of policing in 2008. The<br />
burgeoning bureaucracy and plethora of<br />
targets had crowded out the flexibility to<br />
meet local needs. Labour responded by<br />
shifting away from targets and towards a<br />
more service-based contractual approach.<br />
The incoming coalition in 2010<br />
announced that it was abandoning all<br />
targets apart from one – crime-fighting<br />
– and then set out a new phase of police<br />
reform, which would be centred on<br />
substituting democratic for managerial<br />
accountability.<br />
<strong>Policing</strong> past, present and future<br />
In the articles that follow, key elements of<br />
the past, present and future of policing<br />
are explained. A substantial part of<br />
this Review is centred on the coalition’s<br />
reform programme. There are many<br />
dimensions to this programme, not least<br />
the accompanying deep cuts to core<br />
police budgets. Some aspects of this are<br />
highly controversial, provoking strong<br />
criticism from within and without the<br />
police service. In the second half of the<br />
Review, the focus turns from reform to<br />
the challenges of policing and the nature<br />
of police work.<br />
There are a number of important<br />
themes, which are worth highlighting as<br />
you work your way through the articles.<br />
First and foremost, the role of the<br />
police remains a matter of hot debate.<br />
On the face of it, it is obvious that the<br />
police role should centre on crime.<br />
However, from that point on there are<br />
sharp differences between those who<br />
argue that the police should take a wider<br />
social and preventive role and those who<br />
advocate a narrower focus on ‘catching<br />
criminals’.<br />
Indeed, there are also arguments,<br />
presented here, that an even narrower,<br />
emergency service role would be better.<br />
These debates are important, but in the<br />
past have often been uninformed by the<br />
body of knowledge about how policing<br />
can be effective.<br />
Over the past 25 years research<br />
has moved policing a long way past<br />
the ‘nothing works’ of the 1980s and<br />
provided a new vision of a police service<br />
targeting high-crime places, tackling<br />
high-harm offenders and protecting<br />
vulnerable victims.<br />
On top of this, the latest research has<br />
shown that whatever strategies the police<br />
deploy, they must pay close attention<br />
to their legitimacy with the public.<br />
Legitimacy matters because it sustains the<br />
law keeping of the law abiding and may<br />
discourage law breaking in the rest.<br />
POLICING <strong>UK</strong> | 9