John is a regular correspondant to the Herald on a wide range of issues. He has frequently written on policing issues. I have invited John to contribute his views on this blog. Yer tiz!
"I have several friends who are Police Officers. Because of what they tell me and what I have seen during my visit to Crownhill, I know how hard they work and how much is done by the force to catch criminals. Sadly for all these people who are working so hard, I feel that one of the major problems facing the Police is that there is a gap between the work they do and the public perception. Crime may well be reducing, we may well live in an extremely safe country, but to many people the Police have lost control. I have heard many people say, when discussing crimes which have affected them, ”I didn’t phone the Police, what’s the point? They won’t do anything and even if they do catch the person who did this he’ll just get away with it. Of course, if I was speeding it would be a different story!”
Of course there is no truth in much of this but it doesn’t matter. As far as many people are concerned they are rarely affected by crime themselves (bearing out the fact that we DO live in a relatively crime-free country). Anyone unlucky enough to be affected by a major crime is likely to find excellent service, and nobody would expect less.
The problem comes with the low-level crime, the kind of thing which affects many of us from time to time. This is likely to give a less positive image of the Police and the justice system in general. Low-level theft is hardly worth reporting, unless your insurance company insists on a crime number before paying out. The chance of someone getting caught is very low, the chance of getting your belongings back even lower and the chance of the miscreant, if he is caught, being punished in a meaningful way is non-existent. This is a sad indictment of all those officers who are working hard trying to catch small-time thieves, but looking from the outside it is the view people see.
Similarly, consider an old person who is scared to leave home because of the intimidating gang of youths who meet every night outside. He or she calls the Police but either nothing happens or a Police car arrives some hours later and either finds that the troublemakers have now all gone home, or the occupant of the car stops, has a word with the youths and drives off. The youths may be quieter for a while and then they return to their previous, rowdy behaviour.
In all honesty what can the Police do? The youths may well be a nuisance but being a nuisance is not actually against the law. In most cases rowdy youths know there is a limit beyond which they should not step, and they moderate their behaviour accordingly. The problem comes when some of the youths realise that no matter how badly they behave little or nothing will be done to them. This can lead, in extreme circumstances, to these youths getting totally out of control. They get more mouthy and intimidating, eventually leading to the oft-repeated headlines concerning a law-abiding citizen who asks them to keep the noise down and ends up dead.
Every time a member of the public calls the Police and gets no response, or what they see as a response which does not address the problem, it is a nail in the coffin of public trust in the Police. Jim Webster appears to be trying to address the problem of noisy, drunken youths, but he doesn’t have enough officers to cover every area. The response is targeted at areas which suffer from particularly bad problems, which simply pushes the youths, many of whom are not from that area, to regroup elsewhere. What we need is a city-wide response, but there are simply not enough officers to go around.
The Flanagan report, with its criticism of government-imposed paperwork and targets, may help this situation assuming that the reduction in paperwork does not then lead to a reduction in Police numbers, which was also recommended in the Flanagan report. The very last thing we need right now is fewer Police!
Some interesting facts appeared in the papers after the sad death of Michael Todd, Chief of Greater Manchester Police. Mr Todd was known and respected as a “Copper’s copper”, an old fashioned thief-taker. He was not known for being politically correct, he was frequently to be seen patrolling the streets of Manchester and even wrestling a suspect to the ground. One of his first acts on taking over the job was to take 200 officers off traffic duty and put them on the beat. He also managed to persuade our notoriously anti-police government to fund an increase in officers. The end result of all this? Burglaries were down 41%, robberies 32% and car crime by 25%. Funny that!
Oh and by the way, his was the only force whose speed cameras made a loss!"
