Unwelcome though it may be to some in private security, partnering between it and the police is plateauing, argues Mark Rowe, and to take it further will require police to give up budgets and power, and politicians, local or national, of whatever stripe, to either permit deeper partnering or, more likely, demand it by way of legislation.
Among academic criminologists and on the ground, since at least the turn of the millennium, the assumption has been that private security, having grown for decades in terms of numbers, functions and visibility, would do more of the same – take on more roles that once belonged to the state and that the police carried out. In a phrase, we would see a police, or policing, ‘family’. After a fashion, that has happened. As in a human family, not everyone is dutiful, let alone at all times; the politicians in power, Labour and Tory alike, have let it happen without any noticeable plan – in fact, the on-street uniformed policing landscape has become ever messier, with PCSOs (police community support officers), and various wardens and rangers.
The idea of the private sector becoming ever more visible and valued has been powerful for many reasons. The private security sector – far outnumbering the police – would like it. More subtly, there’s the idea of progress – that despite various twists, life is becoming gradually ever better. And while there’s nothing new under the sun, as life becomes ever more complex, entirely new things come into being without input from the traditional police. Hence a blancmange of regulators – the ICO for data protection, FSA for financial services, Ofcom (still in the process) for ‘online safety’, and so forth.
The private sector can appeal to sheer utility – private contractors can take roles not requiring the power of arrest, leaving the police to do what the public wants – whether collaring drug dealers by breaking through doors, or the owners of dangerous dogs. What’s to stop a private firm from taking the arrested person, transporting them to custody, processing them and holding them in cells (as far as the Old Bailey, where the cell corridors are run by the contractor Serco)?
Partnering, pioneering use of private contractors by the police, has gone on for years, yet never systematically. At least arguably, that leaves each police force to develop good practice that reflects its geographical area and socio-economic make-up. As arguably, that leaves each force to carry on doing things the way they’ve always been done. As life in fact is changing drastically – unless you are still using gramophones and dolly tubs – too often it means police forces are sticks in the mud.
And in places private partnering is being reversed. In 2012, G4S hailed a ten-year, £200m contract with Lincolnshire Police, one of the smaller, more rural forces. The county’s police and crime commissioner (PCC) Marc Jones – the Coalition Government was about to created PCCs, when the G4S contract began – after those ten years ended the G4S contract ‘which delivered 18 core policing services’. As the PCC’s report for 2022-23 put it, Lincolnshire Police made the decision that custody services and cleaning services would be provided by private contractors. All other service areas were transferred back to Lincolnshire Police. The complex and challenging transfer (at a cost of £2m) took from April 2022 to March 2023. Jones’ report ‘envisaged that this will provide considerable opportunity for improving service delivery’. Leaving aside whether the contract was a success or not, and for whom, and noting that Lincolnshire hasn’t turned its back on private contractors – cops aren’t wielding mops – UK police have shied away from large and wide contracting with private security and facilities management (FM) contractors.
And yet, why have expensively and highly-trained cops with arrest powers guarding the blue tape around a crime scene? Why not someone SIA-badged, or another civilian? Why are police so squeamish about holding onto non-arresting roles, when SIA badged officers are often the first on the scene, whether an assault, a flood or fire, or an act of terrorism, and indeed got criticised in volume one of the Manchester Arena Inquiry, for not intervening? Why not save the public purse by routinely using private security at crime scene tape; why has the very term ‘policing family’ fallen out of use, and the police use of private security plateaued?
Several reasons. The Conservatives, who in the Thatcher years were temperamentally open to private enterprise, and privatised utilities and the railways, dabbled in private prisons but got no nearer privatising the police. The Conservatives in power from 2010, first in Coalition, then convulsed by Brexit, then unavoidably by covid, appear to have long run out of philosophical steam. PM Rishi Sunak champions an anti-social behaviour (ASB) action plan, and impressively large sounding numbers of police patrol hours (a drop in the ocean, an hour here and there). If the prisons are full and courts backlogged and ASB, nuisances such as littering, loitering, mouthiness and urinating in public and so forth don’t merit an arrest, why not use the action plan to hire private security patrollers? Who might at least have the merit of novelty and be able to relate to those causing ASB better than a cop with the Crown on his headgear? But add to the Conservative paralysis in home affairs the Home Office dysfunction.
Partly, at least some in private security have lost appetite for privatised, public sector work, because of the time and effort to bid for even relatively small pieces of work; partly because while public sector work has its appeal – presumably UK Government will pay on time, and surely won’t go bust – plenty of other work is around.
As for the police side, the Casey Review of the Metropolitan Police’s culture and standards of behaviour, released in March 2023, was such a comprehensive piece of work that it remains worthwhile to quarry, for subjects quite apart from its finding of the Met as ‘institutionally sexist and misogynistic’. When Baroness Louise Casey wrote of a ‘tendency for the Met to set up new teams in response to delivery gaps or to show action is being taken on a particular issue’, taken for granted was that the force sets up teams of cops. Far from being open to the idea of hiring non-cops, Casey wrote also of the ‘stripping out of support and civilian staff roles and functions’, as ‘one of the most significant consequences of the impossible juggle of cost-saving while keeping officer ‘boots on the ground’’; yet that front line was ‘beleaguered’ and ‘denuded’. The Met, then – still the premier police force in the UK that sets the tone for other forces – thinks solely in terms of its own. Ironically, as Casey also set out, ‘frontline policing is the poor relation’. To leave Casey, we can say that one of the reasons for police to be stand-offish about the private sector – better pay and conditions – no longer applies. Casey noted ‘no longer staff canteens across the Met to provide hot meals on shift’ and PCSOs waiting six months for a uniform. Not that the private sector in general or private security in particular treats its people any better; public and private have become equally wretched. To return to Casey, be sure that responsibility lies at the top, or in Casey’s words ‘the neglect of the senior leadership over a very long period of time’.
We are faced with the assumptions of a fairly small number of police leaders (Casey identified ‘elitism’ as one of the Met’s ills), not aired or shared with the public, that any use of private security that might weaken the police service goes against the grain. Or, those police decision-makers may feel unease at trying something different, in case it goes wrong, or blows up in scandal, which might be career-ruining. In any case, as senior police when speaking to a private security audience are careful to point out, police and private industry have different philosophies: the police are a public service, the private contractor works for profit. Except that such a divisive attitude is disrespectful to private security people who turn out in all weathers and all times to protect people and assets; and if the police are so sniffy about hiring people who are there to profit from the cops, why don’t cops mop their own floors?!
Police have long been compromising, perhaps all along if you look far back enough into history. The police have been happy to take money from football clubs for services inside grounds since the Police Act 1964. Cops are for hire, for events, or on campuses, or by local government.
Perhaps, precisely because the conditions inside the police are so bad – the caseloads, the defensiveness, the optimism bias, the ‘culture of not speaking up’ to quote Casey again – whether you’re a leader, a mid-ranking commander or a constable, you resist change because any change is change for the (even) worse.
Such resistance, a focus on what suits the police as an institution rather than the public they are paid to serve, may explain many things: why so little is done about fraud, usually carried out with a cyber element; perhaps police have not in the last 20 years noticed how everything has moved online?! What other institution could devote so little attention to the number one category of incident it faces, the equivalent of cancer to healthcare? The NHS is arguably in the same bind as the police – demand for services, let alone mental health services, far outstrips supply, except that some working for the NHS appear more relaxed, even determined, about working for the public sector some days of the week, and privately some others.
Photo by Mark Rowe: York railway station.
