While the idea of doubling the numbers of police in the UK is wacky and politically impossible, it may be of interest to tease out why, writes Mark Rowe.
According to the most recent statistical snap-shot, England and Wales in September 2023 had about 147,000 full-time equivalent (FTE) police officers, out of a total police workforce including staff of 234,000. The idea for drastically increasing it arose from the announcement last month by the Environment Secretary Steve Barclay of an โinspection surgeโ, and that the Department for the Environment would โquadruple the Environment Agencyโs regulatory capacityโ, which presumably will mean four times as many inspectors. Similarly, after the Manchester Arena Inquiry, the Security Industry Authority (SIA) went about doubling its inspectors (and, sensibly, adding to its other departments, anticipating that more inspections would mean more data, proseuctions and so on). No-one is complaining that the SIA is thereby tyrannical or over-regulating. Everywhere you look, you see workplaces short-staffed: the armed forces, prisons; BBC radio newsrooms are groaning under cuts; the Church of England takes an age to fill clerical vacancies; morning and night you can stand at Euston station and see the departures board turn red with cancellations by the train operator avanti, often citing โshortage of train crewโ.
Perhaps avanti is unable to count how many services it has to run, and how many drivers it will need. Otherwise, the service sector is elastic: the recent Innovation Lab conference by the contractor Carlisle Support Services heard how, in hospitality as in stewarding, a venue might over-book and even then find fewer people turn up for work than are required; that requires some last-minute adapting. Given that fraud is vastly under-reported and -investigated, and that likewise itโs variously claimed that theft from shops, bicycle theft and (by the Daily Telegraph in its front page lead on Monday) burglary has become de-criminalised, even tens of thousands of extra police, assuming they can be recruited and trained (tasks that would also require more people) would merely dent the 4.7 million crimes that went unsolved, according to the stats for the year to June 2023, as aired in December. And who can say how much crime never reaches the police? Thatโs largely traditional, physical-world crime; what of trend of ever more complicated crimes with voluminous data; and the state setting new rules, such as the proposed Protect Duty that would place a legal responsibility on premises of capacity of more than 100 – such as the social club at my local football ground, that usually has a gate of 50. Is anyone expecting that the policeโs counter-terror security advisers (CTSAs) can cover hundreds of thousands of such places? Certainly the country will need more CTSAs or other state agents, if not police officers, to advise; check; and prepare cases for punishment for non-compliance.
We can easily imagine, then, that vastly more cops could fill their shifts: whether โhardโ policing (going after drug dealers) or โsoftโ (spending time with victims of crime). That would mean a vastly expanded state, however; more court cases, more probation officers and prison cells required; more referrals to drug and alcohol dependency treatment, or mental health services. That would hardly pass the โDaily Mail testโ. The newspaperโs editorial of December 29 found it shocking that as third of all recorded crime (thankfully for the Mail editorial writerโs blood pressure, it didnโt seem to occur to them that crime might go unrecorded) was never solved. The editorial charged that โclear up rates are so lamentable they are practically an invitation to break the lawโ. The Mail showed no sympathy for chief constables; โthe Government agreed to pour huge sums of money into policing and the number of bobbies has now surged to a record levelโ. The Mail, which wishes for โlow taxesโ, hardly sounds like itโs open to hiring twice as many police.
Yet if the Met Office can provide online a forecast for any locality that predicts with uncanny accuracy the weather for the next hour or day, could a model or โdigital twinโ do the same for policing; if you input numbers of crimes, allow for variables such as protests and events requiring a police presence, and come up with a range (minimum up) of what number of police that would be good for society, rather than the number it can afford? That could at least inform public debate. As for how to afford the police, and public services, the planet has a crying need to consider how to share out work, if artificial intelligence is to do away with much of it โ assuming that AI does not do the thinking and imposes its decision on society, much like dog owners kennel their pets. If the UK (to stay local) will have far fewer jobs, what will that mean for tax revenue? Will the state have to cut services further, going against the grain of an ever more complex society and economy needing at least state oversight (such as those sewage inspectors)?
Note extra police wonโt necessarily mean less demand for private security officers. If the UK doubled its police, that would hardly mean a corporate bankโs head office in the City of London or a concert hall would halve their guard force or stewarding. Conversely, if the police were to further embrace partnering with private security, that would not necessarily mean a loss in prestige or budget for the police. The two overlap, as you can witness at railway stations busy on a Friday night with pleasure-seekers heading for London; or football stadia. Would even a doubling of police numbers bring them into competition with private security โ would police look to bring alarm handling into police stations as in the early days of intruder alarms in the 1940s, or to elbow out security officers in shopping malls?
Picture by Mark Rowe, Blackpool, last Wednesday.
