After last week’s Autumn Statement by Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt, that set out likely cuts to police among other public services – ‘Austerity 2.0’, according to Labour – Mark Rowe has been considering what that’ll mean for private security. Here he ponders the police.
The police and all 999 services matter to private security as citizens like anyone else, and in their jobs. Although police have declined to keep up with swathes of modern crime – such as fraud done digitally – there remains physical world crimes that private security cannot and will not reasonably take on, at least not wholly. If there’s an aggressive beggar on the high street, protesters are blocking the entrance to your works, or a gang rams a stolen car into a post office to steal the cash machine, what will be the police (and behind that, a criminal justice system) response?
Businesses also want a consistent response, so that they can plan and insure accordingly. In the case of that ram-raid of a shop, will the response be similar in Fraserburgh and Farnborough? They may be 600 miles apart, that on the Continent might mean at least one country lies between the two, but they’re in the same country (for now).
The silence about what the Autumn Statement means for the police has been ominous. The Police Federation, the rank and file police body, has complained of a real-terms pay cut faced by rank and file officers presently of more than 25 per cent at the prevailing rate of inflation; naturally, the Federation reacts first to what anything means to its members, rather than society. As most of a police budget (as in a school or hospital) goes on staff pay, either staff must accept less pay, or fewer staff. That’s unresolved (as identified by Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham in his reaction to the Autumn Statement).
Let’s consider in the police’s own gold-silver-bronze terms; strategic, tactical command and front-line. So often senior people in any field speak discreetly or are unforthcoming; that’s part of how they got to the top. The same may apply after they retire; either it’s become a habit or they are loyal to the organisation (or their pension) or just aren’t that articulate.
Not so with a senior retired cop I had a first conversation with recently. To digest what he said, politicians are ‘not interested’, and 41 of 43 chief constables are careerists. Rather than try to fix things, change for the better, they only seek to keep the wheels on the wagon from falling off so that they do not have to resign. Making our society like the one in Inverted World, the great novel by the great English writer Christopher Priest. Which leads you to ask, what is the purpose of it all? Which in that book led to one of the great endings in literature.
The cop wanted a Royal Commission, to set out what the police should look like, to be best placed for the decades to come (the previous Royal Commission on the police reported in 1962). My only query – that I did not say to the cop – is that you would then need the politicians to make happen whatever the Commission recommended. The same goes for the Manchester Arena Inquiry; its chair Sir John Anderson ended his volume two on the emergency services’ response to the 2017 suicide bombing with the ‘hope’ that it would be acted on. Policing, then, is political.
What of ‘silver command’, tactical? I recall a 2018 conference by the BRE about their accreditation SABRE in summer 2018 at the Etihad Stadium, Manchester. I wrote a series of three articles as a result about Manchester City FC match day security; but looking back the most interesting talk of the day was by a Greater Manchester Police (GMP) sergeant. Two things have stuck in my mind.
One was the response to calls from the public – response officers had far more incidents than they could attend on their shift. It meant that some things got pushed back to the next shift; which inevitably meant a logjam and things didn’t get attended to at all. Indeed, GMP went into special measures for that reason in 2020, and has only just come out. Bear in mind what that meant in human terms. If you have too much email in your in-box, maybe you get by by not answering the mails from middle managers whose layer in the hierarchy could disappear in a puff of smoke and no-one would notice or care; indeed, it might be a slight gain, as you would have fewer emails. But those shift officers were having to leave untouched 999 calls. Some naturally would be more life-threatening than others, but usually the person calling felt a genuine need to dial 999.
As for the bronze level, the sergeant recalled a female police constable who had taken 40 minutes to console an upset old woman. She felt she had to justify taking all that time (while other, maybe more pressing, calls awaited an answer). Was the PC wrong to give time to the old woman? The question applies to other public services – notably nursing, where the NHS has long had a problem with (intangible, hard to measure) care, while doing better with physical treatment (repairing broken limbs). (Manchester Mayor has recently written of finding GMP in 2017 in a ‘state of disrepair‘.)
Here, then, though the effects are hard to capture – and maybe only felt most by the vulnerable and lonely – will further austerity on the police be felt. Disturbingly, police have already been setting out their stall. Here is a passage from a recent speech by NPCC chair Martin Hewitt, to police and crime commissioners (PCCs) on how ‘the vast widening of the policing mission needs to be taken on’:
“There are various figures and estimates but I don’t think there is any doubt that over half of all calls for service we receive are something other than a crime. Some are entirely legitimate police activity, but a substantial proportion see police stepping into health and social work because of an absence of other service provision.
“This issue has been raised at every one of these [PCC] summits and I, and many others, have discussed it with every recent Home Secretary and policing minister. But there has been no meaningful change – and that needs to happen if we are to improve crime reduction and detection rates.”
The implication; police can only and maybe ought only, to respond to crime. Sure; if that is what the public wants. Meanwhile the trend of the Coalition and then Conservative Governments since 2010 has been to drastically narrow the criminal justice pipeline; for example the halving roughly of magistrates courts. Police say they cannot arrest their way out of fraud, and other crimes. Governments since 2010 have deliberately reduced how many people the criminal justice can handle. Add Home Office ministers’ claims that crime is falling. By 20 per cent, they said during the Coalition, while the official England and Wales crime survey wasn’t including fraud. Now Home Secretary Suella Braverman repeats the fatuous remark that crime is falling, except for fraud (‘and rape,’ that senior cop said when I mentioned this to him).
You have an Orwellian society where the authorities are seeking to convince the people that they are facing less crime than they are, and if they do try to report a crime, it’s not recorded or nothing comes of it.
It comes down to what people want to ring the police about, and often it’s on the border between crime and nuisance (hence during covid lockdowns complaints of noise soared, little discussed at the time). A personal example; I recall an old friend who died in 2010 who in old age had youths walking past his house on their way to school who – presumably larking about – pushed into his front hedge. Police went to the local school, my friend related to me; and (whether the visit made the difference or not) the nuisance stopped. He was satisfied. The man had served his country; the part of an RAAF Lancaster that he flew in the Second World War is on display in the Imperial War Museum in London, even after the IWM took away most of the exhibits on show. Are householders now supposed to lump it?
Photo by Mark Rowe; street art, Eastvale Place arches, Glasgow.
