Police have become bogged down in a ‘snow-storm’ of guidance at the expense of availability to the public the Chief Inspector of Constabulary, Sir Denis O’Connor, warned.
Addressing senior members of police forces and police authorities, Sir Denis said: "The key point is this: police cannot exhaustively offset particular risks to particular individuals without reducing the resources to provide general safety for all us – Isaiah Berlin, one of the leading academics of the 20th century, told us that all choices have costs – we can’t have it all."<br><br>He said that the overly cautious approach of the service resulted in the production of 2615 pages of guidance for officers last year alone. The production of “guidance” around particular risks and legislation which has been “rising year on year” is leading to a growth of specialists and less visible officers being available to the general public.<br><br>Sir Denis said: “In the last year, alone 52 new guidance documents were produced for the police amounting to 2615 pages. These manuals contained over 4000 new promises, covering duties such as policing international cricket matches and data collection for missing persons. If all the pages from currently available national guidance (6497 pages) were laid end to end they would be three times higher than the Eiffel tower.”<br><br>Officers becoming experts in specialist areas of knowledge means fewer police officers are left to deal with everyday policing tasks, resulting in a steady drift away from front line policing. Sir Denis said: “In the last four years there has been a 30.9% increase in officers covering national functions such as Counter Terrorism, an 8.8% rise in investigators and a 2.4% fall in the number of uniform officers policing our communities, equating to around 1,400 officers. This fall has been masked by the introduction of Police Community Support Officers.”<br><br>The vast volume seeks to cover all possible outcomes no matter how unlikely. And it affects officer behaviours; for example, officers now feel the need to escort drunk people home just in case they later come to some harm.<br><br>Sir Denis concluded: “The British model of policing is built around the presence of bobbies on the beat, preventing crime. The more policy aimed at eliminating all possible risks, the less<br>time officers are available to those who need them.”<br><br>He told the ACPO summer annual conference: "Let’s look at a new modern way of layering knowledge transfer and information made available to the frontline – the ‘apps’ approach on iPhone is more like it, than telephone directories of guidance."<br><br>Sir Denis queried the police’s current approach to mitigating risks. He spoke of of how "officers dislike leaving people suffering from mental health problems by themselves if they come across them. They would much rather try and find someone<br>to hand them onto lest they be blamed should something later go wrong. Officers resort to walk / drive drunk people home as the only other alternative is to take them to hospital, which would take even more officers off the street."
He summed up: "But – the truth is that the mountain of guidance is a symptom of the real issue here, not the cause. Neither really is risk. Both arise from a fudged, over elastic view of what the police can and should do 24/7 for the public.
"The departure of police from the street, the accumulation of guidance, the drift to specialist posts are all of a piece. The service needs to tackle risk and so called ‘risk aversion’ at source."
