It’s time for a fundamental “reset moment”, writes Baroness Louise Casey in a report for the Tony Blair Institute titled ‘Rebuilding Trust and Delivering Safer Communities: A Plan for Reforming UK Policing’.
She writes in a foreword to the document: “The public are not fools. They have noticed the decline in visible neighbourhood policing. They have seen the drop-off in the charge rate, with only 6 per cent of offences charged. They can see that the response to cross-cutting issues like fraud and serious organised crime is not what it ought to be. They also know that the job facing police is different to the one they faced a decade ago, including dealing with a large rise in serious violence, both in the home and on the streets.”
She led an independent review of the Met Police’s culture and standards of behaviour, that reported devastatingly in March. On that point, the TBI report argues that the Casey’s review findings ‘were not exclusive to the Metropolitan Police but spoke to a broader failure to uphold and enforce standards within policing’.
The Institute plans to release three reports on law and order – and two further policy papers on preventing the causes of crime, and reform of the criminal justice system.
Among the more striking proposals is a ‘single UK-wide police force to lead on all crimes and threats which span force boundaries, encompassing counter-terrorism, SOC and cyber-enabled crime’. That ‘would entail removing counter-terrorism policing from the Metropolitan Police and the policing of fraud from the City of London Police’.
Under the heading ‘a Modern and Flexible Workforce’, the report proposes that the UK Government should create a series of new specialist entry routes and pathways into policing to attract talent from outside (such as analysts and investigators with experience of the private sector) and, in parallel, commission a review into the case for reforming police employment regulations to drive modernisation. Moreover, they should ask the College of Policing to advise on reforming the pay structure to incentivise skills and examine the case for a new “licence to practice” to drive up professionalism. The College of Policing should itself be reformed so as to enable it to play a more proactive role in monitoring and overseeing professional standards’.
Also proposed are a ‘National Digital Forensics Agency’; and a change to the law so that whereas HM Inspectorate’s findings of underperformance are ‘tolerated rather than managed’, the inspectorate has powers so that forces are legally required to act on its recommendations. The College of Policing should design and produce ‘accessible performance scorecards using available policing data, enabling the public to understand how their force compares with its peers, particularly on issues of local concern’, such as ASB (anti-social behaviour).
You can read the report in full at https://www.institute.global/.
Photo by Mark Rowe; Durham Police van, Durham.
