This week, the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper plans to announce new police performance targets. Perhaps the government has been stung by the growing perception that Labour’s stance on law and order consists mainly of hurty words overreach and emptying jails. But as the legacy of well-meaning but dumb crime policies introduced by the last Labour administration shows, Cooper should beware the law of unintended consequences.
Back in the late Noughties, I was by day the Home Office’s senior official in South West England, accountable for crime, drugs and counter terrorism. By night, I struggled into an ill-fitting stab vest and became Special Constable 74170. It gave me a unique opportunity to see nationally imposed crime targets from both ends of the telescope. Rolling about on the ground at 2 a.m. with belligerent drunk teenagers is an instructive way to critique policy made in Whitehall.
You can’t have targets when record numbers of officers are leaving the force due to moral injury
Back then, a series of top-down targets known as ‘public service agreements’ governed how the huge increase in public spending brought in by Tony Blair’s government was allocated. The problem with crime is that the imposition of political targets, like those I policed with the five chief constables on my patch, produced more problems than they solved.
Here are two examples of good intentions gone bad off the page. The ‘offences brought to justice’ target was a laudable attempt to connect crime with consequences. In practice, this was a target to arrest as many people as possible. The least competent ‘criminals’ who would do far better with a metaphorical kick up the arse were, of course, young people. They were low-hanging fruit, plucked with alacrity by me and my volunteer colleagues for an ‘attaboy’ pat on the back to meet arrest targets everyone on the ground knew were mad. I did try to raise this at the big table in Marsham Street several times but to no avail. The optics were the important thing, the criminalisation of young people now carrying cautions or worse was the collateral damage.
One of my favourite paradoxical measures was ‘public confidence in the police’. This metric, measured by polling, was required to exceed 60 per cent by 2012 – by which time David Cameron had actually swept away all the baroque regional government structures that policed the police.
The crime surveys revealed a bizarre outcome. In Devon and Cornwall, a safe retirement haven where most people’s encounters with wrong’uns was via Doc Martin, confidence in police was awful: it was worse than many parts of the country where violent crime was comparatively huge. There was much Whitehall hand-wringing and I was lambasted for my failures. We put on an expensive multi-agency conference to gather partners together and drill down into the detail. This revealed that, far from pensioners fearing they would be murdered in their beds, the reason for such mistrust in the police was down to weeds and dog mess– two areas the police were not even responsible for controlling.
We don’t know the full details of this new target regime that Cooper wants bring in. But inevitably, there are already plans for yet more regulatory architecture to measure progress – which I fear will do little to make the much-needed improvements on the ground. Police crime clear-up rates are already lamentable, but it should be the job of democratically elected police and crime commissioners (PCCs) to hold chiefs to account. It is them, after all, who will be held accountable at the ballot box if they fail.
Labour is completely opposed to PCCs, so maybe this land grab is one way to wrest back control. But what if it simply duplicates and complicates an already opaque monitoring regime bedevilled by competing definitions, changing demography and polarised communities?
According to proposals trailed in the media, among the areas to receive special attention will be violence against women and girls. Femicide is already a national emergency. Three women are murdered on average each week in this country and the rate has barely changed over a decade. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) currently manages to convict barely over half of adult rape allegations. Perhaps Cooper’s boss, who once ran the CPS, has some ideas about how to improve this performance.
Cooper’s new targets are also expected to focus on police conduct – a source of obvious serious concern. But again, weighing the pig won’t fatten it – to coin an unfortunate phrase. Instead of handing down diktats that will excite and probably misdirect senior officers, the government should fund the better selection, training and support of front-line supervisors who make the moral weather on the streets and in the briefing rooms. Culture is not made or changed in the c-suite. It is what happens when they aren’t around and sergeants fail to do their jobs.
If there is one thing that central government should own and measure, it is to ensure that every police chief is signed up to the ‘broken windows theory’ of crime control exemplified by Bill Bratton. As police chief in New York and Los Angeles, Bratton transformed both cities from being anarchic hell holes to two of the safest places to live in the US. During his tenure in Los Angeles, violent crime fell by 54 per cent. The principle he employed was simple: police low level quality-of-life crimes assertively and deprive communities of those zones of criminal impunity which otherwise poison neighbourhoods, growing in area and potency.
But even as the Home Secretary plans to improve the policing of crimes that matter to ordinary people – however imperfectly, she is also signalling that she wants the police to expand their recording of non-crime hate incidents. Stuck in the middle are the men and women who pull on a stab vest every day and who are never guaranteed to return home in one piece. You can’t have targets when record numbers of officers are leaving the force due to the moral injury of delivering too much service with too few resources and trial by social media. She should remember the words of my former boss and one of her predecessors, Theresa May. She was wrong on many things to do with policing but she was right on this: ‘Targets don’t fight crime.’
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