This week, the charity CrimeStoppers, which receives anonymous tip offs from the public, launched a new hotline – for people to report corruption and abuse by police officers. It’s part of a drive by the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, to ‘expose those who have undermined the Met’s integrity’ following a series of scandals which have shattered confidence in the force and left it in ‘special measures’.
Sir Mark says he employs 3,000 officers who can’t do their job properly because of health, performance or misconduct concerns, including 500 who are suspended or on restricted duties. About 100 are allowed to work only in backroom roles. ‘It’s completely mad that I have to employ people like that as police officers who you can’t trust to have contact with the public, it’s ridiculous,’ the Commissioner told the BBC.
His frustration is understandable. The reasons are more complex.
Traditionally, to get a job as a police officer was to get a job for life. After a probationary period and a spell on the beat you were ‘in’, potentially for 30 years, after which you could retire with a decent pension. Togetherness and camaraderie have always been highly valued in the force – and police officers still watch out for each other, especially when dealing with football hooligans, armed robbers and drunks clutching bottles on a Saturday night.
The downside is that this has contributed to a rather insular culture, in which sub-standard performance, misogynistic attitudes and racist behaviour have too often been tolerated. If there was ever a choice in the police between being loyal to a colleague or calling them out, loyalty generally won out.
The cultural problems have been highlighted in a succession of reports, from Sir Tom Winsor’s withering critique of police pay and conditions across England and Wales, which found ‘weaknesses’ in the assessment and appraisal regime, to Baroness Casey of Blackstock’s interim review of the Met, which uncovered systemic failings in the misconduct process.
Sir Tom’s report, produced a decade ago, led to some changes, such as more stringent fitness tests. But his most far-reaching recommendation, for compulsory redundancy based in part on a police officer’s performance, was fiercely resisted by the Police Federation, which represents constables, sergeants and inspectors. It was never implemented. Judging an officer’s performance remains a delicate area. One police officer told me that new recruits increasingly complain about supervisors who closely monitor their work, and interpret robust management as bullying. They have forgotten that the police are a ‘disciplined’ service, she said.
Baroness Casey’s report, published in October, helps explain why the Metropolitan Police struggles to sack officers with a history of poor behaviour. It found that allegations were dealt with individually, so repeated or escalating misconduct wasn’t spotted; the threshold for ‘gross misconduct’ – which can trigger dismissal – was set too high; and the Met’s professional standards units were under-resourced and inadequately trained. Some of the issues are capable of being addressed by Scotland Yard, which has set up a new 100-strong team to identify rogue officers using covert techniques usually deployed to catch paedophiles. But other flaws go to the heart of the police misconduct system, which is the responsibility of the Home Office.
Over the past two decades, there has been a gradual move in policing towards greater transparency, scrutiny and external oversight. It began with the establishment of the Independent Police Complaints Commission in 2004, to investigate deaths in custody, police shootings and serious corruption; continued with the introduction of police and crime commissioners, in 2012, to increase accountability; and culminated in an overhaul of the way misconduct hearings were dealt with in 2015 and 2016.
Under the changes, it became the default position that police misconduct hearings and appeals would be held in public, with most types of hearing no longer chaired by a senior police officer, such as an assistant or deputy chief constable, but by external legal specialists. The background was, like now, a crisis of confidence in policing, following a damning report about the Hillsborough disaster, revelations about the conduct of undercover officers in the Met’s Special Demonstration Squad and a failure by a number of forces to tackle child sexual abuse.
However, the reforms made an already overly-formal process even more legalistic, with hearings resembling court cases. Analysis by the Casey review found that allegations made by Met officers and staff against their colleagues are taking longer to resolve – around 13 months on average, with 20 per cent going on for two years or more. The delays are a source of ‘huge frustration’, her report says.
There is also some emerging, though far from definitive, evidence that a legally-qualified chair (LQC) is less likely to dismiss an officer than a police chief was. ‘LQCs may be focusing on the harm caused by that misconduct in respect of the circumstances alone,’ the head of the College of Policing, Andy Marsh, has said. ‘But one act of misconduct reflects upon us all.’ The argument goes that chief constables should have the final say over who works in their force, not an independent figure who doesn’t have to manage the consequences of reintegrating someone who has been found guilty of misconduct but permitted to stay. The Police Federation, on the other hand, says the current system is fairer.
Ministers have promised to review the disciplinary arrangements. They may care to look towards the Prison Service, where there appears to be more consistency. Misconduct hearings involving officers are presided over by the governor of the jail with appeals heard by area managers. The system allows those in charge to ‘set the standard, set the tone and hold staff to account for it,’ one former senior official told me.
Police officers are different. They are servants of the Crown, and not subject to employment laws in the same way as prison staff and other public sector workers. But it must be possible to devise a speedier and simpler mechanism for handling misconduct cases so that corrupt and abusive officers are barred from policing for life. Callers to the new CrimeStoppers hotline would then know that their efforts had not been in vain.
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