The Thin Blue Line is in crisis, with a huge drop in public confidence. We ask former officers how policing lost its way – and how to fix it
Source - Daily Telegraph - 29/09/22
He’s just two weeks into the job – one of the biggest operations in policing history – but new Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley already knows he faces a force in crisis. Despite the success of securing the Queen’s funeral, he is contending with corruption, misogyny and racism within his ranks, and beyond them, slumping public confidence.
There are more than 500 unsolved burglaries every day. Barely more than one per cent of recorded rapes make it to court. A sense of lawlessness and impunity is stalking the land and a sense of crisis is gripping policing. The Met has been placed in special measures. The boys and girls in blue are facing universal condemnation. On theft and burglary, the Chief Inspector of Constabulary recently reported that “the current charge rates are unacceptable and unsustainable”, and urged police to go “back to basics”.
Across the ideological spectrum, politicians have queued up to condemn the police. In London, Mayor Sadiq Khan sacked Rowley’s predecessor, Cressida Dick, and now says the Met needs “urgent reform”. Some senior old hands agree. “Priorities have to be given to what people want,” former Met commissioner Lord John Stevens tells me. “Safety on the streets. Burglary, murder, rape.”
“Burglary and car crime are both symbolic,” says Mike Barton, Durham’s plain speaking and highly successful former Chief Constable. “Burglars don’t stop until you catch them. Catching them makes police better investigators. These crimes are a canary in the mine for whether a police team is up to snuff. Everybody should be measured on their detection rates for burglary and car crime.” Reports that some forces no longer attend burglaries, he says, “make me shake my head”. Rowley agrees, telling Radio 4: “It’s too serious an intrusion not to have somebody turn up.”g
It’s not just the basics of crime fighting that are crumbling. A string of scandals – the abduction, rape and murder by a serving officer of Sarah Everard; photos of two female murder victims being passed around by officers for fun; a WhatsApp group at Charing Cross station who shared jokes about rape, domestic abuse and killing young black people – have created a toxic perception of police racism and misogyny. Recently, a serving officer was arrested after allegedly robbing motorists and then using the money to pay for sex at brothels. A week later, Anthony Smith was sentenced to 24 years in jail after being found guilty of 13 counts of sexual assault and rape against three girls – the youngest 13.
“One thing you can really be clear on,” says Shabnam Chaudhri, who served with the Met for 30 years, and who reached detective superintendent despite the racism she says she faced. “It’s not just a toxic culture that sits within one force. It’s prevalent across all 43 [forces]. Policing has lost its way.”
The horror of such cases resonates through the service. “It just sickens me,” says John Sutherland, a former Met chief superintendent who retired four years ago. “I am shattered that people in my former profession could ever dream of behaving in that way.”
Trust is crumbling. Three years ago, 77 per cent of those polled thought the police were doing a good job. Now, barely half do. Crucially, within the last year, the majority of us have lost confidence in the police to fight crime in our local area. Public perceptions of the Met, regularly tracked, have plummeted across the board. Fewer than half in London think it does a good job, down from 68 per cent five years ago. Then, 79 per cent also said the “police can be relied on to be there when needed”. Now it’s just 57 per cent.
“Extraordinary figures for people who don’t trust the police,” says Stevens. “And if you haven’t got trust, you can’t do the job.” Rowley’s in-tray is bulging.
Cutbacks hurt, but it’s no excuse
Rowley has given himself 100 days to turn it around. Doubtless, he will not seek excuses for the hole policing finds itself in. But many say cutbacks have made the job harder. “I’m no one-eyed apologist for the police, but we need to talk about austerity,” says Sutherland. According to a National Audit Office report, funding was cut by 30 per cent between 2010 and 2018, with 44,000 roles – officers and support staff – lost. “That’s uniformed community support officers, intelligence analysts,” notes Sutherland. “We’re not just talking about back office staff, we’re talking about critical operational staff. With them went centuries of experience. We lost the relationships built up with the public. Hundreds of stations closed. I did 25 years with the Met. The most popular thing we did was safer neighbourhood units. We threw that away. That’s the fault of politicians, not police.”
One of those who left the service was Clifford Baxter, who spent a career on the ground in south London stations. “I would have stayed another five years but the job I loved was being decimated,” he says. “A lot of experience was lost.” Today, he says, morale is low and many older officers view their careers as a prison sentence, counting down the years until they qualify for their pensions. “They say ‘I’ve got five years to do. Two years to do.’”
Sheer numbers do have an effect. “If I’m a duty inspector and I’ve got only one car left to deploy,” says Sutherland, “when a burglary call comes at the same time as a stabbing call, there’s only one place the car is going.” But lack of experience matters too. Sutherland talks of evaluating one county force earlier this year: “More than 50 per cent of all their officers, of all ranks, have less than five years service.” He estimates that constables on Met response teams stay just “2-3 years” before moving on, as opposed to “10-12 years” when he started his career in the 1990s.
Then there’s mental health. With cuts to social services, the police, says one officer, find themselves “picking up the pieces as a service of first and last resort”, fielding “a huge number of calls that are mental health related – we’re neither trained nor equipped”.
What police do dismiss is the idea that they are not investigating burglaries because they spend their time protecting hurt feelings online. During her leadership campaign, Liz Truss said she would insist officers are “policing our streets, not debates on Twitter”. But “this idea that we have nothing better to do than police Twitter [is wrong],” says Baxter. “There are hate crime teams, but it’s not a massive diversion of resourcing.”
According to Barton, no force can use the rise of digital crime – even cybercrime and fraud – as an excuse for failures in more “traditional” areas, because they are not tackling cyber and fraud with “scale or assiduousness” either areas. He is sceptical too of the workforce cuts blame game. “When we cut [in Durham],” he says, “we sacked the people who’d lost their mojo. We didn’t let good people go. After those redundancies we had a really slick operation. We had a public sector heart with private sector brain.” For some underperforming staff, “we need to dial up our ruthlessness, we need to say: ‘Sorry, this job is not for you’”.
Even the latest report from the Chief Inspector of Constabulary admits that the staffing excuse doesn’t always add up. “Some problems,” it notes, “are attributable to increases and changes in demand, reductions in police numbers (now being reversed) and financial constraints. Some are attributable to failures in forces to become sufficiently efficient.”
Theresa May’s legacy and toxic cultures
If politicians are lining up to criticise the police, the police are lining up to criticise politicians – and one in particular: Theresa May. “Her leadership as home secretary was for policing a disaster,” says Stevens. “She destroyed the policing structure” in careers and promotion. For example, officers ambitious to rise to the highest ranks no longer have to serve in various forces before securing promotion. Like-minded groups , for good or ill, gather and remain in place, leading to what Stevens calls “allegations of cronyism”.
Another May reform, police and crime commissioners (PCCs), has proved unsuccessful. The police authorities they replaced, says Stevens, were filled with the “big local political hitters. So when they gave us extra money, they held us to account.” Individual PCCs have no such clout, he notes.
Recently departed staff suggest that, from the start to finish of careers, policing now risks producing lower quality officers. At the outset, recruitment and vetting processes are “not as robust as they used to be,” says one officer. Home visits to check up on applicants are now “outsourced and online”. “Vetting processes for police are poor,” says Chaudhri, claiming that recent recruits with neo-Nazi and antisemitic tendencies have not been picked up.
Once in the job, new officers find critical supervision has been watered down. It is universally acknowledged within forces that sergeants, who supervise PCs, are perhaps the single most critical rank, setting the culture within stations and on the beat. Yet sergeant to PC ratios have “dropped off a cliff”, says one insider. According to researcher Gavin Hales, the number of PCs per sergeant in the Met has gone up by half, from four to six, since 2007.
When it comes to toxic culture, forces have taken their eye off the ball since efforts to tackle racism in the wake of the 1999 Stephen Lawrence inquiry, says Chaudhri. “The Met did a lot then that was very good,” she says. “But over time, it was as if we’d ticked a box and didn’t need to worry about it any more,” she says, “which allowed certain cultures to fester and grow.”
In the now infamous Charing Cross WhatsApp group, social media helped cement discriminatory attitudes by driving them underground. “Instead of people being openly sexist and racist [where it could be condemned], it went on in chats,” she says.
But getting rid of what Cressida Dick called “wrong’uns” is not easy. “It’s really difficult to sack officers,” says Chaudhri. “For performance there are warnings, and development plans, and improvement procedures, then you go back to the beginning.” When it comes to misconduct, suspending officers is a last resort.” The introduction of independent chairmen on police misconduct hearings has made the situation even worse, according to Barton. “Chief constables had a more draconian view of misconduct. Fewer people are being sacked now,” he says.
Chaudhri points to the case of Robyn Williams, who was sacked after she was found in possession of a child abuse video, only to be reprieved by an independent tribunal and given a written warning. “It’s hugely detrimental to policing,” she says of the struggle to fire officers. “It allows officers to believe they can carry on behaving as they do.”
Rowley agrees, and is looking to scrap the tribunals: “It seems slightly ridiculous that I don’t actually have the final word on who is in the organisation.”
The constable turning Manchester around
When it comes to fixing policing’s crisis, “leadership” is the easy buzzword. Rowley says fixing the toxic culture will start with him and his example. But Stevens suggests more is needed than speeches. “In my day, we had a secret unit… which was necessary. We used to have black people driving sports cars and see how they were handled by officers.” Barton says he had “informants everywhere”.
“That’s got to be backed up by a good whistleblowing system. You’ve got to be totally ruthless about it, I’m afraid,” says Stevens. “People must actually fear that if they behave in that way, they’re going to be caught out.” Which is why Rowley is dramatically bolstering the Met’s internal investigations’ unit, the directorate of professional standards (DPS).
New Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has given himself 100 days to turn it around
New Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has given himself 100 days to turn it around CREDIT: Kirsty O'Connor/PA Wire
It is a battle that will be won and lost at sergeant level. “They are critical to changing the culture on the fronts,” says Chaudhri. And for those who refuse to change, says Stevens, it does mean reform to make suspension and sacking quicker and simpler.
All is by no means lost. “We’re long past [individual] bad apples,” says Sutherland. “But we’re not yet a bad barrel. We’re somewhere in between. There are still more than enough good people to do what needs to be done.”
There is hope too, when it comes to restoring public trust in the police’s ability to fight basic crime and keep them safe. In Manchester, Chief Constable Stephen Watson is “turning things around”, his fellow officers say, by doing the very basics politicians and public demand. “He’s making burglary a priority, so it can be done,” says Lord Stevens.
“I am frustrated and ashamed it doesn’t happen [elsewhere],” says Barton, who believes the burglaries left unpunished are serious because they lead to confrontations between thieves and homeowners. “Eventually you have a fatality. It should never happen. And that’s why you have actually got to investigate.” Doing so also sharpens the investigative skills, he says. “You can’t ignore crime then suddenly expect to be Sherlock Holmes.”
Mike Barton, Durham’s former Chief Constable: ‘Burglars don’t stop until you catch them. Catching them makes police better investigators.’ CREDIT: Durham Police
It’s honed skills that are needed, he adds, to bear down on “the cohort of men who prey on the most vulnerable” women and girls, and do it repeatedly. “I don’t think police forces have quite cottoned on to the fact... that there is a group of men who we should investigate more closely because they do this a lot.” Rather than complain about the difficulty of securing a conviction against a man who sexually exploits a woman, he thinks forces should examine the possibility that someone who enjoys doing so may be behind multiple crimes.
Above all, it is the restoration of neighbourhood policing that is most frequently looked to as a silver bullet.
“It was destroyed in May’s tenure and needs to be reinforced and restored, backed up by hard-edged detectives with experience on how to arrest people and, crucially, get them convicted,” says Stevens. Once again, Rowley agrees: “Neighbourhood policing has waned over the last decade or so. And the relationships with local communities, understanding what worries them, isn’t as strong as I want it to be. We’ll put more resources into there and we’ll focus on it.”
That might also contribute to better relations with political leaders.
“The most successful forces have political support” rather than warring with Westminster, notes Stevens.
Indeed, for a new prime minister who recently blamed “the mindset and attitude” of workers for low productivity, it’s likely that a bit of can-do among the Met’s new top ranks will go a long way. Something like that of Mike Barton.
“That’s all b------s,” he says when I ask if staff cuts had really made the job impossible. “If you as a leader say something can’t be done, you’ll be right. And the reverse. You’ve got to throw the kitchen sink at [traditional] crime. Or people will stop ringing you because you’ve become irrelevant… and crime will run amok.”
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