Part One: Chapter Two Policing
Skewing and its impact on the prevention and detection of serious crime.
Firearms offences, especially gang related shootings, serious sexual offences like rape and child abuse are obviously police resource intensive, convictions are very hard to achieve and you only get one sanctioned detection for, say, a convicted rapist. As well as investigating and detecting offences after they’ve been perpetrated, preventing them happening is also legitimate police work. Peel’s first principle states,
“The basic mission for which the police exist is to prevent crime and disorder.”
Someone should have explained to him that ‘it’s all very well preventing crime and disorder Sir Robert, but not only don’t you get any detection scores (because you can’t measure something that never happened) but even worse, liberals attack you because they don’t understand how prevention actually works. (Hopefully their wives explain about contraception to their teenage daughters instead of these hopeless plodders.) For example, Michael Shiner, Associate Professor of Social Policy at LSE states about Section 44 of the Terrorism Act; “tens of thousands of stop and searches were carried out and it didn’t lead to the apprehension of a single terrorist”. Doh. Aren’t Associate Professors supposed to be clever? NB Listen to the whole interview (*c) and you may suspect that at some time in his past he developed a grudge against the police. There’s a Bruce Willis & Samuel Jackson movie called Unbreakable. (No spoiler btw). Bruce plays a security bod at a sports stadium and suspecting that someone in the queue is carrying a gun, gets his men to pat down every tenth guy in the queue, in full view of the people in the queue. Before the man with the gun gets to the entrance, he walks away, not wanting to take the risk. Problem solved. Do you get it Professor? Of course there’s no proof, nothing to record. How many times did your daughter bonk her boyfriend without catching pregnant? Is that an important number? Would it prove that condoms didn’t apprehend a single sperm unless you can measure it? It’s the absence of the one thing you really don’t want that shows effectiveness, not…Oh I give up. If you’re too dense to figure it out by now…
*c Thinking Allowed. BBC Radio 4. ‘Stop and search, cancer patients’ 16/9/2015
Dr. Patrick’s thesis points out that two forces which did invest significant resources on serious crime also had to undergo ‘interventions’ by the Police Standards Unit (similar to a school being placed in special measures) because their performance targets were below par. Cause and effect anyone?
“Her Majesty’s Inspector recognises that tackling ‘premier league’ criminality (organised crime, major drugs distribution syndicates and cross border crime) devours resources, and only brings persons before the courts in limited numbers that has no impact on crime performance data. Shifting resources to tackle the easier ‘hits’ (house burglary, car crime, etc), whilst neglecting premier league criminality, may boost the Force’s standing in any volume crime league list –but the penalty would be paid in later years. Major crime players, largely free from Force scrutiny and investigation, will have an impact on volume crime sooner or later.” Cleveland HMIC inspection.
I wonder if the heroic ACPO crime fighters told the prey in their counties they were leaving them at the mercy of organised criminals because Straw, Blunkett, Clarke and heaven help us Jacqui Smith had rewarded them for measuring the wrong things.
Dr Patrick’s thesis makes it clear that because of research and data limitations it is not possible to demonstrate these types of offences have or have not been investigated fully as a result of the skewing misallocation of resources. However, the quotes I’ve selected show how resources were diverted away from serious crimes and towards volume crimes that were then measured and credited as detections, that substandard investigation of them began to increase and that orders were given to ‘skew’ police resources to volume crime and off serious crime.
ACPO chiefs hope that their wrongdoing and lying for gain will be quietly dropped and forgotten. For example, Dr. Patrick demonstrated they’d been falsely reducing the number of rapes by no-criming rape complaints. They did this by pestering women to drop their allegations by persuading them that they weren’t raped, were too drunk or had mental health problems or simply dropping the investigation and not recording it. An anonymous Met chief said, “There is no longer an incentive or benefit to reduce the numbers of allegations recorded.” That means, we’re not allowed to do it anymore so we’re going to forget about all the women who were raped but dismissed, and the pressure put on officers to do that and the money we banked in bonuses and not talk to you about it, so there.” This approach works, I have lost count of the number of times I’ve heard fearless BBC reporters accepting that pitiful, unconvincing answer as the end of their questioning on a topic.