This blog is a précis of a lecture that I recently gave at London Metropolitan University. It is entitled Policing Communities - The Sisyphean Task. A Sisyphean task is described as something that is on-going and futile.
The lecture starts with the development of policing by Peel and his Commissioners and their determination to create an approachable service that is accepted by and engages with the public. They achieved this after a time through the use of their uniform, recruiting and instructions given to constables and senior officers.
By and large the style of policing remained unchanged until just after WW II when a review of policing in Aberdeen identified a new style where motorised patrols were used. The reviews findings, which were later disputed, identified that this improved moral and did not have a detrimental impact on community engagement.
Notwithstanding this, in 1960 a Royal Commission identified the drawback of motorised patrol and yet in 1964 the Home Office issued a circular to police forces to introduce motorised Unit Beat Patrolling. Again, academics proved that this style of response policing was anathema to engaging with communities as police officers become cocooned in their vehicles.
It was not until a review of policing in 1990 that it was fully determined that the welfare style of policing that communities wanted was at odds with the crime fighting responsive style that the police wanted. A change of culture, introducing quality service was called for, but leaders were not able to change the culture of the service.
What followed was rapid change over a relatively short period of time. In came neighbourhood policing in the early 1990s, then came Reassurance Policing in the 2000s, then the government mandated that every police force must have a neighbourhood policing team by April 2008 and then we had the Citizen Focus agenda concentrating on satisfaction levels and finally the public confidence target and the Policing Pledge – all government driven initiatives. The only commonality was the reliance on building a relationship with communities as espoused by Peel all of those years ago.
However, recent evidence from the Chicago CAPS programme and a number of UK forces seems to suggest that communities do not want to engage with the police. People do not attend meetings unless they are community champions or they have an axe to grind. So what is the point in making all of the effort to meet with them?
So, we come to the new Home Secretary who, as soon as she comes into power, removes all police targets and replaces them with the very one that caused many of the problems – reducing crime NOT preventing crime. The lessons from the 1990 Operations Policing Review that identified the dissonance between policing style of the police and public have not been learned. Neither have we learned from the rapid changes introduced in the last decade. None of the initiatives were given time to bed in and develop. Instead we enter this late modern passion for change and change again.
Finally, on Wednesday 2nd March 2011 the Home Secretary gives a speech in which she reaffirms her commitment to crime reduction and states ‘When I said in my first speech as Home Secretary that I didn’t want to run the police, I meant it’. Good news. Maybe we can have a period of tranquillity where the police are allowed to establish a relationship with communities that encourages them to come out of their homes and meet to discuss problems and issues. Policing free of political interference….wait a minute, this statement comes a little later ‘there are ways that the police can make the frontline more efficient too, while increasing visibility and availability on the streets, and without spending any more money.’ Call me cynical, but that sounds a bit like political interference. And then this ‘So we will also mandate police forces to hold local beat meetings on a regular basis.’ Hello – haven’t we been trying to do this for some time?
But police reform is not about settling down and learning. This is the last sentence of her speech ‘The result will be a police force with its powers enhanced, its discretion restored, its professionalism respected, flexible to deliver on the frontline – and free to cut crime.’
Police reform is caught in a relentless circle of re invention that does not learn from history or academic research and often results in the police internalising as identified by Prof. Herman Goldstein some years ago. The final questions must be do our communities want to come to local beat meetings when the police are caught in a trap of reducing crime that will inevitably rely on response style crime fighting rather than the style of policing that communities want.
A final thought. As government cuts bite into policing, there will doubtless be less officers in community or neighbourhood roles to undertake these meetings. Therefore policing is seeking to make greater use of social media to connect with communities. Call me old fashioned, and I accept that SM does have a great role to play, but let’s not move away from face to face contact were we are able to ‘just talk’ to people.
So is policing communities a sisyphean task? I believe not. But I also believe that the police have got be able to control their own resources and task them as they see fit. They do the job year on year, unlike government which changes frequently. Let police reform have time to bed in and encourage communities to see that policing today is as relevant to them as policing in 1829
---Academic references can be provided on request---
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