The real reasons why the police are failing

The police may be right to complain that they have been overwhelmed by the scale of modern crime. But they have made the wrong choices about how to tackle it.

David G Green
http://www.civitas.org.uk/
Sunday May 18, 2003
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,958594,00.html

Many police officers feel they are over-stretched, under-paid, and under-appreciated. Are they right?
As recently as 1996, 64% of people told the British Crime Survey that the police did an 'excellent' or 'good' job. The latest figure for 2001/02 has fallen below the halfway mark to 47%. But looking at the record of the British police, it is surprising that public confidence has remained so high. Since 1950, the likelihood of a crime being cleared up by the police has decreased by 46%. In 1950 45% of recorded indictable crimes were cleared up; by 1999/2000 the clear-up rate had dropped to 24%.

For some crimes the deterioration has been well below the average. Since 1950, the clear-up rate of burglaries has decreased from 33% in 1950 to 13% in 1999/2000. And for robberies, since 1950, the clear-up rate has decreased from 54% to 18%.

During that period, crime (recorded by the police) rose rapidly from about 500,000 crimes in early 1950s to a peak of 5.6m in 1993. Today the figure is 5.2 million, ten times the 1950s rate. A major explanation for falling police performance is that they have simply been overwhelmed by the amount of crime. If we go back a little earlier to 1931, there were three crimes per year in the whole of England and Wales for every police officer (59,000 officers had 159,000 crimes to deal with). By 1971 97,000 police officers had 1.6m crimes to tackle (17 crimes each) but by 2001, 126,000 police officers had to contend with over 5 million crimes (44 crimes each).

However, the police have made matters worse by the manner in which they use the scarce time at their disposal. A common response has been to focus on 'serious' crime and to leave 'trivial' offences to take care of themselves. This understandable reaction turned out to be the diametrically wrong thing to do. And just how wrong was demonstrated by the New York police in the 1990s.

Few cities faced a bigger crime problem than New York in the early 1990s. Its lawlessness had become a taken-for-granted feature of movies of the period. In 1991, for example, there were 99,000 robberies in New York City. But within a few years a rapid reversal had been brought about, so that in 2002 there were only 27,000 robberies. New York's annual robbery rate (540 per 100,000 population) is now less than London's (620). The revolutionary change in police tactics associated with Mayor Giuliani and police chief, William Bratton, became known as 'zero tolerance' policing but its essence was not police strong-arm tactics. Bratton preferred to call it 'community policing' and George Kelling, the intellectual who inspired the reforms, called it 'broken windows' policing.

What did they do? An increase in police numbers was important. In 1993 there were 28,700 police officers. Giuliani was elected in 1994 and had increased the number to 30,500 by the end of the year. In 2000 there were over 40,000 police officers.

With the larger number of officers at their disposal, Giuliani and Bratton re-policed 'harmless' quality-of-life social nuisances and 'victimless' crimes that nevertheless were the seedbed of those crimes that did have victims. Among those targeted were prostitutes soliciting on the streets; people taking and selling drugs on the streets and in the parks; graffiti artists; drunken youths; loud users of 'foul language' in public; unauthorised street sellers; squeegee men; aggressive beggars.

It was found that fare dodgers were also pick-pockets, aggressive beggars spent part of the day begging and part shoplifting, and drug dealers pursuing a 'victimless' crime were quick to use violence when crossed. Getting prostitutes off the streets reduced the atmosphere of disorder that provided cover for drug dealers, who left. Prostitutes' clients, who would not want to tell the police they had been robbed, were easy targets for muggers and car thieves, who also left. The streets were once again occupied by people who wanted to go about their own lives, respectful of other people's rights to do the same. Washington Square Park was typical. It was dominated by prostitutes and gun-carrying drug dealers so that no ordinary person went there, except by mistake. The police put a permanent command centre in the park and it became available once more for use by local students from NYU, residents, office workers and tourists.

The police in Britain have been reluctant to learn these lessons. One police officer who did implement them in Hartlepool and Middlesborough was hounded out by senior colleagues. However, Ray Mallon had become a local folk hero and was quickly elected as Mayor of Middlesborough, where he has had a good deal of initial success and popular support in pursuing this approach once again.

The most typical response of the police service to its diminishing achievements has been to enforce performance measures of every description. As the Observer special crime supplement (27 April) showed, the life of a police officer is dominated by targets and budgets. But do the targets lead to an improved service? Ironically, the danger of focusing on 'activity' targets was seen at the very outset of modern policing in 1829, when Sir Robert Peel framed nine principles of policing for the new London police force. The ninth principle has been forgotten by today's aficionados of performance targets: "To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them."

Show it to modern Chief Constable, who has worked his way to the top by demonstrating mastery of management jargon, achieving target response times on budget, achieving 'step-change' to schedule, or writing elaborate proposals for 'joined-up' working practices, and you get a blank look. When ACPO meets this week, perhaps they should take a look at the 1829 principles.

David G. Green is Director of Civitas: the Institute for the Study of Civil Society. This article draws on The Failure of Britain's Police by Norman Dennis, director of community studies at Civitas. The Nine Principles of Policing can be found online at www.civitas.org.uk/pubs/policeNine.php

Crime is falling - because prison works

Crime has fallen chiefly because more offenders are in prison. David Blunkett's plans to reduce prison numbers would see crime on the rise again

According to the latest British Crime Survey (BCS) overall crime has continued to fall over the last year. Why? And what does it tell us about Mr Blunkett's policies? The main lesson is an uncomfortable one for people of a liberal disposition who instinctively prefer to see offenders rehabilitated rather than incarcerated.
Crime has fallen chiefly because more offenders are in prison. In the 12 months up to December 2002 alone the prison population increased by 3,563 to 69,612. This week it is 74,000. Yet, the government has embarked on a policy of replacing prison with 'intensive supervision' in the community, a strategy that has already been tried in other countries, where it was found to make little difference to re-offending.

To claim that increasing the use of prison reduces crime is controversial. What is the evidence? Despite misleading rhetoric about short-sharp shocks, during the 1980s the Tory Government pursued an anti-prison policy and between 1988 and 1993 the prison population was cut by nearly 10 per cent. The crime rate reached an historic peak soon after and towards the end of 1993 the policy was reversed by Home Secretary, Michael Howard. Between 1993 and 2001 the average number of people in prison rose from 45,633 to 66,300, an increase of over 45%. What happened to crime over this period? According to the BCS crime fell from 19.1 million in 1995 to 12.6 million in 2001/02. Was it just a coincidence? Armies of academics argue the toss, but no one disputes that, while in jail offenders cannot break into your house, whereas when on a community sentence they still have the free time to steal. Criminologists call this the 'incapacitation' effect.

Even if no deterrent effect is assumed, the incapacitation effect of imprisoning on average another 20,000 criminals would have been substantial. How can we work out the incapacitation effect? The Home Office report, Making Punishments Work, estimated that the average offender carried out 140 offences per year. The variation was large, and offenders who admitted a drug problem, were committing an average of 257 offences per year.

We can make a rough calculation of the incapacitation effect of jailing 20,000 full-year equivalent offenders. If each prisoner carried out the average number of offences identified by the Home Office, then 2.8 million offences against the public would have been prevented by 12 months in jail. If they were high-rate offenders, the effect would have been 5.1 million offences. This would account for a large chunk of the fall from 19 million crimes to 12 million.

Labour home secretaries know this and have continued Michael Howard's policies, though reluctantly. Between 1997 and July 2003 the prison population increased by 12,000. What was the incapacitation effect of jailing these offenders? If they carried out the average number of offences, then there would have been 1.7 million fewer victims of crime. And in the last year alone, the additional 3,500 prisoners would have accounted for nearly half a million fewer crimes.

How much did crime actually fall? Since 1997, according to the BCS, there have been 4 million fewer crimes per year. And in the last year, crime fell by about 250,000 offences to 12.3 million in 2002/03.

The Government is under intense pressure to improve public services and, as both Mr Blair and Mr Blunkett secretly realise, being 'tough on crime' is a lot more effective in the short run than being tough on the causes of crime. They also know that, if the Government is to keep crime falling, it will need to build more prisons. Yet the policy set out in last year's white paper, Justice for All, is to replace prison with intensive supervision and surveillance in the community. However intensive it might be, it is no substitute for the almost total public protection afforded by prison.

Perhaps that is why the Home Office is projecting an increase in prison places to between 91,000 and 109,000 by 2009.

· David G. Green is Director of Civitas: the Institute for the Study of Civil Society
http://www.civitas.org.uk/