The Thin Blue Line Gets Thinner

There's an old joke about a man who phones the police when he sees two men breaking into his shed. The police say they are unable to attend due to "a lack of resources." The man rings off, but calls back shortly afterwards to say there's no need to worry as he has shot the intruders dead. Almost immediately his house is surrounded by police cars and armed response units, while a police helicopter hovers overhead. The police are surprised to find the burglars very much alive and arrest them. "I thought you said you had shot them," says one of the policemen. "And I thought you said you had no resources," responds the householder.

This joke came to mind more than once recently after the pronouncements by Sara Thornton, the chair of the National Police Chiefs Council, and by Leicestershire police as to how they will respond to reports of burglaries, or rather how they won't.

Sara Thornton

Leicestershire police have been trialling a scheme to investigate burglaries only at even numbered properties as a money saving scheme, describing the policy as having "no noticeable impact on victim satisfaction" and not affecting the number of suspects identified, and then we have Sara Thornton's statement that victims of burglaries should not expect any sort of visit from a police office and may be expected to upload details of a break in, including photographs, via the internet. Thornton goes  on to say, "Does it make sense to send a uniformed officer to the scene of a burglary to take a statement and look for forensic evidence, then a scenes-of-crime officer to gather the forensic evidence and finally a detective to investigate the crime?" Well, actually yes it does given that the raison d'être of the police is to investigate crimes. Thornton's statement that there are now a lot less burglaries is actually even more of a reason for police to attend as that suggests they have greater resources to deal with them (I know it doesn't, but it is no more specious an argument than Thornton's).

In fairness, what Sara Thornton is arguing is that if the intruders have fled, then the matter is best dealt with by a visit from a scenes of crime officer who can gather DNA and fingerprint evidence and that some evidence in the form of photographs could be emailed by the householder to the police. That would be neither possible nor appropriate in some cases, since for many older people, who may not have access to the internet, a visit from an officer may be the assurance they need.

Sara Thornton's assertion that police need to be focussing on sexual offenses, terrorism, cybercrime and protecting children comes at the cost of, as she says a "move from reacting to those traditional crimes to thinking about focusing on threat and harm and risk and really protecting the public" which would be all fine and dandy were it not for the abject failure of the police to protect child victims of sexual abuse in Rotherham and Rochdale. And is there a danger of policing being based on what crimes are currently "trendy" or fashionable at the expense of "traditional" crimes that are nonetheless still crimes and still the cause of distress and loss among victims? I doubt anyone would disagree with the notion that the police should protect the public, but that is equally well served by investigating "tradional" crimes and putting away the perpetrators.   

The police are, like many other public services, being expected to do more with less following cuts estimated to be in the region of 20% in the last five years, resulting in the loss of 17,000 officers and a similar number of civilian staff. The fact that the service could lose 34,000 jobs in five years and still function suggests an element of over manning in the first place; the truth is that, like most organisations a certain number of cuts were tenable, but they have probably gone too far. Add to the cuts the overwhelming need for the police to report on the work they are doing (anyone who has worked in any large organisation will know that reporting on what you are doing is in many organisations more important than the job itself) and the other equally inevitable imbalance that large organisations suffer where the people directing strategy outnumber those implementing it and bingo, the number of officers at the sharp end soon becomes insufficient to deal with the organisation's primary function. And remember, the primary function of the police service remains what it was in Sir Robert Peel's day, to prevent crime and disorder; is it within their remit to decide that this crime is more worthy of investigation than another? I rather think that if a police officer of Sara Thornton's rank were burgled they would be visited by an officer (or several) regardless of whether they lived at a property with an odd or even number and I rather doubt that they would be expected to upload their own scene of crime photos on the internet.

It must be distressing to be burgled under any circumstances. To return from a holiday to find your house ransacked and your treasured possessions stolen must be even more distressing, but at least, even if the police are uninterested you won't be out of pocket if you are insured. Except that, in the fine traditions of insurance companies everywhere, any possible reason not to pay out will be sought out and pounced upon. The latest is that insurers will trawl social media accounts of burglary victims and any announcement of an upcoming holiday or happy snaps posted from an exotic destination may be used as a reason not to pay out on a claim. To add insult to injury then, our burglary victim will not only to a large degree be ignored by the police but they will be dismissed by their insurers.

And is burglary the thin end of the wedge? There is a whole, separate debate about whether or not certain drugs should be legalised and part of that debate is driven by the notion that the war against the production, distribution and use of these drugs has been lost. The idea that because some crimes are proving difficult to solve or that certain laws are difficult to uphold, we should simply give up on them would be abhorrent to most people, including, I imagine, many policemen, both rank and file and senior. On the other hand, and this is where my initial antipathy towards the views of Leicestershire police and Sara Thornton begins to waver and turn to understanding, if not agreement, cut-backs and reduced resources mean that increasingly police forces must cut their coats according to their cloth. As is true in most organisations, the troops on the ground have the difficult task of implementing directives from above that are based on imperatives with which the they, and certainly the public, do not agree or find hard to justify.

"Evening all"

Increasingly, the police are being expected to do more with less; the thin blue line gets ever thinner.