Rebooting The Police: Time To Think Smarter

The extraordinary cost of modern organised crime and its damage to the entire economic structure, is given prominence across the media today. It raises questions about which sort of crime must take precedence over another in the public interest. All of that is backward thinking. Crime is crime. If you are the victim of it, is does not matter what category it falls into. The State owes you solution, justice, and closure. Because it is a fundamental failure of the State that the crime happened at all. And if the States makes excuses about the fact that your crime is not on the priority list, two things happen. You become a very disgruntled citizen and criminals who commit that sort of crime know they can do so with impunity. That in turn tells us something. Something bad. It tell us that law and order as a concept is broken. It has been replaced with lots of law and much less order.

To deal with this we need a different kind of policing designed not to fit the locality but to fit the nature of the threat and the challenge of preventing it. The idea of forty something underfunded police forces all over the country, replicating everything the other does, often with systems and even people who do not talk to each other, presided over by scattered elected crime commissioners for whom but a handful of people vote is, frankly, silly.

We already have the National Crime Agency. That is good. We need to add to it with:

The National Traffic Police to deal with enforcing traffic laws, RTAs etc.

The National Investigation Branch to investigate and solve all crimes below the threshold of those covered by the NCA .

The National Cyber Force to fight cyber crime (not cyber security) of all kinds from pedophiles to fraudsters.

The Community Police Force to carry out high visibility local policing, crime prevention, victim support and to investigate social, domestic and petty crime.

All of these forces can have local offices and the Community Police Force should man police stations, one for every neighbourhood and open all hours, just like it used to be. The CPF can have local input in its leadership and management. If you want to keep these pointless Crime Commissioners to save somebody’s face you can do so, at this level only.

Yes it may all cost more, although the present arrangements are awash with duplication and system failures which are costing dear, but the savings on the cost of crime will run into countless billions. The nature of crime has changed but the nature of policing hasn’t. There have been some good innovations and tinkerings at the margins. But the time has now come to do the job properly.