Like using a Model T Ford on the M25

- A romantic curiosity, historically significant but totally unsuited to modern life.

Nick Alston used the announcement of his stepping down from the role of Essex Police and Crime Commissioner at the next election as an opportunity to state a view about how we do policing.  While it was picked up by local media, I believe it is one which is deserving of much wider coverage and debate.  Quite simply, he thinks that foot patrols, the beloved ‘Bobby on the Beat’, is an outdated and ineffective way to try to police 21^st century Britain; that the resources supporting it would be better used elsewhere.  And I think he is correct.

The public clamour for visible foot patrols has frequently been described as “harking back to a golden age of policing which never existed”.  The principle is often associated with references to ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ – a TV series which ran from 1955 to 1976 and which itself was a spin-off from a feature film, ‘The Blue Lamp' from 1950.  In which the principal Bobby on the Beat was shot and killed.  Despite this, Sir Ian Blair is credited with trying to perpetuate the concept in 2002, while Deputy Commissioner of the Met, by inventing Police Community Support Officers as a cheaper way of providing visible, reassuring foot policing.

Why do we, almost uniquely in public service, try to cling on to the methods of the 1950s in policing?   Times change, the way in which we live has changed and technology has made life in 2015 in many ways unrecognisable from sixty years earlier.  Hospitals, paramedics, firefighters, schools, social services – the list of agencies which have moved with the times is virtually endless.  But we cling stubbornly to a romantic notion of a man or woman wandering around a small area, smiling and chatting, admonishing now and then and making the people who see them feel safe, apparently.

If you have the opportunity to speak to those who actually did street policing in the 50s and 60s – as I, fortunately, do quite often – you will learn that it really wasn’t all smiles and stroking small animals.  Policing was confrontational, in many ways much more so than today.  Foot patrols were the default because there was no real alternative.  Far fewer officers could actually drive vehicles for one thing; more importantly communication with them was difficult – there were no radios, no mobile phones or pagers.  Messages got to officers in one of two ways –either the Police Box or Post, where a flashing light would alert the passing officer to a message, or another officer being sent to find the patroller to pass it on by word of mouth.  In order to make this work officers were assigned to relatively small beats and required to make regular ‘rings’ – calls in to the station from a box or post to see if there was anything new to learn and also to confirm they were where they should be.  The regimented discipline which required them to remain on their beat was part of the best system of command and control which technology then allowed.

By the early 1970s things had changed, radios and the greater availability of vehicles had led to the adoption of the ‘Unit Beat Scheme’, almost always referred to as Panda Cars.  In the same way as modern leaders have embraced advances in technology and integrated them into policing, those in command in the mid 60s saw the opportunity to modernise and mechanise and provide a better service.  But the mid-60s also saw the rise of challenge to police authority, fuelled in no small way by disgraceful corruption cases, free-thinking media and energised lawyers supporting victims.  Though the two developments were separate and parallel, many viewed them as cause and effect.  Bobbies in cars didn’t speak to the public, hence they were becoming aloof, unapproachable and remote.

 

In 1972-3 an experiment was conducted in Kansas City to see what effect patrolling officers had on reported crime, by varying the levels of patrol across discrete but similar beats from none to saturation level.  The short answer is there was no discernible difference, in reported crime, fear of crime or public satisfaction.  The details of the experiment are freely available, for example HERE .  I read this paper at Bramshill in 1984 and was fascinated, as it seemed to point against many of the commonly-held beliefs in policing that we were still trying to serve. I then came across some other research (which I now cannot find but would very much like to) which said that on average an officer on foot patrol would pass within a quarter of a mile of a burglary or robbery in progress once every (I think) 12 years.  It might have been 2 years, or 22 years, I cannot remember but it is largely irrelevant, since it went on to point out that, even if the officer were aware of the crime, he/she would not necessarily thereafter be able to prevent it or apprehend the perpetrator.  So much for the reassurance of foot patrols.

I took this thinking with me throughout my police journey, from London to Yorkshire then Surrey and back to London.  Ploughing the major crime / covert policing furrow that I did I never had the chance to implement my ideas, but I still spoke about them.  And got sideways glances and rolled eyes when I did.  It was a heresy, just as some commentators are now describing Nick Alston’s views.

What are the justifications for foot patrols?  Two main ones I think, first community intelligence – the public police officers speak to are their eyes and ears is the common phrase. Are they, really? I am sure there will be anecdotal evidence of snippets passed on which have resulted in successful operations and improvements to community life.  Equally there will be many other officers who, like me, never had a sniff of useful information from anybody who approached me on foot patrol.  But in any case, now everyone has a phone, most a mobile phone. There is Twitter, Facebook, email, Whatsapp (for the moment), Snapchat, Instagram and hundreds of other apps I have never heard of.  Do we really think that anybody will not pass information on unless they can do it face to face?  When it can be done in those ways remotely, no meeting, where nobody can see and indeed with relative ease, anonymously?  

The key to attracting information is not a physical meeting, it is for the person with it feeling sure that it is worthwhile to pass it on – often, that something will be done about it.  And that concept leads on to my ideas on the second justification:

Reassurance is the other aim of foot patrols, we are told.  By which is meant making people feel safe when they see a Bobby on the bet.  Which is fine, for the individual actually seeing that Bobby at that time (and assuming they haven’t read the Kansas City experiment).  There are though a few holes in this argument.  First, the vast majority of this country is simply unsuited to foot patrol.  Outside of the cities and large towns each ‘beat’ is just too big to be patrolled on foot.  Rural areas have never really had foot patrol, sometimes bicycles but mostly motor-cycles or cars.  Even the Ladybird book from the 1960s gives a simple and graphic snapshot of how policing was then.  (Although if you do Google it, make sure you get the real one, not the very funny spoof).  

In the cities, the concentration of residents, residences and places of work means that the actual visibility of a patrolling officer in terms of the percentage of the population is similarly low. Think of it like penetration of the market.  Let’s say London’s residential and working population is sitting at 10 million people at some point during the night, there are some 58000 individual streets and we know there are less than 800 officers on duty.  Even in the impossible event that all these were on foot patrol (actually at least 700 of them will not be) each one would have to cover 70-odd streets to give everybody a chance of seeing them. If everybody else is awake, on the street or looking out of the window and remaining stationary. This is the absurdity of foot patrol as reassurance – your chance of being reassured is many, many thousands to one.

The question I would like considered by police leaders and especially by the public is this:  What is more reassuring, seeing a police officer walking past you once or twice a year or knowing that, when you need them, a phone call will bring two highly-trained efficient officers to you within minutes? 

A good analogy is with breakdown cover.  Would you sign up with the firm which says they have three vans driving around your town and if they see you broken down they will stop and fix your car, or with the company which promises to attend your breakdown within 30 minutes if you phone them?

My plan for action? Put the scarce resources currently used for local or neighbourhood foot patrols into making sure there is an excellent response to calls from the public.  Calling for police for good reason to be told there is nobody available is not going to work.  What about that PC handing out cards to kids in the street, or the one sipping coffee at the day centre?  How are they reassuring me when somebody is breaking into my car or spraying graffiti on the bus shelter?

Then, make the response meaningful – we need quickly to rid the community of the mindset they have been railroaded into that it isn’t worth telling the police because nothing will be done about it.  It is really difficult to get police to respond to some calls still – even if you know what you are talking about and point out the actual offences which are being committed as you speak. Yes, that was my  recent experience in Suffolk, I shudder to think how those without my background view such antics. 

The community can be your eyes and ears, but what is the point if the brain and body will not respond to the messages?  This can only be achieved by prompt, efficient and decisive response becoming the norm.  The public will then trust that calling the police is not the futile exercise it so often is at the moment.

Lastly, police leaders – including PCCs – must have the courage to tell the community how it is.  Yes, of course listen to their concerns and priorities but you have been seduced for 50 years into trying to deliver the results the public wants by the methods they (misguidedly) think they need.  We would never accept the community dictating methods to firefighters or the NHS, why do we allow it in policing? 

Police must listen to the public but the public must also listen to the Police.  Its leaders must be permitted to use their professional knowledge and judgement to deliver results in the most efficient way – which, in the 21^st century, cannot include a romantic notion of adhering to a past perceived as glorious.

© Colin Sutton 2015 All rights reserved

Thoughts on the PCC's meeting

I feel enlightened.  I am not sure that is the aim of the Suffolk PCC's series of public meetings, but that was the effect.  Having been forced by my last 9 years of police service and the subsequent 4 years of media work into the very interesting, often exciting but ultimately rather narrow bubble of murder and major crime, my thinking needed a jolt back into more general topics.  And the meeting last night has provided it.

So much has passed through my head since I left the community centre last night, much of it with me standing in a new position - that of a resident, a citizen, a person looking at the police and policing from the outside.  It has taken a while, but I am there.

Which meant that, as the Chief Constable talked about serious and organised crime, the need for a Cybercrime unit, tapping in to regional resources I was thinking "Fine, but this is about the people who live in Mid-Suffolk."  How much of that actually touches them, has a malign effect on their everyday life?  Sure, many of us have had our cards skimmed, but the banks, willing to accept the risk rather than implement cumbersome and expensive security procedures, pay us back.  We don't actually lose out.  Yes it irritates that crooks are making money from it, but is it a priority for us?  Is it what we really want our scarce police resources being targetted on?  Investment fraud practised on the elderly by cold-callers.  Now there is a real issue that actually causes losses, but try to get the police involved in that.  Good luck, I have - from the advantageous position of working as a consultant inside two different Trading Standards Units. It was a nearly impossible task, even though the losses were measured in millions.

The businessmen in the audience were nodded to, "You know what happens when your supply lines get disrupted".  To which one reasonable answer would have been, "Yes, we have to find another supplier and the price goes up". That is, I think, just the economics of the market and applies just as much to drug supply as it does widgets and thingmybobs. Of course the drugs problem as perceived in communities cannot be addressed by mass arrests and prosecutions of users, as one man suggested.  The police, CPS, courts and prisons would be swamped, they just couldn't cope with the numbers.  But it fails at the first hurdle in any case - as soon as officers make an arrest the tedious custody, processing and administrative tasks take them out of the game for hours.

Of course investigation and prosecution of dealers up the chain has to go on, often by specialist units and regional or national agencies.  But let us not pretend that it has any measurable effect on the ills experienced by communities due to drug use.  So let us rely upon it neither to do so, nor to justify taking resources away from local policing.  Indeed, the only drugs operations I have been involved in which made a real difference in quality of life for communities were those aimed at disrupting overt sales and use on the streets - Operation Welwyn in King's Cross where I was the Detective Inspector, and its child Operation Rockwood which I ran as Head of Intelligence in West Yorkshire some years later. Street undercover operations in order to disrupt supply and take it away from ordinary people to make their streets safer.  But I would never pretend it was anything approaching a complete solution to the drugs problem, just a way of making life more pleasant.  And while it would have relevance in a few areas of a handful of Suffolk towns it has little I think to offer the rural rump of the county.

Speeding.  The bane of rural life some would say, and despite my credentials as a fully-fledged petrol-head, motorsport competitor I would agree.  Perhaps because, in small part, of that.  But as the Chief said, it isn't just exceeding the limit which causes danger.  Many of our roads have 60mph limits yet 45 can be dangerous given their nature and the type of traffic using them.  I am surprised that much more use is not made of s.59 notices - the power under the Police Reform Act 2002 to warn drivers using vehicles in an anti-social way.  First notice is a warning, the second in 12 months means the vehicle can be confiscated. Perfect to deal with drivers who are inconsiderate, careless or driving on footpaths or bridleways.  No equipment needed, just an officer with a pen and paper, minimal bureaucracy.  Assuming of course there is an officer available.

Which leads neatly on to numbers, resources, funding.  It is not going to be easy, we accept that.  Whatever your view on cuts, they are here for the immediate future.  We either shrug our shoulders and accept a worse service or get clever, get smart and get innovative.  Can a better service be achieved with less?  I think so, as does this former UK officer now working in Canada: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/7908488/Free-the-police-and-save-billions.html

The key to that seems to be the reduction in bureaucracy and time taken for officers to deal with the administrative tasks which now beset everything they do.  Which is a problem for us, in that much of it is imposed at a national level, by Parliament or the Courts.  But a good and achievable start would be to restore the authority to charge for all but the most serious of offences to police, obviating to need for ponderous file preparation and liaison with the CPS before charges are laid.  Watch some of the TV films showing procedures in custody offices now, and see if you think to precautions taken, the questions asked of prisoners, the things done to accommodate them are sensible or unwieldy.  I wonder sometimes if the Custody Officer's badge ought to say "Police"; "Holiday Inn Express" might be more accurate.

I am sure the public desire is for police to enforce.  Not to advise, not to mediate and certainly not to ignore.  Yes, the process and our convoluted, cumbersome, over-sophisticated criminal justice system does not lend itself to a presumption of arrest and prosecution in every case but, to coin a phrase, other enforcement methods are available.  I have referred to the s.59 enforcement notice for vehicles already, similar provisions are in place for anti-social behaviour in terms of fixed-penalty notices and ultimately ASBOs.  Confiscations of uninsured vehicles, prohibition notices that sort of thing.  Indeed, just turning up and showing that the police care - that the community cares - with a firm word will have an effect.  Zero Tolerance doesn't have to mean arrest, it ought to mean that we don't ignore things.

The two pillars of local policing for local people are community and response. Yes it is reassuring to see patrolling officers (despite all research pointing to their having virtually no impact on crime levels) and the link they provide - eyes and ears - is too useful and integral to policing to be lost. Yet there is also, isn't there, a great reassurance in safely knowing that, when the chips are down, when something is happening and you really need police help, quickly, one phone call will deliver two professional, trained and competent officers at your door within minutes.  Personally I think this is the most important reassurance, others disagree.  Whichever way you think, can we agree that they are both desirable?  A feature of the tale from Canada in the link above is the high proportion of the workforce which is available for street duties.  I have no idea what the similar proportions are in Suffolk, but I am certain it will be nowhere near.  Despite the massive civilianisation programme the British police underwent since 1997 there are still too many officers in all forces in non-patrol roles.   The key to this is a multi-functional workforce with a default position of patrol, in community or response roles.  Where other demands arise they can be switched to a different role while the need persists, but we cannot afford a standing army of backroom staff at the expense of more visible policing.

Which also means that police must restrict themselves to policing.  I was interested in the Chief Constable's remarks about looking at the whole public service demand.  Yes there is overlap, with Social Services and Children's Services in particular but also with health and housing. But there must be a clear understanding of who does what and despite all these professions being staffed as they are by those who care, the temptation formally to fill the gaps caused by the shortcomings of other agencies is to be avoided.  We have already, in most places, washed our hands of lost property and a few other things the police have always done because there was nobody else.  Nothing should be ruled in or out other than patrol and response; some traditional functions will and ought to be examined carefully to see if their contribution to what the community wants from its police justifies their existence.  It is all scary and yet refreshing in equal measure.

Mid-Suffolk PCC Public Meeting, 13th May 2015

Despite my interest in policing I've never been to a public meeting with the police before, at least not as a member of the public.  Perhaps I was just too scarred by the experience of being savaged in Islington in the 80s or frustrated in Bradford in the 90s while sitting on the other side of the table, but more that I didn't think I would want to put myself in a position which would probably just result in my sympathising with the speakers rather than the audience.

However, a less-than-satisfactory telephone encounter with Suffolk Constabulary earlier this week caused me to be looking at their website, and I saw that there was a meeting last night in Eye, the large village/small town just 3 miles away. Speaking were the Police & Crime Commissioner Tim Passmore, the Temporary Chief Constable Gareth Wilson and my local Inspector, Tristran Pepper.  So it was I arrived, early as usual, in the Community Centre car park waiting to play my part in feeding back community views on policing.

As is often the case, I found some humour in the situation straight away.  Four youths were, as I arrived, sitting on the playground equipment smoking.  Now it might have been that they could only afford the one cigarette and that was why they were passing round between them, but I suspect there may have been a less legal reason for it.  And while they certainly looked up (and stopped sharing) while first the Chief and then the Inspector walked into the building in uniform it didn't actually put an end to their fun.  How ironic, I thought, if someone were to mention youths taking drugs in public areas in the meeting about to begin.  I wasn't disappointed.

As the meeting began I looked around at my fellow participants.  Around 20 members of the community and a handful of staff from the PCC's office I guess.  A man videoing the meeting for later upload to the website and a lady serving the free teas and coffees. With biscuits. Our part of Suffolk is very rural and eyeing the public attendees I realised that all were 10 years or so older than me with the exception of a 40-something man in a tie sitting behind me who seemed quite organised, being in possession of some sort of PCC publicity material upon which he had made copious "black spider" notes.  I tried, mentally, to predict the issues to be raised.  Cynics in the Met always say that, whatever the crime situation, the public always complain about dog mess on the pavement.  I discounted this, if for no other reason than that the area actually has very few pavements, and put my imaginary bets instead on speeding, drugs use and visibility of police.

The meeting began pretty much on time and for once the audio and visual equipment worked flawlessly, at least after the PCC had found the button on his radio mic.  He started, inevitably running through the financial challenges facing the Constabulary, the changing demands it faced and reassuring us that he would not be "chucking other people's money at it".  Of course, not Mr. Passmore - you are a Conservative - we all know that is Labour's method.  There was a quick reinforcement of his view that he was right to refuse to amalgamate the Constabulary's Control Room with our neighbours in Norfolk - the one most contentious decision of his reign to date - although without offering any reason for his conviction.  Perhaps it has been all been done before; certainly nobody seemed to want him to expand. He ended by explaining that much research had been conducted on domestic violence and acknowledged that "the system does need improvement" and then touched on innovation, referring to an initiative titled "Evidence-based policing".  Which, I thought, didn't sound all that innovative - surely policing had been based on evidence for a very long time.  Or at least ought to have been?

The Chief was next. He has a pleasant and relaxed style which I warmed to.  He stressed the changing nature of demands, that "cyber-crime" and other new problems had largely filled the gaps in demand created by the fall in more traditional crime, hence the overall demand levels had changed, he said, very little.  He accepted that staffing levels would continue to fall and suggested that this could only be met by reducing calls for service, which would enable him to do a better job but with fewer resources.  He was keen to talk about serious and organised crime, the Eastern Area Specialist Operations Unit, Counter Terrorism unit, the ATHENA regional intelligence project, mobile working and body cameras.  I couldn't help but think that, as interesting and exciting as all that might be it was possibly a little beyond the issues that this audience was keen to explore.  The course of the discussion later confirmed this to me.  Lastly, and what was much more relevant was his desire to "understand the demand on the public sector in the county" - with a view to reducing demand by identifying duplication and overlap.  

The final presentation was Insp. Pepper, who ran us through the (improving) figures for victim satisfaction and reductions in anti-social behaviour and domestic burglary in the area. He was entirely reassuring and gave the clear impression that he was a man who cared about his role and succeeding in it.

So, on to questions from the floor.  First up a well-spoken man in the 'pole-position' seat, by the aisle in the front row.  He advanced his view that drugs were the root cause of all crime, and expressed his horror that he had recently heard there was heroin in the area.  The PCC sympathised, said that he personally loathed drugs and that it was the top priority of the policing plans, adding somewhat curiously that we should "rest assured that everything is being done that can be done, but we can always do more I suppose".  Eh?  A few more comments from the floor drew the expected and ironic reference to drug-taking in public areas and then the microphone was passed to the man behind me with the notes.  Who started eloquently but suddenly and without warning flew into a 'hang em and flog em' rant as to how all drug users were criminals and had to be treated as such, arrest them and prosecute them and it is problem solved. He used the phrase 'nail them' a number of times; I don't think he was actually advocating crucifixion but to be honest I don't think any of us was absolutely certain.  It was a very interesting point in proceedings for me - how would this largely senior, probably pretty conservative audience react?  I was a little surprised and quietly relieved that he received absolutely no support.  

A few references to policing hunts followed, from which I learned only that it is a subject which polarises opinion - as if we didn't know that.  And then on to speeding.  The Chief was, as throughout, calm and measured in his responses, explaining that the mobile speed cameras were not a cash cow, were sited so as to have the maximum impact and that Community Speed Watch schemes were expanding and successful.  A few eyebrows were raised when he said that on some rural roads it was difficult to enforce speed limits because it was dangerous to put officers there - due to the speed of passing traffic.........  He quickly qualified this by saying that of course it could be done but that the officers' safety had to be paramount.  We knew what he meant but it was just a slightly clumsy way of expressing it I suppose.

We went on with a discussion about 'eyes and ears' which enabled me to make my point about the difficulty of getting deployment decisions right; I was entirely happy that my feedback was well-received and will be taken into account. Those on the platform appeared to accept that new methods and processes were unlikely to be right first go and that adjustment would made where it was needed.  

The last point was made again by the man with the notes.  He started by apologising for his earlier rant, and in complaining about the lack of police visibility in the town of Stowmarket even made passing reference to Roy Jenkins and the Unit Beat scheme of the 1960s, before spoiling his apparently comprehensive knowledge and research by getting the year of the Brixton riots wrong and repeating an urban myth about the role played by local officers in it. Which upset me a little, but not as much as it did the pole-position drugs man, who stood up, turned round and forcefully accused notes man of monopolising the meeting and ruining it for everyone else,  High drama.

Except it wasn't quite the end, as the microphone then got passed to an elderly man who had so far remained silent, and who proceeded to ask the PCC a question about youth engagement.  Which was a little odd in that there had been scarcely a mention of this throughout the rest of the meeting.  The PCC though clearly relished the question and gave us a 5 minute run-through of the 3 initiatives he was working on in this area.  It was certainly a friendly question to ask him and actually made me wonder if it wouldn't have been better for the answer to have been delivered as a statement in the PCC's opening remarks.

That, then, is my factual report of the meeting.  In my next blog I will try to unpick a few of the issues it highlighted to me.

Emobilize - computer scam by internet and phone

I came across a genuine scam today which is worth passing on, especially to those who are not as computer-savvy as some.

A window pops up on your PC and says that you have loads of infections and your hard drive is about to expire irretrievably. It looks like it is a Microsoft pop-up. There is an 0800 number so you call it, it is free after all. A convincing Indian man will then explain the risk, say that he is from Microsoft and somehow put a piece of software called Remote Rescue or similar on your PC to analyse it. He will then tell you they can clean it for a price, in this case it was £300 by credit card. They then draw a few pretty patterns on your screen, tell you it is done and off you go. What then becomes of your credit card numbers is anybody's guess.

The company doing this call themselves E-mobilize, www.emobilize.net The number they use is 0800 0588121. They are run by 3 Indian nationals called Saurabh Basak Born Sep 1987; Muthuraja Mani Born Jul 1979 Shaswat Ravi Born 2Dec 1984. The company is registered to a very low rent accountancy firm called Husain Bulman & Co, 258 Merton Road London SW18 5JL. 

They process their payments through a firm called Pinnacle E-Serve who are run by another pair of Indians, Mrs. Shivani Jain Born Nov 1976 and Mr Sudhir Abba Born Oct 1970.

Enquiries continue, but please warn your friends and share as widely as possible.

Duty to Levi? - It's not right, but it's not surprising

Levi Bellfield found bullying the vulnerable easy.  He intimidated women and weaker men with his size, backed up by dreadful violence if it were needed.  But when it came to a more equal fight – such as when it kicked off in a club where he was working – he would be nowhere to be seen.  Perhaps one day the video we found of him supposedly ‘bare knuckle boxing’ will make its way on to You Tube, and the world can share the laughter we on the enquiry team burst into when we saw it.  ‘Bare-knuckle running away’ was a more accurate description.

So it is no surprise that he was assaulted and was unable to defend himself in Wakefield Prison.  There are some genuine hard men in there who, whatever they had done to be put away, were still decent enough to take exception to Bellfield killing young girls, beating up women and raping anyone he fancied.  It was only a matter of time before somebody took him on.  It isn’t right, but it also isn’t surprising.

Equally, it is completely understandable that the Prison Service chose to settle his claim. £4,500 is a tidy sum, but nothing like the amount they would have to spend on a full trial, even if they won.  The Service is just as cash-strapped as the rest of the Public Sector, and its bosses have to make business decisions, with sound economics winning over common sense morality.  And indeed £4,500 is drop in the ocean compared to the many millions the public purse has spent on trials already on Bellfield’s behalf.  You and I pay and the only winners are Bellfield and the lawyers.  It definitely isn’t right, but as distasteful as it might be, it also isn’t surprising. 

But if you want real proof that the whole system is messed up, look no further than the scale of compensation paid by the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority to the families of murder victims.  For a single relative the maximum is £11,000, and for multiple relatives £5,500 each.  So, currently, the parents of Amélie Delagrange, Marsha McDonnell and Millie Dowler - who not only endured the loss of their daughters but the heartbreak of trials, of Bellfield sneering at them and having their lives dissected by his legal team – would each be entitled to just £1000 more than Bellfield has been given because the warders at Wakefield could not prevent him from getting a few scratches from a sharpened toothbrush.

And that is so not right as to be off the scale, and puts this whole ridiculous business of a duty of care being owed to monsters like Bellfield into a sickening perspective.

The Truth: Hurts.

Senior Investigating Officers make hundreds of decisions, most of which are actually of very little consequence.  Of the few that do really matter, some are surprisingly easy.  At least I suppose that many others will be surprised  that they are really what seem these days to be called ‘no brainers’. 

A strangely frequent no brainer is whether to secure some evidence of a serious crime in circumstances where it is obvious that the admissibility of that evidence might at some later date be called into question.  My thinking in these situations was pretty swift, and went along these lines:  If we don’t get the evidence now, we might not ever get it.  It won’t then be available at court.  If we get it but it is challenged, the learned Judge might exercise discretion against us, and we might lose it.  It won’t then be available at court.  But he or she might just let it in, and we will have it.  So let’s get what we can, and then let the court decide - the worst that might happen is that we end up in the same position we would have been in had we not secured it.  There is nothing to lose.  At least that was how it seemed.

But this thinking relied upon two principles which we took for granted, but which the shameful treatment of Detective Superintendent Steven Fulcher has now called into question.  First, our criminal justice system eschewed the American doctrine of ‘the fruit of the forbidden tree’.  Essentially, evidence which was obviously correct, which pointed to an incontrovertible objective truth, was admissible even if procedure had not been followed in unearthing it.  So a search without reasonable suspicion, without a warrant, even an irregular interview, were of no consequence if they yielded sound evidence.  Jurisprudentially, the concept of objective truth was accepted and it trumped whatever procedural niceties the Judges’ Rules or then the Police & Criminal Evidence Act threw up in the path that led to it.  Secondly we, the SIOs, knew that our first duty was to the community we served, and that we could justify decisions as being faithful to that duty without fear for our reputation, career or pension.  Which is how it should of course be, unless we want those who take the decisions in major investigations to be putting themselves before the people they have sworn to serve.

The awful and unwarranted predicament in which Steven Fulcher now finds himself has cast serious doubts on all this; doubts which have terrible implications for us all.  When confronted by a self-confessed murderer telling him of the location of a further victim, Mr. Fulcher had to take a decision.  But it was a no brainer.  He could comply with PACE, return to the station, and commence an interview, at some point after a solicitor had been summoned, advice given and the tape machine switched on.  If, as the result of advice, or a change of heart, “no comment” was the result, the opportunity to find a body, to resolve a case and most importantly to let a family know what had really happened to a loved one, would have been lost.  The alternative was to carry on, to strike while the iron was hot and allow the admission to be made and the body to be found.  On the basis that, if the suspect were to indicate the spot and the body to be found, it was pretty self-evident that the suspect knew a great deal about it, an objective truth would have been uncovered and the lack of strict procedural correctness therefore judged irrelevant.  Which is what Steven Fulcher did, and which – I hope – any SIO worthy of the name would have done.

I can just about understand the Judge’s ruling that the evidence of the second murder is inadmissible.  I do not agree with it, however I am sure he was applying the law faithfully as he saw it.  But what I cannot fathom is the decision - presumably taken by the top team within Wiltshire Police - to suspend Steven Fulcher and call in the IPCC.  Because SIOs are going to take note and inevitably factor their own career prospects in to similar decisions in future, to the detriment of victims, their families and the community.  Which will equally inevitably mean bodies not found, crimes not solved and victims not satisfied.

Police Officers who take money, who falsify evidence, who are too lazy to act, who use excessive force – these are the ones who should be suspended, investigated and dealt with.  Those like Steven Fulcher, who do the best they think they can, honestly, in a considered manner and prioritising the interests of victims and the community, should be applauded, not suspended.

The pen is mightier than the sword

Or, updating the adage for the 21st century, the computer is mightier than the gun.

Arming every officer, even if it were logistically possible, even if they were all suitable (which it isn't, and they aren't) would not prevent tragedies such as we saw yesterday. Policing is a risky business at the sharp end, and where a madman does things so far off the scale of reasonableness and predictability the risks are impossible to eradicate.  And to alter the essential character of our policing to such an extent in the hope that it might help is, sadly, simply not worth it.

But what we must do, what the leaders of our Police Service are duty-bound to do, is to take every possible step to make sure that our policing of our communities by consent is safe.  In this context that means making sure that every single piece of information and intelligence which might help inform officers attending every call for help is available to them and those who direct them.

There is a long-standing issue with the dissemination of information gleaned from major investigations, which few forces, if any, have come to terms with.  Typically, a force will have three computer systems relevant to this issue - Command and Control, which logs calls for help, who is responding, how the incident is dealt with and the result; an intelligence database where information, graded for reliability, is kept in cross-referenced indices with entries relating to persons, vehicles, premises and locations; and the HOLMES (Home Office Large Major Enquiry System) database upon which every piece of information relating to major investigations is kept in discrete accounts.

The Command and Control system has a facility whereby as an incident log is created any flags attached to the address entered will be displayed.  These may relate to the occupiers or the location and are essential for the dispatching officer to make an informed decision as to the risk to officer safety.  In some forces these flags still have to be entered manually whilst in others information will be copied across from the intelligence system automatically.  But of course even in the latter cases, manual entry on to the intelligence system is required, so there is a dependence on somebody, somewhere, deciding that the information is worth recording.  The ultimate systems might be where the Command and Control logs themselves automatically write back to the intelligence system, but the issues of duplication and data standardisation here are proving difficult to overcome.

At a divisional level intelligence staff are pretty good at updating the Command and Control database. But it all becomes a bit murky when you start to try to include HOLMES. Culturally it has taken some years to arrive at the position where detectives investigating the most serious of crimes have accepted the necessity to put everything they do, see, hear and take possession of on to 'The System', that is, to record it on the HOLMES database. The additional burden of separately submitting an intelligence report for the different database seems to have been taken on only by the more conscientious and far-sighted officers.  Despite repeated efforts it has not been possible, to my knowledge, to arrive at a reliable means of achieving the automatic transfer of information from HOLMES to an intelligence database, certainly not in a foolproof and operationally sound way. So we are left to rely upon the judgment of individual intelligence officers attached to major enquiry teams, who have as a priority the gathering of information for dissemination to their team and perhaps understandably therefore are frequently too busy to push information out from the team to the wider force in any comprehensive or reliable manner.  I doubt there is a Senior Investigating Officer past or present who has not wrestled with this problem, tried to address it but ended up uneasy that it has never really been solved.

Why is all this relevant?  Because the fact that there is a vast mass of useful intelligence lying dormant in HOLMES accounts across the country means, generally, that opportunities to solve or prevent crime, and to mitigate risks to officers, are not available to those who would like to take advantage of them.  Because, I fear, it is very likely that despite the huge external and internal publicity generated by Greater Manchester Police in the hunt for Cregan, there will be information in the HOLMES account that would have led to his capture had it been available to a wider audience. Or, more devastatingly perhaps, which would have linked Cregan somehow, maybe through a few degrees of separation, with the house in Abbey Gardens.

This piece is written not to criticize nor carp, but rather to offer a suggestion at a time when all of us, especially those who have worn the uniform, are hurting. It is extremely difficult, extremely unpalatable.  But it would be some additional respect to the memories of Fiona Bone and Nicola Hughes if their painful loss were to inspire each and every police officer and staff member to ensure that every conceivable snippet of information they acquire is shared as widely as it can be. Computers, not guns, ought to be giving our dedicated frontline officers the increased safety they deserve, but as ever, they can only be as good as the information they are fed.