Myriad performance targets within policing bodies are leading to a high number of issued cautions, to the detriment of citizens
Early in 1966, just a few months before he retired, Lieutenant Colonel Sir Ranulph Maunsell Bacon QPM, the Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police spoke at a Home Office conference in London. The subject of his speech was ‘Effective Policing’ – a dry and uninspiring topic guaranteed to have the majority of his audience sleeping peacefully within a few minutes. However, halfway through he departed from his prepared notes and jerked everyone to attention with an unscripted and unexpected comment.
“Actually, any fool can deliver effective policing,” he said. “All you need is a bottomless pot of money and a gullible citizenry who believe everything that you tell them.”
As it was then, so it is now, but sadly for today’s chief constables and commissioners, the world is a different place and the pot of money has disappeared. Ever since the financial sky fell on the City of London in 2008 and the economy could no longer be sustained by buy-to-let mortgages and cheap credit, those who manage policing in this country have had to face up to a fiscal environment that is completely alien to them. Where once money was literally no object, police forces are now being forced to think the unthinkable and deal with 20 per cent reductions in their budgets. Salaries are being slashed while a pay freeze is in place until at least 2016, and despite recruitment and promotion within ranks coming to a juddering halt, the government has embarked upon a programme of ‘reform’ which will see compulsory redundancy introduced for all police officers , at every rank, within the next few months, based upon ‘economic pressures’ facing forces. Thus the power to dispense with the services of sworn police officers will, for the first time since the Police Strike in 1919, be linked to what the force can afford to rather than individual performance.
Nowhere is this being felt more keenly than in London, where the Metropolitan Police seems to be collapsing operationally as it sheds staff, closes stations, and struggles to keep the loyalty of its personnel. Staff who in a recent internal survey voted overwhelming that they had “little or no confidence” in their senior officers. However the Met has a bigger strategic problem; because whilst dealing with these challenges and cutting £631 million from its budget over the next two years, the force must simultaneously be seen to be delivering an effective service to the people of the capital. And sadly for the forces’ publicity branch, the citizens of our fair city are not as gullible as they were 50 years ago.
This presentational sleight of hand is being achieved by publication of myriad performance targets produced by Scotland Yard, in an effort to show how well the force is doing. Every offence category, from homicide to simple theft, has its own discrete target for reduction and detection. This target culture cascades right down through the organisation and ends up, as is the case in all London boroughs, with every individual front-line officer required to make not less than five arrests per month. Failure to produce these apprehensions puts officers in jeopardy of discipline and misconduct proceedings. Thus, constables concerned for their job security look for any offence to help them meet the target, no matter how trivial or unnecessary it may be.
To the average member of the public, a ‘detected’ crime suggests an offence where a suspect has been charged and taken before a court for punishment, but only around 50 per cent of offenders, some 650,000 per year, make it this far – increasingly the remainder are given fixed penalty tickets (300,000 per year), or are cautioned by the police (358,000 per year). ‘Simple’ cautions were introduced in the 1980s to deal with minor offences, with the aim of reducing costs and freeing courts to deal with serious crimes. From the police point of view, cautioning is a highly attractive option, described by one insider as “maximum result for minimum effort,” because every caution is one less case file to be prepared and at least one less day at court. The offender signs a form admitting to guilt and, miraculously, another crime has been successfully ‘detected’, which is then promptly recorded on the plus side of Home Office crime statistics.
The rate of cautioning has increased at an alarming rate over the past decade; in fact, the majority of all arrested offenders are now cautioned at police stations or served with a fixed penalty notice. Simple cautions were imposed on more than 2.2 million people between 2000 and 2008. Any pretence of standing by the original philosophy that a caution represents a ‘last chance’ was abandoned long ago in the interests of expediency. There are legions of examples of offenders being cautioned two, three or four times in succession before being formally charged.
Significantly however, few people realise that a police caution counts for official record purposes, as a criminal conviction. Recently, I spoke to a group of Muslim boys and girls on a ‘Young Leaders’ course in an East London borough. Aged between 15 and 19, they were articulate, intelligent and street-smart; yet without exception they had no idea how a police caution for a trivial offence could affect their lives forever. “It doesn’t count,” said one, “it’s just a slap on the wrist.”
“A caution is just a telling-off,” said another. “The police tear it up when they let you go.”
One young man even believed, “the police are doing you a favour, so that you don’t have to go to court”.
In every case they were wrong and were completely unaware that a recorded police caution for a minor prank in which a boy’s school sports kit was hidden in a shed (true story) was categorised as ‘Theft – Dishonesty’, or that throwing a bread roll at someone in the street (yet another true story) was recorded as ‘Common Assault’ and listed forever more as a ‘Violent Crime’. There are countless such examples across the whole of England and Wales but what these young people did not know was that cautions such as these for ‘Dishonesty’ or ‘Violence’ (and especially ‘Drugs’) will bar that person from obtaining a visa to travel to the USA and a dozen other countries. All cautions must be declared in job applications, meaning applicants with criminal cautions for Dishonesty, Violence or Drugs will be barred from the Civil Service, the Armed Forces and all the caring professions. A caution in youth can blight someone’s life prospects for decades.
So, as the sun sets on commonsense policing in the UK, my advice to any innocent person offered a police caution for an alleged offence, no matter how trivial, is to ignore the soothing words of the custody sergeant as you are told, “It’s just procedure, sign here and you can go on your way.” Instead politely refuse and demand your day in court. In most cases, if the alleged offence is not deemed to be ‘core business’, the evidence against you is not compelling, and on a cost-benefit analysis, a contested prosecution will cost more in terms of cash and effort than they feel is justified within shrinking budgets, the police and the Crown Prosecution Service will forget about it. In the interest of costs, they will ignore you and leave the courts to deal with more serious crime.
Photo Credits: Matt Cardy/Getty Images