The police need operational reform and community accountability not defunding

There's been a great deal about 'defunding' of police and criticism of the manner in which police operate. It has long been appparent that operational efficiency and the desire of senior officers to minimise individual initiative has led to poorer policing. The police will present reams of statistics showing how they catch more baddies, do more patrolling and generally do a massively better job that those dull, old-style bobbies of the 1960s. And, of course, it's not usually the police who are responsible for the crime - that's mostly down to the criminals.

It should, however, concern us that policing is increasingly militarised in style, that police officers are more 'other' and less citizens in uniform, and that managerial preference has reduced local beat centres in favour of huge barracks like this one in Bradford:

Even worse, as a citizen, entering one of these huge unfriendly buildings means entering another offensive space. For such large buildings the reception for the visitor is claustrophobic and assumes that any person walking into the building is a threat to the police on duty. The walls are plastered with irregularly spaced warning notices, stern instructions to any visitor and posters about crimes. There is not even the slightest attempt to make the place welcoming and every visitor must either stand and wait or else perch on an uncomfortable plastic chair screwed to the floor. Eventually you are seen by a person from behind a reinforced glass screen requiring you to almost shout so as to be heard. The sense in all this is that, whoever you are, the police will respond vigorously and agressively towards anyone who steps across their arbitrary behavioural line.

In these days of technology, this operational centralisation seems unnecessary. Why require officers to travel to a central location when instructions, reports and orders can be sent using mobile telephones, tablets or laptops? Even better, such an approach could allow for something similar to this example from Dallas:

...a homeowners’ association emerged and a nonprofit Munger Place Alliance Against Crime hired off-duty uniformed police officers and to pay the city for the use of their squad cars in order to patrol the neighborhood at random times in four-hour increments. The police officers met with the homeowners every month and reported their findings and experiences. Instead of a resident seeing a police car in the neighborhood and experiencing a tremble of apprehension, now a resident would break into a smile because the police were there on behalf of the neighborhood. They were not there to shake someone down for a minor infraction.

The impact in Munger Place was positive and, since the initiative started, has seen crime plummet and the area become, once again, a desirable area for people to live and work. Yet police services everywhere have eliminated local police stations, sold off police houses and ended the old practice of embedding police officers in communities by providing them with a home there. As we consider the future of work for everyone else, we should perhaps start to look at the future organisation of policing. It's very clear that in many of our large cities the police services are failing - you don't need to look much beyond London's knife crime epidemic to see how police appear (when they're not hounding essentially innocent people for saying something on Twitter) to have walked away from proactive and community-based policing.

As with so much in our public service, the cry from the organisations and their advocates is "more funding, more funding". There is little expectation that police services will reform as a condition for the additional funding and politicians simply parrot "1000 more police officers" to head off the critics in the same way as they intone "7000 more nurses, 500 more doctors and 20 more hospitals" to lay claim to caring about the population's health. In England the creation of Police and Crime Commissioners was supposed to improve the accountability of the various police services. Sadly, these PCCs were given no say over operational priorities, a limited control of the budget and precious little else - they quickly became elected mouthpieces for police leadership rather than people able to shape and improve our response to crime in local communities.

The more thoughtful criticism of policing (some of it from people involved in the BLM movement) has rightly pointed out that, for many communities, the police are seen as an intrusion even though most people living in those communities cry out for lower crime, safer streets and a trusted police presence. When the local police were literally local - based on the high street in a station you could walk to from home - people felt the police were 'their' police not 'feds' or 'cops' swooshing in with fancy cars, tazers and a bad attitude. In that little description of the change in Munger Place the most telling line is how people feared the police, "...seeing a police car in the neighborhood and experiencing a tremble of apprehension." Put simply, if you're a police service and this is how you're seen by the communities you serve, then you're failing. And the UK police are failing.

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