Future of Policing Conference

'LEADING TOWARDS THE FUTURE'

A speech for "The Future of Policing" Conference 10th October 2003

Sir Ian Blair QPM
Deputy Commissioner of The UK's Metropolitan Police Service

The police service is sometimes caricatured as the most resistant to change of all public services. If that were true, then the next few years are going to be very uncomfortable. The Prime Minister has speculated about the need for something like a British FBI. The Home Secretary and the police minister, Hazel Blears, are on the path of a new localism. The Home Office is making clear that "you ain't seen anything yet" in terms of police reform. The Conservative Party is pursuing a return to local town policing. The Liberal Democrats are looking to mandate community policing, at least in London.

But resistance to change isn't true! At least, it isn't true of police chiefs. Today, three of us will outline a radical vision for the future of policing, through which we hope to make clear that the leaders of the police service want a different service from the existing one, are not being pushed towards reform but are leading the way, are, in fact, demanding from political parties the room for manoeuvre to change the Service, in terms of governance, of accountability for performance, of mission and of employment practice. And, in doing that, we three are not alone. Ours is not yet an official ACPO position but to take but one example; in past decades, Chief Constables have universally resisted fiercely any suggestion of amalgamation of their forces. Today, the Association of Chief Police Officers is moving rapidly to a position where it is they who are suggesting consideration of that process to government, rather than the other way round.

In my speech, I will largely concentrate on the place of professional policing within the overall communal effort to reduce crime and promote safety, answering, perhaps in a different way, the question I first asked in a speech in 1998, "Where do the police fit into policing?" Peter Neyroud will be concentrating on issues of democratic accountability and local ownership of policing outcomes. Dennis O'Connor will be reconsidering the police mission. However, since I speak first, they have agreed that I should briefly run over the terrain, so that you can see the connections between the presentations.

The key questions about the future of policing are "What should the police do? How should what they do be determined and be measured? How should the service be organised? What kind of people should deliver that service?"

What should the police do?

Well, something different from what they are doing at the moment. We are facing a success gap; a gulf between our assessment of success and that of the public. Both recorded crime and BCS crime are persistently falling. In broad terms, police in England and Wales are being ever more productive, making more arrests, disrupting more gangs, driving down offence rates and yet the public neither believe it nor apparently feel safer. I would suggest to you that this is because policing can broadly be divided into three categories, like the three parts of an altarpiece, to use an odd image. In the middle are the traditional staples of policing, of burglary, theft of and from motor vehicles, deception, street robbery, assaults in public places, domestic violence, answering calls for service. This is our traditional territory; this is what we've been measured on and on which we've been delivering.

However, on the left hand side of this altarpiece, is another group of offences, broadly serious crime and terrorism, such as the rise of gun crime in London and other major cities, with drug turf wars blighting our streets. Only two weeks ago, a seven-year-old girl was murdered deliberately because she had witnessed the murder of her father in what appears to have been a gang shooting. Last week, a jeweller in a country town was murdered in her shop and an automatic weapon was used in a murder in Hertfordshire. The public is also perturbed by an apparent rise in random stranger violence. At the same time, the threat of international mass-casualty terrorism is all around us and every commentator speaks of Britain being an inevitable target. Our first problem then is that, while most crime is decreasing, the crimes that are increasing are, despite being rare, the most frightening of crimes and, of course, those most often and most repeatedly described by the media.

Nevertheless, I am not sure that is the main problem. People have a pretty clear idea of their chances of being struck by lightning and, for most people, there is a sense in which these terrible crimes happen to someone else, somewhere else. It is the other end of the spectrum - the right hand side of this altarpiece - that is the issue. For too long, it has been the police and the Home Office statisticians who have defined what constitutes crime, and, in our surveys, in our dealings with community groups, we do not find that residents, except in particular locations, are overly concerned about gang violence or the threat of terrorism; they're worried by burglary and street crime and assault but understand the police response to it; what they are really worried about and what they see as matters needing police intervention but not receiving it is something quite else; noisy neighbours, open low level drug-dealing, drunks, rowdy teenagers, the mentally ill and the just rude and the aggressive. It is now becoming increasingly clear that what we would describe as policing for the purposes of reassurance has got to become a matter as significant as preventing and detecting recorded crime; we have to understand what it is that people see as being the signal events which show disorder within their community, and, if we need an example, the most pressing problem reported by the majority of the respondents to the Met's annual survey of Londoners about community safety was the presence of abandoned vehicles in the streets.

How should what the police do be determined and measured?

Dennis will therefore outline what the police service is seeking to do around reassurance but, without stealing his thunder, I am quite certain that this will be pointing the police service towards its role in the strengthening of communities, the building of social capital and increasing the collective efficacy of local neighbourhoods; if so, then this will need new skills, new forms of partnership, new forms of measurement, if a sceptical public is to be persuaded of its increased security.

And that means that my second question, 'How should what the police do be determined and measured?' reveals that there is another part to the success gap, which is our failure to engage local communities in informed and impactive ownership of local policing priorities. In London, as in much of the rest of the country, local police commands are co-terminous with boroughs, so there are thirty-two of them in the Met. Some of these commands have a thousand or more staff; they are co-terminous with local authorities that are themselves the results of amalgamations of smaller boroughs before them. Most people just do not connect with government at that level. For most people, policing decisions therefore remain unaccountable and opaque; this must change.

Our emerging view echoes some parts of the Home Secretary and Hazel Blears' emphasis on civil renewal and, indeed, some parts of the Conservative Party's concern for local policing. We need to change the current structure of distant police authorities and relatively unrepresentative and powerless local consultative communities. We need to go much more local, much more accountable, and a number of us believe now that we should move, as the Patten report into the policing of Northern Ireland recommended, towards much more local police boards, representing a mixture of elected and appointed individuals, to whom local police chiefs should account for their performance and actions. However, it is no use doing so, unless those local policing boards can actually determine what the local police should broadly be doing. Even if people were able to engage significantly with their local police commander, they would then find the room for manoeuvre of that commander extraordinarily circumscribed. In London, for instance, that commander would be negotiating with local people inside the framework of a Metropolitan Police Authority plan, which already contained the Met's contribution to national priorities, the Mayor of London's emphasis for the year in question and the priorities additionally set by the Metropolitan Police Authority.

If localism is to work, then the number and the weight of national and, in my case, pan London targets must lessen. Within a framework of, perhaps, floor targets for national achievement, we must develop bespoke targeting, agreed between the local community, the local police chief and some form of strategic police authority. This requires, first, a real commitment from all of the parts of the tripartite structure to meaningful devolution. It also requires the provision of much more information on a much more local basis, perhaps following the real time local information systems of the Chicago Police Department, which will allow local citizens knowledge of crime patterns in the local area at the touch of a button. Beyond that, however, it needs something even more significant: a redefinition of what success would look like. Most of us here know the difference between inputs and outputs and outcomes and we have to insist on the local measurement of outcomes; we have to insist that the interest in police numbers is diminished, that the concentration on crime numbers and judicial disposals is not removed but balanced with a measurement of locally agreed targets for police visibility and with public satisfaction, together with evidence of public behaviour in terms of their occupation of public space.

How should the service be organised?

Would, of course, it were that easy, for if it were, then the Policy Exchange recommendations about breaking the current arrangements of British policing back into the small town or district forces could somehow work. However, the world is much more complex and, however good they are, relatively small units of policing cannot deliver cohesive services in relation to organised crime or travelling criminals or, topically, gun crime and nor can they deliver economies of scale in relation to information systems, command and control, human resource planning, forensics and so on. Furthermore, the internationalism of crime increases at an extraordinary pace and the relationship between people smuggling, crime, revenue evasion, identity theft and terrorism remains a potent mixture far beyond the capacity of small local police units. Both the government and the opposition are entirely right to be considering new national responses, perhaps the creation both of a border police and some new unification of the various national units to create one agency to combat organised crime.

Such structures, however, will deal only with organised criminality at an international and national level. The challenge will then be to deal with crime at the level that lies between the immediate concerns of the local community and national and international conspiracies. This I believe is the piece which is most clearly missing, in this context, from the Conservative Party proposals. First, all national units have a tendency to go after bigger and bigger fish, losing focus on middle tier criminality. Secondly, much of this level of criminality is rooted in and impacts upon local communities, often but not always, new vulnerable communities. No local force will wish to see national units moving in for significant operations and then vanishing, leaving them to pick up the pieces. There is a different model and the model is in front of us, which is of regional forces, such as the force called the Metropolitan Police, which has at its disposal units to deal with kidnap, commercial armed robbery, paedophilia, organised drug traffickers, the organised sex trade, et al. No other force has these capabilities on such a scale. If local policing is to work, it will have to have support from some policing structure beyond itself, in my view in the form of regional forces, but possibly some other formally collaborative arrangement across different forces in a region.

However, one thing is certain: if we combine these themes, the creation of local policing boards and much increased devolution of autonomy to local commanders at one end and the need to provide services at a regional level at the other, then the forty-year-old pattern of English forces must come under renewed consideration and, again, many members of ACPO are up for just that, as Peter Neyroud will explain, in his discussion of a three-tier policing settlement.

What sort of employees does this require?

The Metropolitan Police covers the greatest spectrum of policing in the UK, with responsibility for counter terrorism, the protection of the Royal Family and the prevention of organised crime at one end to the provision of local policing services at the other; all three parts of the altarpiece. We know that we are not properly fulfilling the right hand side; we know that we are not fulfilling what the community wants. We have tried twice before; members of this audience will remember the neighbourhood policing and sector policing experiments in the 1980s and the 1990s in London. They both failed. They failed because the resources that were meant to be dedicated to them were taken away to do all the other things - in the other parts of the altarpiece - that the police were required to do.

The Met have therefore launched our Step Change Programme (http://www.met.police.uk) and http://www.met.police.uk/job/job905/live_files/5.htm

However, within that discussion is a new truth, which is that our intention, our requirement, is to deliver that with a different form of workforce. These local teams will be a mixture of police officers and police community support officers. The obsession by the media and by some political commentators on officer numbers has been oddly damaging for the police service. Odd, because that fixation has led, in recent years, to the Met and other forces being given many welcome new recruits, but recruits which represent an ever increasing proportion of the workforce and of its budget, to the point where police officers are already being used inefficiently to do jobs which would be better done by other people. From our experiments in devolution in London, we already know that local police commanders will wish to reduce the number of police officers and increase the number of civilians, in order to put more police officers onto the street.

However, that civilianisation in a fairly traditional way is only one part of the future. The next stage is more radical: to consider what part of the police task needs the full skills and authority of police officers. We need an irreducible minimum of warranted officers who are capable of exercising the ultimate requirement of public policing, the legitimate use of force. This will remain a very large part of the workforce. However, a number of us now believe that policing tasks can be divided up into different orders of complexity and that we have a workforce, despite their industry and commitment, a significant number of whom are insufficiently trained for the most difficult tasks and over-trained for the majority of their routine work. If the enormous costs of answering all parts of the public requirement for policing are to be within manageable bounds, then a completely different type of police service needs to be envisaged and introduced. We need to move away from a thirty-year career, in general terms, to bring people in at different levels in the organisation, to bring different skills into our workforce, of accountancy, of patrol skills only, of investigation only, of mediation, rather than trying to make the omni-competent constable a reality in the 21st century.

Is this just about modernisation and efficiency? No, ultimately it is about the survival of public policing and here I turn to what I think will be Adam Crawford's main interest in this tour de horizon, the question of the survivability of the public police: because we cannot deliver what the public want within existing resources and existing deployment patterns. We live, in a post-modern age, in a market society, call it what we will, in which personal security is becoming an imperative and therefore in danger of becoming a commodity to be bought and sold.

In my speech in 1998, I laid out a vision of a police service which would manage the provision of patrol in what has now become known as the horizontal model, in which a police officer coordinated the work of many patrolling bodies, including local authority and private security employees. In the years that have followed, the development of different forms of warden service and the provision in the Police Reform Act for accreditation of such bodies have accelerated that process. However, I am now convinced that that is not only not enough but probably the wrong direction. I am sure, from his chapter in Tim's book, that Adam will argue that this is a false trail but I firmly believe that the public would benefit immensely from an expansion of what I would describe as the vertical model of policing, in which the vast majority of patrolling services are provided through the public police.

I have in mind two concentric circles. The inner, much smaller circle is coloured completely blue; this is the direct employees of the police service. The second circle is much larger and consists of all the personnel involved in community safety activity. I believe it is in the interest of social cohesion and public security for as much as possible of that circle also to be blue, in effect for the inner circle to widen. When I returned as Deputy Commissioner three years ago, I found that one London borough was so fed-up with the failure of the Metropolitan Police to provide services in the right hand of my altarpiece, that is for routine patrol, they were considering setting up their own police force, not to patrol only their own estates but to patrol the streets of their borough. We have now negotiated with that borough, Kensington and Chelsea, for them to buy our police community support officers instead.

Police Community Support Officer

This time last year, we had 30 PCSOs in London. There are 950 now, 1450 by the end of the financial year, by which time we will have provided a golden share of PCSOs on each borough, following which will begin to negotiate with all boroughs for the purchase of further PCSOs as a Metropolitan Police franchise. As well as Kensington and Chelsea, some of those negotiations are already at an advanced stage. The advantage of PCSOs is that they do not leave the streets, they do not go up town to do football or marches, they do not make arrests, they do not go to court, they do not need extensive training; they are there and the stories of their success are already legion. There is clearly a spectrum in the warden services provided by local authorities, along the well known journey from grime to crime, but we believe that there is an inherent advantage for the public in having one uniform, one accountability rather than a plethora of disjointed activities; we believe that PCSOs with access to and making contributions to Metropolitan Police intelligence systems will make the capital safer.

However, the argument goes far further than this. In Miami, 19% of the city is not patrolled by the public police but resides behind gated gates and guards. The ghettos of affluence of the great South American and South African cities are stark examples of what may go wrong. At a recent international conference of police chiefs in London this month, almost every major city chief noted their concern over the rise of housing associations, private developments and individuals seeking private security for patrol of their premises and the streets that surround them. In a city which has three hundred languages spoken in its schools, which is probably one of the most diverse cities on the planet, I believe this is inimical to public good. The Met will therefore rigorously seek to extend the coverage of its PCSOs, in due course, beyond local authorities to housing associations, to retail areas and even in the fullness of time, probably to community groups and housing developments. We are already in discussion with the Department of Constitutional Affairs, for instance, for PCSOs to take over the guarding of Court premises. I am sure that this is a journey which the police service has to make: we will compete in the marketplace. We have a value-added product and we will use it for the public good.

Much of this funding will be Met funding but much of it, of course, will be the funding already used by other people to purchase community safety. We just have to colour as much of that wider circle blue as possible. And, of course, the development of PCSOs has huge advantages; they bring a completely fresh seam of individuals into the police service, with 40% of our current employees being from minority communities, for instance. They are representative of a police service that is reinventing itself in terms of employee mix and will soon be joined by, I am quite sure, new breeds of civilian employee, detention officers, escort officers and investigating officers, without warranted powers. And we currently have a great opportunity.

It is absolutely marvellous that we have now got more police officers in England and Wales than we have ever had before, but that can now be used as a jumping-off point. Just as in the health service, where once there were only doctors, nurses and porters, there is now a rich and accepted mix of employee disciplines, so the police service must diversify the way it recruits and deploys individuals with different skills, powers and tenures. The whole team needs welcoming and celebrating. We need to change the language and start to talk about the total number of police employees as a success. The Met has 41,000 of them; why don't we celebrate that fact because each and every one of them is working to promote community safety. If we just talk about 41,000, then we can change the mixture within it for the benefit of efficiency and effectiveness.

Conclusion

So what will this look like? Well, in ten years time, the three of us look to a police service which will operate at three levels, national, regional and local, capable of carrying out the entire spectrum of policing, from counter terrorism to working with communities to strengthen social cohesion. Most police services will be delivered through a structure in which local police commanders negotiate outcome-based performance targets with their local community, within the framework set by and with the backing of specialist resources derived from, strategic police authorities. These authorities are likely to look over the work of a much smaller number of much larger forces. A border police and a national agency to counter organised crime will have come into existence. The number of police employees will grow and they will be from a much wider spectrum of skills and backgrounds; many staff will be very highly trained and many much less so. There will be an irreducible and probably a majority of warranted officers but a larger proportion will not be warranted but will still be police employees, whose total numbers will still be regarded as a great achievement of government.

Put simply, in a new century, the old dispensation will no longer do; the police service is up for reform.

Sir Ian Blair QPM
October 2003