Cutting Crime By Catching Criminals

Cutting Crime: Catching Criminals With Better Policing

Proposals for Policing and Criminal Justice from the Liberal Democrat Justice and Home Affairs Team

Cutting Crime: Catching Criminals With Better Policing

Foreword Chris Huhne MP Liberal Democrat Shadow Home Secretary There is too much crime, and particularly too much violent crime. Crime hurts some of the poorest and most vulnerable members of our society, who have the fewest resources to withstand its arbitrary and unpredictable effects. All the political parties can agree about the objective. We all want to cut crime and improve personal security. The only question is how. The Liberal Democrats have a fundamentally different approach to that of Labour and the Conservative consensus. We are resolutely in favour of what works. We want effective action to cut crime, not political posturing. We will follow the evidence and the research, not prejudice and hunch. The most striking feature of the national debate about crime is how removed it has become from the hard evidence about what works. The Labour government has presided over an enormous increase in the prison population, even though its own expensively-funded research from leading international criminologists shows that more prison does not cut crime. Its policy can only be explained as a knee-jerk response to populism. Ministers are adrift on a turbulent sea of tabloid ink. The Conservatives, of course, cheer them on. After the calls to remove any checks on police surveillance, the liberal credentials of the Tory front bench are in tatters. David Cameron also recently called for everyone carrying a knife to be locked up. If this happened, the prison population would quadruple and a Tory government would have to put a penny on the basic rate of income tax to pay for this commitment alone. This paper is a plea for a fundamental shift in our thinking about crime. It argues that we rely on prison far too much. First, re-offending is appallingly high as prisons are colleges of crime. Secondly, the chances of being caught are still far too low as only one in a hundred crimes leads to a conviction. We do not need to increase the severity of punishments, but we do need to increase the chances of being caught. Catching criminals works better than posturing about penalties. The focus is therefore on better policing. We need more police on the streets and detecting crime. But we also need to improve the standard of the average police unit to that of the professional best. How? We must stop ducking the tough choices on police reform, as both Labour and Conservative governments have done. We also need a radical programme of decentralisation, scrapping national targets and empowering local people to hold their own police force to account. Police forces should be able to experiment and innovate. Police authorities should have far more power to set priorities, budgets and police taxes. They should also be able to dismiss the chief constable.

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A paper by the Liberal Democrat Justice and Home Affairs Team

Cutting Crime: Catching Criminals With Better Policing But police authorities must be representative of the whole community, including women and ethnic minorities, which is why we reject Labour and Tory plans for elected sheriffs. We propose a mixed system with a majority elected by fair votes. Labour and the Conservatives have been locked in a populist battle over punishment for so long that they cannot change. Labour has had its chance over the last eleven years, and it has criminalised a generation of young people and nearly doubled the prison population. Labour cannot deliver a fresh start in cutting crime. The Conservatives won’t. Only the Liberal Democrats will.

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Cutting Crime: Catching Criminals With Better Policing

Executive Summary •

The public believe that crime is the most important issue facing the country today. Yet criminal justice policy has become uniquely divorced from the evidence, as Labour and the Tories compete on tough rhetoric rather than effective action. The public debate about crime needs to focus on what works.

•

Catching more criminals cuts crime, and posturing about punishments for the minority who get caught does not. This is because only one in a hundred crimes results in a conviction. There should be a spending shift towards policing and detection and away from gaol for minor offences as prisons act as colleges of crime. Abolishing ID cards would also fund more police and their staff.

•

Better policing means more police on the streets. We are committed to an extra 10,000 police officers and neighbourhood policing across the country. It also means more efficient policing that improves the average to the standard of the best. Detection rates even for violence vary from 36 per cent to 67 per cent in different forces, yet both Labour and the Tories have ducked the hard issues of reform. Serious and organised crime needs higher priority.

•

Central targets have been counterproductive, and it is time for a radical decentralisation allowing priorities and budgets to be set locally. Where police forces have the same boundaries as councils, the council should be the police authority holding the Chief Constable to account. Where police forces straddle councils, a third of the police authority should be nominated councillors and two thirds directly elected by fair votes.

•

Faith should be restored to crime figures by putting them under the direct supervision of the Office of National Statistics and publishing crime and detection figures at local (ward) level. A National Crime Reduction Agency should be charged with assessing the reporting on the effectiveness of police and criminal justice measures so that policy is guided by evidence and not prejudice.

•

Chief officers should have greater discretion to manage their force in deciding key staff changes and rewarding specialisms. The police contract – lifetime employment for 30 years, a single point of entry and pay linked to seniority – should be urgently reviewed. The Government should respect police pay awards from the independent Police Arbitration Tribunal.

•

Prisoners should have education and training as a route to work, and prisoners with drug addiction and mental health problems should be treated medically if necessary in secure accommodation. Minor offences and anti-social behaviour should be dealt with by Community Justice Panels in every town, and the probation service should be strengthened to enforce community sentences. We back restorative justice programmes where offenders recognise the effects of their actions and make amends to their victims. Specialist courts, notably drugs courts, should be expanded so that the offender’s progress in rehabilitation can be followed and ensured.

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A paper by the Liberal Democrat Justice and Home Affairs Team

Cutting Crime: Catching Criminals With Better Policing

Contents

Foreword

Page 2

Executive Summary

Page 4

Introduction: The Problem

Page 6

Tory and Labour Tag on Crime

Page 8

Liberal Democrat Proposals for Change

Page 15

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Cutting Crime: Catching Criminals With Better Policing

Introduction: The Problem 1.1. The British people believe crime to be the most important issue facing the country. Despite the gathering signs of economic problems, some 42 per cent of those polled in the six Ipsos-MORI polls so far in 2008 thought crime “the most important issue facing Britain today”.1 The Government’s own review into public perceptions of crime found that 55 per cent of the public thought crime was the most important issue facing Britain today.2 1.2. The importance attributed to crime has undergone a sea change over the last forty years. From 1974 to 1992, there was only one year when more than 20 per cent of the public thought crime the most important issue facing the country. From 1992 to 2005, there were only two years when concern was less than 20 per cent. Since 2005, concern has taken off sharply rising through 30 per cent to its present level of more than 40 per cent. 1.3. The increasing concern of the public contrasts oddly with the fall in crime shown by official figures in recent years - whether for crime recorded by the police or by the British Crime Survey (BCS). The most reliable and consistent series – as recognised by Tory and Labour ministers when in office – is the BCS based on a sample of nearly 50,000 interviews. Unlike the recorded crime figures, it is immune from changes in recording practice. It shows a peak in 1995 followed by a consistent decline except for 2006-7. On the BCS, overall crime is now back to the levels of the early eighties in Mrs Thatcher’s pomp.3 Within BCS crime, violent crime has tracked the overall total downwards is now about half its peak in 1995. 1.4. Public perceptions, however, have changed dramatically, as we have seen from the polling data. One factor in public perception is undoubtedly the change in the political climate. Criminal justice policy had for many decades been marked by a substantial degree of consensus among the political parties, but became a fiercely contested area when Tony Blair took over as shadow Home secretary in 1992. It is a tribute to Mr Blair’s political skills that the first sharp step up in public concern about crime dates from 1993. 1.5. The consequent political heat – reflected particularly in the popular press, with its emphasis on human interest stories – has helped to increase the fear of crime. Some 44 per cent of national tabloid newspaper readers perceive “a lot more crime over the previous two years” compared with just 24 per cent of national broadsheet readers4. 1.6. Public concern has also been heightened by knife crime. We cannot be certain about exactly what is happening, as the recorded crime figures do not yet report knife crimes separately, and survey evidence in London is only partial. But in order to assess recent trends more objectively, the Liberal Democrats asked the NHS about admissions to hospitals from stab wounds. These show that admissions had risen by 88 per cent over five years among under 16s, by 75 per cent among 16-18 year olds, and by 34 per cent overall

1

http://www.ipsos-mori.com/content/turnout/the-most-important-issues-facing-britain-today.ashx Page 7, Engaging communities in fighting crime. 3 Figure 2.4, page 28, Home Office Statistical Bulletin, July 2008. 4 Table 5.09, page 142, BCS data. Home Office Statistical Bulletin, July 2008. The difference in perception between social groups does not account for the difference in newspaper readership. 2

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Cutting Crime: Catching Criminals With Better Policing to almost 6,000 a year.5 The public is right to be worried about this development particularly as it is concentrated geographically in troubled areas. 1.7 The figures for police recorded can be affected by changes in police recording practices, targets and public tolerance. They are therefore widely regarded as less reliable than BCS figures, which show a fall in violence. However, the police recorded figures for the most serious violence show an increase from 15,820 to 16,939 cases per year over the period of Labour's period of office. These cases of serious violence are less likely to have been affected by changes in police recording practices or public tolerance. 1.8. There is nothing liberal about violence. Violent crime is unacceptable, and the public demand for safety and security is entirely legitimate. As society has become more affluent, new generations will not put up with inconveniences and disruptions that our forebears thought normal. The policing and criminal justice system has always faced a trap of rising public expectations familiar to other public services. It can only spring itself from that trap if it manages to outperform expectations by providing a service fit for the twenty first century. 1.9

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This paper looks first at the dead end into which Labour and Tory policies have led us, and then about how we can gradually re-establish a criminal justice and penal policy based on evidence and professionalism rather than hunch and prejudice. The focus is on what works and what does not, and what the policing and criminal justice system needs to do if it is to reform to meet new challenges and higher expectations.

Hansard, 25/06/08: Column 362W.

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Cutting Crime: Catching Criminals With Better Policing

Labour and Tory Tag on Crime 2.1

The principal charge against both successive Conservative and Labour Home secretaries is that they have ignored what works to cut crime, and have instead played to the gallery about measures about which there is much more doubt. In no other area of public life is the gap between policy and evidence so wide.

2.2

Labour and the Conservatives have both succumbed to five key failures: •

They have pretended that prison and sentence severity is what deters crime, when the evidence shows that what really matters is detecting the crime in the first place. Catching criminals matters more than posturing on punishments.

•

They have wasted taxpayers’ money on prisons, when the priority should be policing, probation and secure treatment facilities for addicts and the mentally ill.

•

They have succumbed to legislative diarrhoea as a substitute for action, with the Labour government alone creating a giddying 3,600 new criminal offences since 1997. Criminal justice bills are used to “send signals” like press releases.

•

They have set centralised targets for policing that have proved counter-productive in distorting local priorities, undermining the professional discretion of police officers, and sucking thousands unnecessarily into the criminal justice system.

•

They have ducked the tough choices on police reform so that skills are not rewarded enough, poor performance is not tackled, and pay has become a political football.

2.3

The latest example of knee-jerk nonsense was the Home Secretary’s announcement ahead of her policing green paper that she intended to march offenders into hospitals to see the consequences of violence, even though nobody had considered that patients and doctors might resent offender tourism. Moreover, a similar juvenile awareness programme called “Scared Straight” had been tried, tested, and found to put crime up not down in the United States.6 When we pointed this out, the green paper was amended late to ditch the idea.

2.4

At the same time, the Conservatives suggested that the maximum four year sentence for carrying a knife, at the discretion of a judge who could assess the motives and dangers involved, was not enough. There should be presumption that everyone carrying a knife should serve time in prison, a pledge that duly made tabloid headlines, but would, if implemented, quadruple the prison population and add a penny to the basic rate of income tax.7

6

Anthony Petrosino et al, “Scared Straight and other juvenile awareness programmes for preventing juvenile delinquency: a systematic review of the randomised experimental evidence”, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, September 2003, p. 41-62. 7 Liberal Democrat research shows locking up every knife carrier (330,000 young people) would cost £4.9 billion a year. This is based on the £40,992 annual price of keeping a prisoner behind bars and the capital cost of building

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Cutting Crime: Catching Criminals With Better Policing 2.5

The sad truth is that both Labour and the Conservatives are far more interested in posturing in the press about punishment than about taking the measures that are proven to tackle crime. Their approach has meant that crime has been higher than it would have been had they done the right thing and stuck to what really works. That is why Labour and the Tories are soft on crime and soft on the causes of crime. They care more about their own short-term popularity than getting crime down.

2.6

Both Labour and the Conservatives are committed to longer prison sentences: the average crown court custodial sentence has gone from 22.4 to 25.2 months since 1997 at considerable expense to the taxpayer. Yet the Home Office’s own research on sentence severity – a substantial study by leading international criminologists - has concluded there is “no firm evidence regarding the extent to which raising severities of punishment would enhance deterrence of crime”.8

2.7

Both Labour and the Conservatives want yet more prisons, even though we lock up more people per head of population than any other country in the European Union except Luxembourg. Labour’s proposed Titan prisons are particularly ineffective because prisoners will be far from families and relationships that might allow some chance of rehabilitation and living in such large institutions can have a brutalising effect on their inmates.

2.8

The international evidence also undermines the view that prison works. England and Wales had an 11 per cent drop in crime between 1991 and 2001 but a 45 per cent increase in the prison rate: from this simple contrast, some argue that prison works. But in the same period Canada experienced a 17 per cent drop and increased the incarceration rate by just 2 per cent. Denmark had a 9 per cent reduction in the crime rate, which was matched by a 9 per cent reduction in the prison rate.9 If prison works so well, why have we needed to raise the prison population from 44,552 in 1993 to 83,575 in July 2008? The most comprehensive recent study of the international evidence concluded: “These figures, once again, support the general criminological conclusion that crime and incarceration rates are fairly independent of one another; each rises and falls according to its own laws and dynamics.” 10

2.9

Prison is necessary for serious offences and serial offenders, but its main focus must be to prevent crime not to leave its inmates with so little to do or learn that they swap hints on best criminal practice. As the former Tory Home Secretary David Waddington once put it in a criminal justice white paper, prison is “an expensive way of making bad people worse”. The current re-offending rate for a young man serving a first custodial sentence is 92 per

100,000 additional prison places. http://www.chrishuhne.org.uk/news/000480/tory_knife_plans_would_add_penny_on_income_tax.html 8 Von Hirsch, A et al, Criminal Deterrence and Sentence Severity, page 46, Oxford, Hart Publishing 1999. 9 The Howard League for Penal Reform, The Principles and Limits of the Penal System, p. 13, http://www.howardleague.org/fileadmin/howard_league/user/pdf/Commission/HL_Commission_Seminar_1_Repo rt.pdf 10 Tapio Lappi-Seppala, Trust, Welfare and Political Economy, National Research Institute of Legal Policy, Finland, 2007 (mimeo).

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Cutting Crime: Catching Criminals With Better Policing cent.11 Short-term prison sentences disrupt work and family commitments, and train people very effectively for a life of worse crime when they get out. 2.10 The reason why sentence severity and prison has so little impact on crime is partly the shocking rates of re-offending, which must be addressed by providing meaningful education, training and work for prisoners so that they are better equipped for an honest life outside. But there is another reason why sentence severity is so weak an instrument: only about one in 100 crimes in this country leads to a conviction in court12. What works to cut crime is detection: catching criminals is more effective than posturing on punishment. 2.11 Yet detection rates have fallen back sharply from 34 per cent at the end of the eighties to 28 per cent on the latest figures. Just as tellingly, detection rates vary substantially from police force to force. This can, of course, reflect different recording practices and also efforts to take other crimes into consideration after conviction. But even for crimes such as violence against the person, which the public and police might expect to prioritise, there is an astonishing difference in detection rates from the worst force (London’s Metropolitan police with 36 per cent) against the best (North Yorkshire with 67 per cent). Even big urban forces similar to the Met – such as Merseyside and Greater Manchester – have detection rates for violence of 54 per cent and 50 per cent respectively. 2.12 Narrowing the differences in detection by learning from best practice and what works should be an overwhelming priority for all police forces. There would be more than 140,000 extra violent crimes detected each year if the national average detection rate were improved to the rate of the top 10 per cent of police forces. There would be nearly 400,000 more crimes detected if the average detection rate was closer to the top 10 per cent, including over 40,000 burglaries, 17,000 robberies and 7,000 sexual offences. This kind of improvement in detection rates would have a greater impact on reducing crime than any other single factor.13 Penalties are usually severe: the problem is that the chances of facing them are too low. 2.13 A sensible police and penal policy would give top priority to policing, detection, and community punishments, saving money on prisons. If the prison population had been held at the same level as it was when crime peaked in 1996, there would now be additional £1.2 billion available in public spending from the prison running costs alone, enough to hire an additional 25,000 police officers across the country, an increase of nearly a fifth. If the ID card scheme were scrapped, a further 10,000 police could be retained. 2.14 The Matrix knowledge group recently found that seven alternatives to prison offered better value for money for the taxpayer when reduced re-offending is the desired outcome. The value for money savings per offender were significant, ranging from £425 to £88,469 when considering only the public sector costs, and between £16,260 and £202,775 when also including costs to the victims.14 These included three adult community-based 11

Reducing re-offending by ex-prisoners, p. 16, http://www.thelearningjourney.co.uk/file.2007-1001.1714894439/download 12 This takes into account crimes not covered by the British Crime Survey against business and those under the age of 16. The BCS crime detection rate is about 3 per cent. 13 Liberal Democrat research, available on request. 14 The Matrix Knowledge Group, The Economic Case For and Against Prison, November 2007, http://www.matrixknowledge.co.uk/prison-economics/

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A paper by the Liberal Democrat Justice and Home Affairs Team

Cutting Crime: Catching Criminals With Better Policing interventions – residential drug treatment, surveillance and surveillance with drug treatment – and two alternative juvenile interventions – community programmes with aftercare and surveillance and community supervision with victim reparation. If prison was the only possible sentence, then behavioural intervention, educational or vocational intervention, sex-offender treatment and drug treatment all had a positive impact for both the offender and the taxpayer.15 2.15 The same bizarre sense of priorities – favouring prison over what works in policing and other strategies - animated Tory policy in Government. Violent crime rose every year between 1979 and 1997 by a total of 168 per cent. In the same period, total recorded crime rose by 81 per cent. Burglary doubled. The chance of being a victim of crime doubled. Convictions fell by a third.16 Surprisingly, police numbers fell by 1,132 between 1993 and 1997 admittedly in part due to local decisions giving priority to equipment.17 Nevertheless, this was despite John Major’s promise of 5,000 more police officers.18 As recently as in their 2005 manifesto, the Conservatives proposed 5,000 new police officers a year.19 David Cameron quietly dropped this proposal when he became leader preferring quixotic commitments to jail all knife-carriers. 2.16 Punishment posturing has led to ludicrous legislative results. There have been 65 acts in this area since 1997. Another six bills are being prepared for next year. In their first decade in government, Labour added 370 Acts and 33,000 Statutory Instruments to the statute book, a total of 114,000 pages. This legislation takes the same amount of shelf space as 200 copies of War and Peace and is twice as heavy as John Prescott. 2.17 Labour has introduced 3,600 new criminal offences since 1997 . It is, for example, now against the law to sell a grey squirrel or impersonate a traffic warden and in 2004 it became illegal to import into Britain ‘potatoes which he knows to be or has reasonable cause to suspect to be Polish.’20 This legislative diarrhoea is the despair of judges, who see whole sections of criminal justice bills shovelled through the Commons without debate. Just as important, it takes police time and effort to keep up with the constant whirl of new offences. 2.18 The automatic response of Labour and Tory ministers to failure and public pressure has been to gather more power to Whitehall, weakening links between police and local communities, and at the same time depriving police forces of their ability to experiment and innovate. Decentralisation is the only way, in public services, that there can be a process of discovery akin to entrepreneurship in the private sector, and the only way in which best practice can be developed and then spread. Imposing one model from Whitehall merely risks spreading failure. Yet centralisation has been the order of the day for both Labour and the Tories. 2.19 Between 1968 and 1974, Labour and Conservative governments undertook police force amalgamations that reduced their number from 126 to 43. Later, the Major administration 15

Ibid., p.15. Hansard, 17 Jun 2008: Column 880. 17 Police Service Strength 2003, p.14, http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs2/hosb1103.pdf 18 Conservative Party Conference speech, 1995. 19 Conservative Party Manifesto 2005, p.15, http://www.conservatives.com/pdf/manifesto-uk-2005.pdf 20 SI 2004/1452 Polish Potatoes 16

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Cutting Crime: Catching Criminals With Better Policing would reduce the size of police authorities and transfer direct management functions and control over budgets away from them to Chief Constables in the 1994 and 1996 Police Acts. The result was toothless police authorities and forces severely lacking in local accountability. 2.20 Labour has continued this process since 1997. They have expanded the reach of the Home Office in setting targets, prescribing strategies, inspecting performance and requiring the implementation of detailed action plans.21 In the Police Reform Act 2002, the Home Secretary tied police forces hands by producing a National Policing Plan. The Home Secretary had new powers to intervene in the management of police forces, upsetting the balance between the traditional tripartite structure of government, police authorities and chief constables. The Police and Justice Act 2006 further eroded the autonomy of police authorities and allowed direct government intervention in police business.22 2.21 The Home Secretary retains a number of powers, such as removing chief officers, giving directions to forces and the power to force mergers, which the recent Green Paper makes clear the Government is still prepared to use.23 2.22 The Police Federation believe that the ‘target-driven culture’ imposed by the Government is forcing them to make arrests for petty offences, at the expense of concentrating on serious crime.24 The idea of ‘offences brought to justice’ bizarrely gives equal weighting to all offences. Clearing up a murder, therefore, is of the same ‘tick-box’ value as cautioning a man for ‘possession of an egg with intent to throw’ or for ‘throwing a glass of water over his girlfriend.’25 The result has been that incidents, such as playground disputes, which once would have been dealt with by common sense and a ticking-off, now appear in the crime statistics. 2.23 As one police officer put it, in an interview with a think tank, ‘we are bringing more and more people to justice but they are the wrong people.’26 The easiest way to get sanction detections is to penalise children. This Government has criminalised children in an unprecedented manner. Between 2003 and 2006, the number of young people aged between 10 and 17 who received a reprimand, final warning or conviction for an indictable offence increased by 19 per cent.27 We have more children in prison than any other country in western Europe, and we have the lowest age of criminal responsibility in both Scotland and England and Wales28. Our detailed proposals for tackling youth offending – for preventing offences in the first place, and for heading off minor offenders before they get

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Loveday, B. and Reid, A., Going Local: Who should run Britain’s police?, Policy Exchange, 2003, http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/images/libimages/180.pdf 22 Daily Telegraph, Abandoned police force merger plans cost £11m, 21/08/06, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1526849/Abandoned-police-force-merger-plans-cost-andpound11m.html 23 Home Office, From the Neighbourhood to the National: Policing Our Communities, p.84, http://files.homeoffice.gov.uk/police/policing_green_paper.pdf 24 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6656411.stm 25 Ibid. 26 The Public and the Police, Civitas, p. 48, http://www.civitas.org.uk/press/prcs74.php 27 Nacro, Some facts about children and young people who offend – 2006, March 2008, p.2, http://www.nacro.org.uk/data/resources/nacro-2008050105.pdf 28 Aged 8 in Scotland, and aged 10 in England and Wales.

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A paper by the Liberal Democrat Justice and Home Affairs Team

Cutting Crime: Catching Criminals With Better Policing worse – were set out in July in our paper “A Life away from crime – a new approach to youth justice”29. 2.24 Jan Berry, the former head of the Police Federation, has said that these Government targets are causing a breakdown in public trust in the police.30 Today, only just over half of the public (53 per cent) think that the police are doing an excellent or good job.31 This may have increased from a low point of 47 per cent in 2003/04 but it remains a long way behind the 1996 level of 64 per cent.32 Perhaps more worryingly, only 41 per cent of those who had had recent contact with the police thought they were doing a good or excellent job, compared to 57 per cent who had not.33 Worse still, only 48 per cent of all people surveyed thought the police would be there when needed and 43 per cent thought they could be relied on to deal with minor crimes.34 2.25 Apart from corroding trust, chasing sanction detections for minor offences diverts police effort from crime that the public cares about most. 2.26 Despite all the management-speak of centralised target setting and control, both Labour and the Conservatives have ducked many of the serious issues of police reform. Everyone is in favour of the easy commitments – cutting paperwork, introducing more IT – but neither Labour nor the Tories address the rigidities of police working. There must be a review of the many aspects of police officer employment practices which limit the service’s attractiveness to many potential high calibre candidates. Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) was surely right to advocate a ‘fundamental review of concepts such as the single point of entry to the service, the 30-year police career and the current nontransferability of training, skills and qualifications.’35 2.27 In the four years since that report came out, however, Labour have been unwilling or unable to tackle these fundamental issues any more than the Tories. The Tories’ interim paper Policing for the People admits that one of the greatest problems with police pay is that it is bound to seniority and suggests that officers should be able to progress within ranks, not just between them.36 Yet when faced with precisely these recommendations in 1993 by the Sheehy Report, the Conservative Government ducked real reform.37 Similarly, the Conservatives now recognise that ‘police injury pensions were regarded as particularly wasteful and expensive.’38 However, in the mid-1990s they again ducked the issue and refused to implement the reforms recommended by the Sheehy Report on pension reform.39 The 1993 report recommended radical changes to police tenure and pensions. Yet despite promising that a full review into police pensions would report in mid-1994, the

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http://www.libdems.org.uk/media/documents/policies/A%20Life%20Away%20From%20Crime.pdf http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7145860.stm 31 Crime in England and Wales 2007/8, p.117, http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs08/hosb0708.pdf 32 Op Cit, A New Beat, p.9. 33 Crime in England and Wales 2007/8, p.119, http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs08/hosb0708.pdf 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., p.18. 36 Conservative Interim Paper Policing for the People, pp.110-116, http://www.conservatives.com/pdf/policereform.pdf 37 Home Office response to Sheehy Report, p. 3, response 11 and 13. (28 Oct 1993) HDEP93/175 38 Op Cit, Policing for the People, p. 123 39 Sheehy Report (Oct 1993), Chp. 13 and Home Office Response, p.2. 30

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Cutting Crime: Catching Criminals With Better Policing then Conservative Government refused to take on these difficult issues and the review remained unpublished until 1998.40 2.28 The Home Office’s response to the Sheehy Report also pledged to introduce new arrangements ‘for dealing with misconduct and unsatisfactory performance will ensure that officers who ought not to remain in the service will leave it.’41 Unsurprisingly, the Conservative Government ducked this issue as well. Pay continues to be overwhelmingly determined by seniority in a way that would be regarded as antediluvian in other walks of life, as it merely encourages a demotivating time-serving culture. Poor performance is more difficult to tackle than other parts of the public sector let alone the private sector. 2.29 Both Labour and the Conservatives have now recognised the limits of centralised targets, and seek to ensure local accountability through directly elected officials. In the Conservative plans, there would be one elected Commissioner or sheriff for the whole force area, but this would allow someone to be elected on a modest vote who could proceed to ignore the interests of minorities. Indeed, they could also ignore the interests of the majority if they were elected on a plurality of the vote. Labour plans are scarcely better, as they would elect one person for each council that is part of a Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership. As a first past the post election, this too is likely to sideline women and ethnic minorities from representation on the police authority. Both sets of proposals would risk a further politicisation of policing.

40 41

Ibid., p.5. Ibid., p.2.

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Cutting Crime: Catching Criminals With Better Policing

Liberal Democrat Proposals for Change 3.1

The Liberal Democrat approach to policing and criminal justice above all seeks a shift away from populist punitiveness, and towards what works to cut crime: more police, higher detection rates, greater local accountability, ways of dealing with low level offences before the formal criminal justice system is involved, and an emphasis on preventative measures taken in conjunction with local councils (such as alley gates, measures to enforce licensing restrictions and so on). When prison is necessary, its focus must be on work, education and training for prisoners, and on providing help back into meaningful jobs on leaving.

3.2

Reducing crime should be the overwhelming priority of the police and criminal justice system, and proposals should be tested objectively to ensure that the most effective measures are being taken with that one objective in mind. The National Police Improvement Agency should be given a wider remit and more resources to test scientifically what works: the new National Crime Reduction Agency should aim to do for policing and criminal justice what the National Institute for Clinical Excellence does in the health service. In policing, its research should gradually build up a core of professional expertise around policing techniques that are proven to be effective. It should also have a key role in publishing comparative performance indicators, and reporting on and encouraging best practice.

3.3

The current distrust and confusion concerning the crime statistics needs to be addressed. The public regards the politically-sensitive crime statistics rather as they used to see the unemployment figures under the Conservatives, an expensively rigged joke. The Home Office statistical unit should no longer merely be under the umbrella of UK National Statistics, but should be a part of the Office of National Statistics itself. The closeness of the relationship between statisticians and the policy-makers they serve can be fruitful in ensuring relevance, but it can also lead to doubts about conflicts of interest. Where the ONS feels that crime figures are inevitably compromised – because of police decisions leading to under-recording, or the public’s unwillingness to report – those series should be highlighted as unreliable. Crime figures should be published at ward level, but these should also include detection rates so that local police can be held to account.

3.4

There should be a sustained shift of spending priorities from the prison service to the police and probation, so that non-custodial sentences can be properly enforced. We would put at least 10,000 more police on the streets by scrapping the Government’s intrusive and ineffective ID card scheme. If the prison population had been maintained at the same level as 1996, there would be £1.2 billion extra in running costs available to spend elsewhere in the home and justice budget. This is enough to hire 25,000 police officers.

3.5

Centralised targets must end, but the corollary is that local accountability must be strengthened firmly. Police authorities should have far more power. They must have the sole right to sack and appoint the Chief Constable, a right currently circumscribed by the approval of the Home Secretary. They should set local policing priorities, agree any national minimum standards (for example for response times), determine budgets, and change that part of taxation allocated to them (currently council tax, but a part of local Autumn Conference 2008

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Cutting Crime: Catching Criminals With Better Policing income tax under our proposals). They should not be subject to Whitehall capping, but should be held to account in the normal democratic way by the voters. 3.6

Where a police force has the same borders as a local council, as is still the case with eight of the 43 English and Welsh forces at present, that council should be the police authority. Councils can then dovetail their own anti-crime efforts with the police and criminal justice system, and take a view of local priorities not just within policing but more widely. The council will have a clear mandate across its field of responsibility, allowing it not merely to raise or lower tax and spending on policing but also to shift resources from one area to another. There is a direct line of accountability to the electorate who can therefore have the last say in rewarding or punishing the decisions of their elected representatives.

3.7

Force mergers, however, now mean that most police forces straddle a large number of local authorities, so that different arrangements need to be made in these cases as there is no appetite for breaking up existing forces. The same considerations apply to a very large force area like London. The present system of indirect nomination of elected councillors – the compromise as forces have become larger than councils - is in theory proportional, but in practice smaller groups and minorities are squeezed out. Although the Liberal Democrats have averaged 27 per cent of the vote in the last five years while the number of Lib Dem councillors on the police authorities is disproportionately small at 19 per cent. The distortions can be much greater in individual force areas, where Labour representation is systematically squeezed in the South and Tory representation in the North42.

3.8

Our proposed new powers for police authorities mean that the public should know and be able to hold to account their police authority representatives: there should be no taxation without representation. Unlike voters can hold decision-takers directly to account, there will be overwhelming pressure on central government to interfere. Police authorities need to be strong enough, with a popular mandate, to resist Home Office meddling. We therefore propose that two-thirds of the elected members of the police authority should be directly elected by fair votes. Direct election by the Single Transferable Vote would properly represent all the strands of opinion, minorities and the quirks of geography in a police authority. There should be no bar on a dual mandate allowing people to stand for council and the police authority. This one-third/two-thirds system is the same as Liberal Democrat policy for elected health boards.

3.9

Given the importance of councils and police working together in crime and disorder reduction partnerships, police command units should be aligned with such council boundaries to encourage dialogue and co-operation between the commander and the council, as is already the case in London. No-one should underestimate the impact that an enlightened council can have in preventing crime. Lib Dem-run Liverpool managed to cut domestic burglary by a quarter in two years, and reduce robbery by 18 per cent, thanks in part to its alley-gate scheme. Southwark's multi-agency approach to street drinking cut the numbers from 140 to 26 in one month in Camberwell over a period of a year. Lib Dem Lambeth put enormous efforts into closing the borough's 84 crack-houses, reducing them to just ten open at any one time. Bristol opened the first Family Support

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A council has to nominate three members to a delegated body before the Opposition need be represented.

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A paper by the Liberal Democrat Justice and Home Affairs Team

Cutting Crime: Catching Criminals With Better Policing Centre in the UK where families that agree to learn about parenting skills and other ways to change their lives have legal action suspended while they do so. The lead councillor for community safety and the chair of the CDRP should have the right to attend and speak at meetings of their police authority. A third of the elected members of the police authority should be nominated from councillors within the force area. Police authorities should also co-opt extra members such as magistrates and others to ensure diversity, experience and expertise. As now, key votes should require a majority of elected members. 3.10 Police authorities need to take a proactive role in challenging their local force to meet their priorities. There is also strong evidence of big differences in force efficiency: a recent study from Loughborough University economists, for example, gave police force efficiency scores that ranged from 100 per cent for Suffolk, North Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Cumbria to 73 per cent for the Metropolitan Police and 78 per cent for Surrey.43 Given that the criminological evidence is so strong that detection deters crime, the variation in detection rates from one force to another is surprisingly large. But the numbers, of course, are only ever part of the story. In rural areas where everyone knows everyone else, it may be easier to detect crime than in urban streets where neighbours are strangers (though in other respects rural areas more difficult to police). So police authorities should have the resources to research the performance of their police force, and to allow for the full range of factors determining performance. 3.11 The Government intends that data about crime at ward level should be published. But it is essential for local accountability that not just crime data but also detection data should be published at ward level, allowing residents to assess police performance. In New York, one of the key factors in improving police performance under the reforms of Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Commissioner Bill Bratton was the regular comparison of successful precincts with less successful ones, and the spreading of best practice. The NYPD Compstat system also publishes data within a week of collection, enabling swift responses to operational shortfalls and changes in criminal activity. 3.12 We support the new emphasis on neighbourhood policing. After many years when only the Liberal Democrats championed this idea, the pilots have been successful in cutting crime and reassuring the public.44 Neighbourhood policing is now being rolled out nationally. It provides an essential link between police forces and the communities they serve, gathering intelligence about crime and also reassuring witnesses that they can and should come forward. Policing relies on the active cooperation of the citizen, and neighbourhood policing is a key part of maintaining the public’s commitment to law and order. 3.13 If the Chief Constable and other chief officers are to be held closely accountable by reinvigorated police authorities, they in turn must be able to manage their forces, decide on key staff changes, and reward key specialisms, subject of course to the key checks and 43

Drake, L. and Simper, R., Police Efficiency in Offences Cleared, p.23 http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ec/Research/Discussion per cent20Papers per cent202002/Research per cent20Papers per cent202002/Police per cent20Efficiency per cent20in per cent20Offences per cent20Cleared.pdf 44 Victimisation rates fell from 42% to 32% in the pilot areas, compared with a fall from 38% to 32% in those without neighbourhood policing activity, according to the House of Commons standard library note SN/HA/4122. See the evaluation also in http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs08/rdsolr0108.pdf

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Cutting Crime: Catching Criminals With Better Policing balances of employment law. There should be an urgent review of whether the very restrictive terms and conditions for police officers – a single point of entry into the force, 30-year lifetime employment and pay determined by seniority – are still appropriate. Pay must reward an officer’s investment in expertise – whether in information technology or forensics – without promoting them out of the job for which they are well prepared. Working closely with the staff associations, it ought to be possible to modernise the police contract to make the working life of the vast majority of dedicated and hard-working police officers more satisfying and rewarding. 3.14 There should be more routes out of the police force when officers are no longer motivated or even physically fit. A job for life, regardless of aptitude or effort, is no longer acceptable. For example, police officers are physically tested when they join the force, and are tested again each year for the use of equipment like batons and handcuffs. But in such a physically demanding job, it is odd that there are no regular tests for fitness as one chief constable pointed out last year in introducing compulsory fitness testing.45 Fit and active front-line officers should receive pay in line with the dangers they face, and the arrest powers they exercise. There should be annual fitness tests, and those who fail should be moved to a desk role or civilian position in the force. 3.15 The Government’s handling of overall police pay has been abysmal. Given that the police are not by law allowed to strike, and there are also controls on their ability to take second jobs in their spare time, the Government owes a particular responsibility to the police to respect agreed methods of pay determination. Ministers should respect and implement in full the recommendations of the independent Police Arbitration Tribunal. The Home Secretary’s failure to do so has been a substantial blow to morale. 3.16 There should be a renewed effort to cut unnecessary police paper-work, and to replace form-filling with voice-recognition technology, hand-held computers, and civilian keyboard operators who could take details over the radio. However, some data are required to stop abuses such as disproportionate stop and search of members of ethnic minorities. Police powers must be used responsibly and in proportion to the problem. The Law Commission should be asked to advise on how legal checks and balances could be made simpler, and the Plain English Campaign should be asked to advise on simplifying police forms. 3.17 As well as local communities asking ‘what are the police doing for us’, we should also ask ‘what can we do for ourselves?’ Community engagement means encouraging people to work alongside the police, notably in the unique role of the Special Constable. The Home Office calls them ‘part of a tradition of the public taking an active part in policing their own community’ but in recent years their numbers have plummeted.46 In 1993 there were 20,573 special constables in England and Wales.47 Today there are just 13,221.48 We would 45

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/north_east/6973970.stm ‘Police: Serving the Community’, Home Office Booklet, http://police.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/communitypolicing/police_serving_community.pdf?view=Binary 47 Hansard, 22/07/02, Column 854W, http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200102/cmhansrd/vo020722/text/20722w45.htm#20722w45.html_w qn6 48 Hansard, 07/01/08, Column 298W, http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmhansrd/cm080107/text/80107w0060.htm 46

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A paper by the Liberal Democrat Justice and Home Affairs Team

Cutting Crime: Catching Criminals With Better Policing back a new recruitment drive for special constables particularly among women and people from ethnic minorities. 3.18 Turning now to the prison system, the key priority must be to ensure the reform and rehabilitation of the offender. There is therefore a clear measure of success: does the offender commit crime again? The first priority must be to treat the mentally ill and drug addicts as patients rather than prisoners. Neither will respond rationally to punishment, and both need care if they are to stop re-offending. Yet 72 per cent of male prisoners and 70 per cent of female prisoners suffer from two or more mental health disorders.49 And 55 per cent of offenders entering prison have serious drug problems.50 Offenders who are mentally ill or drug addicts should be separated out of the mainstream prison population by extending mental health and drug treatment for offenders. 3.19 Rehabilitation among other prisoners would improve by giving them something productive to do. Prisoners who do not participate in education or training are three times more likely to go back to crime. This makes it even more shocking that 65 per cent of offenders do not receive any training. Half of all prisoners do not have the skills required by 96 per cent of jobs, and only one in five are able to complete a job application form.51 We would triple the number of prisoners working, and make education and training compulsory. We would ensure that access to basic literacy and numeracy courses is available to all and targeted at young offenders. The effort a prisoner puts into the education and work will be one of the factors used when considering their release date. There can be routes back into useful social roles, but we are simply failing to provide enough of them. 3.20 The courts system has a key role to play in promoting rehabilitation. When dealing with addicts, a specialist drugs court is most likely to be able to insist on rehabilitation. They also allow judges to follow through with an alternative if a first course of action fails, so that judgement becomes a process of reform and rehabilitation. We should expand specialist courts that develop a real knowledge of drug or domestic violence cases. Community courts, such as the pilot in Liverpool, are also an interesting innovation. By bringing police, probation and social services together in one court building, it is possible to follow through an offender’s rehabilitation. Community Courts should be properly evaluated and rolled out across the country if, as we expect, their promise is borne out by the evidence. 3.21 An alternative to imprisonment is community punishment. David Hanson, the Justice Minister, said recently that ‘the truth is that for many offenders community sentences are more effective in cutting re-offending than short-term prison sentences.’52 But community sentences need to be demanding and rehabilitative. A properly resourced and stable probation service is the key to effective community sentences.

49

Prison Reform Trust, Bromley Briefings, June 2008, p. 29 http://www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk/temp/FactfilespPROOFspJUNE08small.pdf 50 Ibid., p.31 51 Prison Reform Trust, Prison Factfile, p.33, http://www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk/temp/factfilenov2006finalsp4.pdf 52 David Hanson, MoJ Press Release, 03.06.08, http://www.justice.gov.uk/news/newsrelease030608a.htm

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Cutting Crime: Catching Criminals With Better Policing 3.22 To stop young people from being sucked into the criminal justice system for low level offences and anti-social behaviour, we would set up Community Justice Panels (CJPs) in every town and city. Pioneered in Chard, Somerset, offenders apologise before a panel of local people. A course of reparation, including Positive Behaviour Orders (PBOs), is then agreed that allows the offender to make amends to the community, with a punishment agreed by local people that is tailored to fit the crime. Action is taken in the courts against those who refuse the punishment. The re-offending rate in Chard is just 5 per cent.53 3.23 Another innovation is restorative justice. Victims confront the offender with the full consequences of their actions, which can lead to heart-felt changes in behaviour in the offender and a relief of grievance for the victim.54 A growing body of evidence suggests that restorative justice cuts re-offending, including a recent Government report.55 In a Canadian study, offenders who were dealt with using restorative justice had a much lower reconviction rate - just 11 per cent compared with 37 per cent of those who went to prison.56 We would ensure that restorative justice projects are run locally in every community with facilities in schools and children’s care homes. We will also back larger pilots of restorative justice programmes in the criminal justice system.

53

http://www.realjustice.org/library/cicjp.html Restorative justice: the views of victims and offenders, June 2007, http://www.justice.gov.uk/docs/Restorative-Justice.pdf 55 Does restorative justice affect reconviction?, June 2008, http://www.justice.gov.uk/docs/restorative-justice-report_06-08.pdf 56 Institute for Public Policy Reseacrh, Communities can hold youth to account and reduce re-offending, http://www.ippr.org.uk/pressreleases/?id=3180 54

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A paper by the Liberal Democrat Justice and Home Affairs Team

Cutting Crime: Catching Criminals With Better Policing

Applicability and Costings With the devolution of powers to Scotland and Wales, many decisions made in Westminster now apply to England only. That means that policies in those nations are increasingly different from those in England – reflecting different choices, priorities and circumstances. The proposals set out in this document are our vision for what a Liberal Democrat government in Westminster could do to cut crime. Some proposals published by the Liberal Democrats imply modifications to existing government public expenditure priorities. We recognise that it may not be possible to achieve all these proposals in the lifetime of one Parliament. We intend to publish a costed manifesto, setting out our priorities across all policy areas, at the next general election.

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