Do Bobbies on the Beat Cut Crime?

It seems a strange question to ask. Pretty much everyone seems to think so. Voters seem to want it. Politicians and opinion formers lobby for more beat officers and less time spent with coppers "filling in forms". It even appeals to common sense gut feeling. More police on patrol is bound to deter baduns. It supposedly follows doesn't it? Tom Utley in the Mail seems to think it does.

Or does it?

Utleys article is in response to the Chief Inspector of the Constabulary; Sir Denis O'Conner, who said that a drop in public faith in the police was in part due to them seen as turning a blind eye to responding to anti-social behaviour. This has lead to Theresa May saying she wants to put more bobbies on the beat. Alan Johnson has also said that he thinks that was a good plan too. (this would contradict Utleys point that it is politicians who are reluctant to see more beat policing. Why would they when it is electorally popular?) It does seem odd that senior coppers have been seen to be rather reluctant to do just this. (O'Conner never actually says out loud that more police on the beat actually cuts crime. Just that people seem to like it.) Or when they refer to it they seem to address it rather obliquely , like they don't seem to like to talk about it. Well the papers do like to talk about it, and are constructing a narrative of combing the worst examples of really horrible anti-social scrotes terrorising their poor neighbours to utter despair, showing how beat police are needed even more than ever. At first I suppose I would have perhaps felt the same way that it most follow that more cops on the streets will cut crime but then I read these pieces by "Flat Earth News" author Nick Davies, an investigative journalist who looked into this very thing. (articles: Here; here and here.) I began to see perhaps why the top cops are wary of beat policing. It just doesn't seem all that effective as a method of policing. The striking year long; 1972 to 73 experiment where Kansas city police used scientific methodology to test the effectiveness of beat based policing - discovered that when they created three specific "beats", one with three times as many foot patrolling police officers, one with none and one with the normal amount of cops, that the police numbers had next to no effect on the crime levels in the three zones, confirmed by over 600 different research indicators. Other studies have yielded the same results, that is foot patrol frequencies have negligible impact on crime rates and detections. It has been reckoned that a police officer in the UK would have to patrol for over 80 years to randomly chance upon nabbing a burglar in the middle of making off with someones DVD player. Bobbies on the beat appear to at best a sticking plaster solution to fighting crime, and only really succeed in making the public feel safer (which is not to be sniffed at. The fear of crime whilst not the same as actual crime, can cause great misery and fear to many people.) and at worst an attempt to fight crime, by not fighting it at all, and even making the public feel more threatened by coming to the understandable post hoc conclusion that as there are more cops around, there must be more crooks around as well.

When you began to give the issue some thought, it does dawn on you that the relative ineffectually of beat based policing is not quite the superficial contradiction in terms it appears. Davies uses an excellent metaphor to describe this method of policing as "doctors being told to prevent car crashes". What this essentially means is that crime like car crashes - is a multifaceted and complex issue, with many complex factors contributing to its causes and frequency. The on foot policeman is in the same boat as the hypothetical doctor, standing with his medical bag on the hard shoulder of the M6 earnestly waiting for his first casualty. He is reactively engaged into fighting on single front, a complex problem without having the resources to fight it in a larger context. The cop like the doctor knows that he is only scratching the surface of the problem. He knows stuff like drugs and alcohol abuse, and lack of facilities for kids, and policies of dumping the families from Satans sulphurous shitter without adequate concern for the local community. And indeed the problem of families like these being so chaotic and fucked up to the point of perverse nihilism, that any conventional deterrent is not going to achieve anything. These all have to be tackled, like the doctor knows that putting barriers and matrix signs on the motorway to warn traffic of hazards, or the problems will continue persist, with them picking up the pieces at the end. It may seem that a visible police officer could perhaps have stopped some yob decorating a car door with a pen knife, or harassing that disabled women as she goes to the local shop, and I'm not saying that in some circumstances it may be able to tackle some of the problem, or cause a less bold tearaway to have second thoughts about his line of work. They probably both apply. I'm also not advocating that coppers on the beat (especially working and getting to know the community) be withdrawn as they are of no use at all. Top cop Ian Blair has; if you read between the lines, has implied that the PCSO's were brought in to be delegated to this kind of policing. They do have a role and must be used. But they appear not to be the quick fix solution to every ones prayers, and this is a problem.

I say that the popular perception of beat based policing being a surefire way to cut crime levels, when in fact it is largely (not wholly though) a cosmetic operation, is a problem because of the fact that crime is such a complex beast to tackle. This means that to really make progress in tackling it you have to understand the roots of it. Unfortunately this is often seen as synonymous with sticking up for criminals and social engineering by critics, hence why politicians like to laud putting "feet on the street" so much. Getting to the roots of crime won't get headlines with a crime busting narrative, and can lead to accusations of being soft or turning a blind eye to "real peoples" suffering under crime. I hope to put accross that just because I think the more conventional police approach was not half as good as is perhaps thought, that doesn't mean I don't care about the victims of crime. I know that on many crumbling estates the residents can be browbeaten to sleepless fear at the hands of absolute gangs of horrors, or that an entire block can be dragged down to crime ridden misery at just one rogue family, and I sympathise with them a lot. This kind of posting may sound a bit hollow if you live in this kind of place, but I really don't think that more foot patrols would have stopped this from happening or have helped the stories published in the papers to support more foot patrols. It would likely be a case of borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, as yobs just terrorise someone out of the sight of the patrols and return when they have left. Then you have the issue of the patrolling being interrupted by actually dealing with antisocials, or being sent to a nearby incident. This is where I feel Utleys article misses the point. He sees crime and policing at the most generic level, with all the complexity removed. Sadly it isn't, if it was crime would have been solved years ago. No-one actually benefits from antisocial behaviour, and it affects everyone - so there isn't an ulterior motive for the police / government to "ignore" it. I think all right thinking people would do everything possible to stop crime if they had the power to do so, but sometimes that power can be elusive. That I think needs to be said more often, that this kind of thing can't be deconstructed as A is bad so we have to do B -there's always C,D and E as well. If the powers that be indulge this kind of thinking (and I'm not saying under the heat of popular flack, and nothing is more emotive than crime - that I can't see why they would) then they risk ending up initiating policies of limited merit otherwise.

Surely that truly is betraying the victims of crime.

Questions on the latest front in the Drugs war.

As we know, the home Alan Johnson has ordered the dance drug Methedrone (meow meow) to be reclassified from a legal substance up to a Class B drug, which is to be implemented as soon as possible (or if you're a resident of the Isle of Man, it has already been done.) presumably on the basis of a few post hoc anecdotes implicating (that doesn't mean the same thing as CAUSE, Sun and Mail editors BTW) it being involved in the death of some young people. This has caused some ructions amongst Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) advisers against the governments apparent spur of the moment ban on the substance. The latest advisor to have resigned in protest on the banning of a substance so quickly, and with so little evidence that the drug actually is a great enough hazard to health to warrant a ban is ACMD government advisor Eric Carlin. He is pretty damning in what he sees as a bit of gesture politics before an election:

"The decision to criminalise mephedrone, was 'unduly based on media and political pressure"

"A 'lack of interest' in prevention and early intervention with young people."

"We had little or no discussion about how our recommendation to classify this drug would be likely to impact on young people's behaviour. 'Our decision was unduly based on media and political pressure."

"As well as being extremely unhappy with how the ACMD operates, I am not prepared to continue to be part of a body which, as its main activity, works to facilitate the potential criminalisation of increasing numbers of young people."

"I believed the decision to rush through the ban had been politically motivated in order for the Government to look tough prior to the election."

"We've not properly considered it, not assessed how young people use it."

Call me Mr Pedantic, but isn't this what an advisory council on drugs use should be chewing the fat about?

This is I'll admit only the opinions of one man, but when we hear that others associated with this kind of thing have been airing similar sentiments, we must question if the government is actually taking into account what these people say, or are other factors motivating their reaction to drug control? We have this equally terse testimony by Dr. Polly Taylor, who was also a member of ACMD before she quit prior to the ban being announced, and in part due to Professor Nutts sacking late last year:

"In the months following the professor's departure, the Government had failed to give its advisers the independence they deserve. I feel there is little more we can do to describe the importance of ensuring that advice is not subjected to a desire to please ministers or the mood of the day's Press."

This hardly allays my fears that drugs policy is being directed by rational evidence based empirical research on the actual harm to users, and not to placate the editorials of newspapers that, ironically just hate a Labour government no matter what they do.

It has been argued that these people are just throwing their toys out the pram. A bunch of unelected bigwigs who think that they should be calling the shots to an elected government, and having a petulant strop when they are knocked back. It may well be true for some individuals. But the common narrative here seems to be that advisers the government has brought in, have either simply offered advice that no one had any intention of paying heed to, or have simply not even had the chance to advise at all. We seem to have a situation where the press respond to whatever is "the killer drug of the week" on the basis of anecdotal evidence, which leads to lurid headlines, then to the calls to ban substance x, then the ban itself from a government. That isn't joined up thinking on a very serious issue. It sure as hell isn't a sound evidence based methodology on drug prevention, and I can well see why the ACMD are banging their heads on a very large brick wall.

I don't think Alan Johnson is a bad man for banning Methedrone, and I don't sanction drug taking (like anything with risk, it is up to the individual to weigh up the risks, and go from there without pressure.) I also think that prohibition of drugs, while superficially may be seen as the right way to protect people, ends up causing more harm than good. Methedrone has now been taken from legitimate sources to the drug dealers. We now don't know if that meow meow tablet has been cut with god knows what, and that hugely inflated costs should fill the drugs trades coffers nicely. It would be a sad irony if methods brought in to "protect" people from this stuff, just ended up putting them at greater risk.