Be honest now. Have you never been tempted, while watching Life on Mars or Ashes to Ashes (assuming you are a fan of the time-warped TV series), to wish that the police were still that unreconstructed? The bad guys got what was coming to them and the good guys dealt it out. Okay, PACE (Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984) was not exactly adhered to (indeed, it did not exist) and people were fitted up, or even beaten up. But hey, they were criminals.
On second thoughts, perhaps DCI Gene Hunt is not the best role model for modern policing. After all, it was during this period, the late 1970s and early 1980s, that policing in this country lost its way, providing neither the avuncular on-the-beat presence of an earlier age of police fiction, Dixon of Dock Green, nor the tough guy, get-the-results attitude of The Sweeney.
In the 1970s, the police began to spend more and more time in their cars and off the streets. Young officers who might, in bygone days, have been content to devote their whole careers to uniformed tasks, now wanted to be detectives and to spend as little time as they could pounding the beat. Police moved out of the communities in which they had grown up and became commuters. The houses that used to be occupied by police officers were sold off.
The contact the police had with the community became increasingly remote. Worst of all, the police, aided and abetted by a growing army of criminologists, began to develop a specious academic justification for this estrangement. Beat policing did not work, they said; it was a waste of resources. Far better to focus on problem-orientated policing or other crime-specific activities.
Then came targets. Police chiefs were under pressure to ensure their officers were at a crime scene within a fixed time period.
This was measurable, unlike the deterrent nature of a local bobby doing his community rounds. Soon, fewer police officers were seen in public; they were either waiting around for something to happen or, increasingly, filling out the voluminous paperwork that was considered necessary to push up standards. The police were moving further away from the fundamentals of policing enunciated by Sir Robert Peel in 1829, when he told recruits to the new Metropolitan Police: “The principal object to be attained is the prevention of crime.”
By the turn of the millennium there was an air of crisis around British policing. After a dip in numbers, there were more officers than ever, yet fewer were to be seen on the streets. Public faith in the police was dwindling and the officers themselves were becoming disenchanted with the red tape. Reforms were needed and introduced – from new standards units to direct intervention, league tables, performance indicators, an ill-fated attempt to regionalise county forces, more central powers – none of which appeared to address the central problem: a growing demand for the reassurance and order provided by visible policing.
After the terrorist attacks in the US in September 2001, it dawned on police chiefs and policy-makers in Britain that losing contact with communities was a pretty big mistake, one that could have serious consequences far beyond an increase in burglaries or car thefts.
One of the first senior officers to recognise that the police had “got it wrong” was Sir Ian Blair, the current Met Chief, when he was Chief Constable of Surrey. “Public reassurance is now an end in itself,” he said in 2002. “Ten years ago it wasn’t. We actually lost sight of the fact that the public wanted reassurance. People want to see street patrols – lots of them; real community-based policing where they know their police officers, and local needs are addressed.”
“New” neighbourhood policing
With this change of approach, the concept of neighbourhood policing was born. After a three-year gestation period, it has now spread across the country. Gordon Brown calls it a “new era” in policing, though there is an element of reinventing the wheel here. What we are talking about is local policing. Bizarrely, British senior officers and politicians have found themselves travelling across the Atlantic to learn methods of community policing that the Americans had imported from here, while US police chiefs were bemused to be headhunted to teach British forces the techniques they had themselves invented.
