Doing Less With More. The New Politics of Policing

Doinglesswithmore The‘new’politicsofpolicing

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nticipating last year’s comprehensive spending review, a number of senior police officers started to claim that in future the police would have ‘to do more with less’.

But this fundamentally misread the ‘new’ politics of policing that is emerging. It is clear, following the publication of the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill, that the Coalition government has a radical agenda for police reform. Driven by a combination of economic and ideological imperatives, policing is expected, in terms of public funding, to ‘do more with less’ while, in other respects, doing ‘less with more’.

Ineffect,thepolicewilldo less andwillbeexpected tofindwaystoengage more individuals,communities andorganisationsin policingactivity The reductions in public spending on the police, which the government expects to be around 20 per cent, means there will be less police officers and so when they do act, it will be important that their interventions have more impact. However, together with these economic factors there is a political case for reform also. Influenced publicpolicyresearch–June–August2011

by the government’s ‘big society’ thinking, there is a clear sense in which communities are expected to become more involved in social control work. In effect, the police will do less and will be expected to find ways to engage more individuals, communities and organisations in policing activity.

In this sense, the pressures on the police resonate with those facing a number of public services. The government’s public service reform agenda is predicated on pushing responsibility ‘down’ from national government to local service providers, and ‘out’ from the centre to service users, who will be given more discretion to determine whether local provision is meeting their situated needs.

This article examines the emerging reform agenda around policing and how we should understand its causes and potential consequences. First, it places the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill in the context of the longer-term ‘deep politics’ of police reform. Second, it examines the bill and its aim of inducing a more ‘democratic’ policing. Next, it focuses on some of the difficulties involved in police–community engagement and in rendering the police more responsive to community concerns.

This is informed by empirical data derived from two major research programmes in South Wales and South London. The discussion concludes by thinking about how policing will look over the next decade and the tensions it will confront.

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MartinInnes assessestheCoalitiongovernment’spolice reformagendaandseesan‘evolutionwithinarevolution’, withapparentlyradicalreformsinfactrepresentingthe continuationofadeeper,longer-termprocessof reshapinganddemocratisingthepoliceforceandits socialrole.

In one of the most sophisticated historical accounts of the development of the police in England and Wales, Robert Reiner (2010) describes the ways in which the shape of policing is ineluctably tied to the condition of society. He traces how the development of policing has been driven by the interplay between a series of ‘bumps’ and other, more ‘grinding’ reforms. His overarching thesis is that the institution of policing has evolved in response to more structural social processes, but that within this social matrix there have been more rapid pulses of urgent change, often driven by particular crises.

This longer-term perspective is important, as it shows that for all the talk of police reform and modernisation in political rhetoric, the ‘reach’ of these reforms has, in terms of their practical transformative capacity, often turned out to be quite shallow. As such, in seeking to better understand the Coalition government’s agenda, it is important to locate their proposals in a broader context – what is referred to here as the ‘deep’ politics of police reform.

This deep politics has gravitated around three key narratives that, over the past decade or so, have reconfigured the delivery of policing. They can be summarised as follows:  Seeing like a citizen: This contends

that police should find ways to view the world through the eyes of the public, rather than focusing solely upon those issues to which the criminal justice system, directly shaped as it is by the auspices of criminal law, attaches particular value. For example, this sees officers attending to problems on the basis of the harm they cause to the public, in addition to whether or not they are defined as crimes in law. Thus the key driver is to better understand what things look like and feel like for communities, rather than relying upon 74

the rational bureaucratic organisational lens to define what are and are not considered priorities. In effect, the imperative is to ensure that the public’s problems are established as police priorities.  Participative policing: Alongside the imperative to see like a citizen, there has been an emerging trend to find ways to do policing ‘with’ rather than ‘to’ people. The early manifestations of this were provided with traction by the introduction of crime and disorder reduction partnerships, but subsequently this agenda has continued to be developed and refined.

Fundamentally, this is about finding ways to involve those beyond the police in the conduct of policing. Under the current government’s agenda, this connects to ‘big society’ thinking.  See-through services: The third component of this deep politics of police reform is focused on making police services more ‘see-through’, that is, on significantly enhancing their transparency and accountability. The introduction of police and crime commissioners (discussed in more detail below) is coherent with this. But just as radically, it has been mooted that raw crime data should be made available to the public in order that it can be ‘mashed’ and ‘crowd-sourced’, with citizen activists using their multimedia skills to produce insights into how well local police officers are performing (Halpern 2009).

These three key narratives help to capture how, although the current government is considerably accentuating and sharpening the direction of travel in relation to reconfiguring the police, there are to a significant degree precedents for what they are trying to achieve. Most notably, such precedents can be found in many of the developments around neighbourhood policing (NP) and, in turn, NP’s connections to a longer tradition of community policing. publicpolicyresearch–June–August2011

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Thedeeppoliticsofpolice reform

With the publication of the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill, the Coalition government has launched a radical experiment with police governance and accountability. The bill’s signature innovation – introducing directly elected police and crime commissioners (PCCs) – is proposed as a deliberate ‘shock’ to the traditions of UK policing, designed to leverage greater democratic accountability and responsiveness from the police. It is intended that the role will function to replace ‘bureaucratic’ with ‘democratic’ accountability in policing in England and Wales. Fundamentally, this amounts to a big experiment: for all that ministers have genuflected towards the US in working up their proposals, PCCs are not a direct translation of any American system.

Thebill’ssignatureinnovation –introducingdirectlyelected policeandcrimecommissioners –isproposedasadeliberate ‘shock’tothetraditionsofUK policing With the roll-out of NP in particular, sections of the police have been making themselves more responsive to communitydefined needs and concerns. Almost all police forces in England and Wales now hold ‘Police (or Partners) and Communities Together’ public meetings (Innes and Roberts 2008). So when the bill mandates that ‘beat meetings’ will be held regularly in every neighbourhood, this is simply institutionalising what is being done anyway. While the quality and value afforded by these meetings can be debated, for the purposes of this article, the important point is that they are already an established part of NP practice.

To date, several concerns with the bill’s contents have been raised, focusing on the estimated costs of implementation, a neglect of less publicly ‘visible’ policing issues, likely interference with police operational independence, and the potential for discrimination against unpopular minorities. However, careful analysis of the bill’s contents suggests several other profound, longer-term implications that, as yet, have not been identified.

First, we need to ‘follow the money’. The bill states that: ‘The elected local policing body ... may make a crime and disorder reduction grant to any person’ where it ‘contributes to securing, crime and disorder reduction in the body’s area.’1 The pivotal phrase here is that any person can be funded, not just existing state agencies. So a PCC is afforded power to commission a private provider to deliver visible patrols in an area, or undertake any other function. The American influence looms large here.

Unlike the UK system, which maintains a relatively small number of police forces, policing in the US is highly fragmented with literally thousands of (often very small and highly specialised) agencies. Over time, the new funding arrangements for England and Wales have the potential to induce a similar fragmentation and marketisation of the British policing landscape.

Such arrangements become particularly problematic in trying to detect patterns and trends in crime. Consequently, American law enforcement has invested in a whole new layer of taskforces and intelligence clearing houses to coordinate efforts across their complex, multi-polar policing system.

Indeed, there isn’t one single American system of local policing or police governance.

Rather, individual US police departments are subject to widely varying arrangements.

Advocates of reforming UK policing frequently cite the case of New York and its dramatic reductions in recorded crime during the 1990s as evidence of what enhanced democratic accountability achieves. It is misleading, however, to

1 Part 1, ch 3, s 9: 1–2

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Policereformandsocial responsibility

Amorescepticalappraisalof thecurrentcourseof developmentswouldsuggest thatwhatthisagendamay actuallydeliverinpracticeis greaterprivatisationofpolicing The driving impetus for introducing PCCs is that they will translate local public problems into policing priorities. However, there are certain policing issues that do not naturally resonate with the general population. For instance, research evidence 76

derived from NP on which issues communities identify as priorities suggests that domestic violence or child abuse rarely feature. There exists a real tension in terms of how or why a PCC would support police resources being directed towards such ‘hidden’ crimes, when such actions are less likely to help them get re-elected.

We need to think also about the consequences of an electoral cycle that is focused exclusively upon crime and policing.

This is a process with an in-built capacity to increase public insecurity and fear, with ample motivation for PCC contenders to ‘talk up’ local problems. Research demonstrates that it is far easier to induce public fear than it is to reassure people. As such, while PCCs may enhance the democratic accountability of the police, the process of electing them may increase fear of crime and harm overall community wellbeing.

In sum, while there is significant transformative potential within these proposals for reform, it is limited by the bias towards placing the public in a ‘steering’ rather than ‘rowing’ position. By steering, it is meant that they are being given the ability to influence and direct policing, as opposed to being actively engaged in doing social control work (or the actual ‘rowing’). A more sceptical appraisal of the current course of developments would suggest that what this agenda may actually deliver in practice is greater privatisation of policing. A number of private sector providers are gearing up to take on more business across the criminal justice sector. There appears to be far more activity focused on thinking about the role of private provision than on how communities can be more actively and directly mobilised in the delivery of policing. This potentially imperils the traction of the government’s ‘big society’ idea, which is of particular concern given the 20 per cent funding cuts to the police budget that are in process. There is a real tension between creating a public demand and having sufficient resources in place to meet it. In order to understand the shape and tenor of these issues, it is useful to draw on some empirical data to see how they present in real settings.

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attribute falls in crime, such as those in New York, to particular governance mechanisms.

These policy entrepreneurs neglect the evidence showing that since the mid-1990s crime has fallen across western Europe, under very different accountability arrangements (Innes 1999).

The US approach that the PCC model appears closest to is, in fact, founded upon police commissioners and chiefs being appointed by a city’s mayor, rather than being directly elected. This is relevant, given that the Coalition’s Localism Bill proposes elected mayors for the 12 largest English cities outside London. Compared with their American counterparts, these mayors will be much less influential in relation to community safety and policing, as this responsibility will belong to the PCCs. As currently conceived, the introduction of mayors alongside PCCs will induce an increasingly messy and convoluted accountability architecture.

Here we must return to the vexed issue of funding. In the proposals before Parliament, there is nothing to stop an individual’s PCC election campaign being bankrolled by corporate interests. Given the opportunities for private corporations to be commissioned by the PCCs (because anyone can receive a crime reduction grant), there is a natural incentive for them to sponsor would-be commissioners sympathetic to their agenda.

Doingdemocraticpolicing For the past decade, the research team at the Universities Police Science Institute (UPSI) at Cardiff University has been conducting a programme of research examining how policing can become more responsive and accountable, so as to reduce the social harm that crime and disorder does to neighbourhood security. Three examples from this work help to illuminate some of the issues in play with regards to the broader police reform agenda.

Researchfoundthatinorderto triggerandsustaincommunity mobilisation,effective localpolicingneedstobein placetocatalyseeffective communityinvolvement 1. The National Reassurance Policing Programme Between 2003 and 2005, the UPSI team led research for the Home Office-funded National Reassurance Policing Programme (NRPP) (see Innes 2007, Innes and Roberts 2008). Across 16 trial sites in England, the NRPP tested the viability and efficacy of a policing model founded upon:  Visible, accessible, familiar and effective

The research evidence collected during the NRPP trial on this issue was interesting: it suggested that public co-production was the element that police found most difficult and challenging, and elicited particular organisational reticence.

However, several of the trial sites did try to progress direct citizen participation in designing and delivering a form of policing more responsive to their security needs. Over a period of 12 months, in two of these sites there were increases in levels of community cohesion and in five sites residents reported increasing trust in their neighbours (Tuffin et al 2006).

These findings are potentially important for the big society agenda, given the question about whether communities are asked to participate in policing in a steering or rowing capacity. For what the research found was that in order to trigger and sustain community mobilisation, effective local policing needs to be in place to catalyse effective community involvement.

Particularly in stressed communities, police appear to have an important role in ‘taking the ground’ in order to create a space where community action can be seeded and fostered in order to start tackling local problems (Carr 2006). This is because in the absence of a certain level of neighbourhood security, community mobilisation is potentially a high-risk strategy for those involved, given the possibility of threats or retaliation.

officers the signal crimes doing most harm to communities  Co-producing solutions with partners and the public.

It provided the template for and was translated into NP. Interestingly however, in the process of translation the last element (co-producing solutions with the public) was neglected and omitted from the standard operating processes devised for policing neighbourhoods. Rather than co-producing solutions, the public’s role in NP was reduced to that of being consulted. publicpolicyresearch–June–August2011

2. London Borough of Sutton Informed by the NRPP study, the research programme at Cardiff evolved to explore in detail how police could find ways to ‘see like a citizen’ and what the impacts of doing so might be. Working with the London Borough of Sutton and the Metropolitan Police Service between 2007 and 2010, we have been tracking the development of a style of ‘community-intelligence-led neighbourhood policing.’ Each year, 600 residents of Sutton, drawn from each neighbourhood across the borough, have been interviewed in-depth about their 77

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 Community-intelligence-led targeting of

 Generate tactical community intelligence

on the public’s neighbourhood security needs, identifying what specific local problems and in which locations are generating the greatest social harm from the public’s point of view  Develop a more strategic picture of public priorities and employing this to ‘bend’ services towards these. In this sense, the analysis has been used to inform the evolution of how NP is delivered across Sutton  Assess and evaluate the progress of implementing NP over time at a granular and local level.

This last application is particularly important because independently tracking the evolution of NP over time and evaluating what it delivers at a local level is not currently being done elsewhere. The interviews are used to identify what local problems individual respondents are most concerned about, and whether these have changed how they think, feel or act, in any manner. By aggregating these data together and analysing them, it is possible to derive a form of community intelligence providing insight into the key crime and disorder issues from the community’s perspective. Table 1 below sets out the top five issues identified by this process between 2007 and 2010.

Table1:Citizen-definedprioritiesinSutton Priority

2007

2008

2009

2010

1 2 3 4 5

Youthdisorder Speeding Graffiti Litter Publicdrinking

Youthdisorder Speeding Parking Graffiti Litter

Youthdisorder Speeding Parking Undesirablegroups Litter

Youthdisorder Speeding Parking Litter Dogmess

2 This is a generic code used to capture when people attribute local problems to non-local groups – sometimes based upon ethnicity or lifestyle factors.

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These data show how, by using the community intelligence gathered from the public to successfully ‘grip’ particular problems, a certain consistency has started to emerge in terms of what issues are acting as ‘drivers’ of public insecurity – youth disorder and speeding being key among these. Public drinking dropped out of the top five in 2008 and has not returned since, suggesting that this issue is being effectively managed in the eyes of the community. Inconsiderate parking emerged as a problem that same year and continued to be generating concern in 2010. The environmental issue of dog fouling emerged in the top five for the first time in 2010, replacing ‘undesirable groups’.2 This suggests that the public are recalibrating the focus of their concerns to a degree and are now attending to different issues. Broadly similar patterns emerge in terms of which localities they defined as particularly troublesome and places where problems accumulate. By 2010, almost everyone was focused upon Sutton high street as the key problem area. This contrasted with the situation in 2007 and 2008 when several residential neighbourhoods featured strongly.

The changes observed over time in Sutton as public concerns have been identified and targeted by interventions are important in terms of what they tell us about how public perceptions can shift over time. Dealing effectively with public priorities does not mean that in future there will be no citizen concerns. Rather, the

experiences and perceptions of crime, disorder and policing locally.

These data have been used in the borough in three main ways, to:

Althoughpolicingcannot solveallcommunityproblems, theprocessofinvolving communitiesandbeing demonstrablyresponsiveto theirconcernscanimpactupon importantoutcomemeasures As well as helping to evolve the delivery of NP in Sutton, this study has afforded an opportunity to evaluate its outcomes. One such evaluative indicator that reflects the overall pattern is perceptions of crime and disorder. In 2007, 50 per cent of the people interviewed in Sutton stated that they believed crime and disorder had risen in the past 12 months. By 2010, only 12 per cent thought the same. By way of comparison, the same question in the 2009–10 British Crime Survey found that 31 per cent of people thought local crime and disorder

had risen. It would seem that although policing cannot solve all community problems, the process of involving communities and being demonstrably responsive to their concerns can impact upon important outcome measures.

3. Community engagement in Cardiff The applied research in Sutton suggests that engaging meaningfully with communities to collect community intelligence on the drivers of neighbourhood security does have the capacity to impact, albeit in a constrained way, on key social problems.

Putting in place a similar engagement process in Cardiff, we were able to test the value added by this more systematic and structured approach when compared with the kinds of community engagement techniques used more usually by police.

Prior to implementing the methodology outlined above, in 2008 we ‘reality tested’ the quality of South Wales Police’s (SWP) community engagement. In doing so, we produced strong evidence that overall engagement was patchy. In some neighbourhoods there were good links established, but in others there was little apparent connectivity. A rigorous test comparing levels of demand for policing services (based upon recorded crime rates) with the amount of engagement activity found that engagement activity was weaker in the more deprived, high-demand neighbourhoods. Furthermore, when a sample of Partners and Communities Together (PACT) meetings were examined it was found that over half of them were attended by fewer than 10 members of the public.

Implementing a similar approach to Sutton – requiring police to make contact with and interview a member of the public in each ONS output area3 across the city – forced them into making a whole lot of new contacts. It transpired that 73 per cent of the people engaged through this approach had

3 The Office for National Statistics uses a system of output areas for reporting data from the national census. The whole country is subdivided into output areas, each covering approximately 350 residents.

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focus of public concern has merely been recalibrated. This is not to say that things have not gotten better: in Sutton, it would seem reasonable to suggest that the top concerns in 2010 are less harmful problems than were evident in 2007. Crucially, the frequency with which these problems were identified by members of the public was much reduced. For example, although youth disorder remains the top issue, comparing 2010 to 2007 it was being cited by one-third fewer respondents. Likewise, on utilitarian grounds it could be plausibly argued that having people focus upon problems in the public area of the high street is preferable to them being concerned about what is happening in their own immediate neighbourhoods. Nevertheless, these data do usefully articulate the constraints of what can be achieved even through a carefully and precisely targeted NP approach.

Conclusion A combination of political and economic precepts is prompting a reconfiguration of the shape of British policing. Following a period of continually increasing moral and economic investment in the police, what is now being sought is a smaller, smarter and sharper style of policing. It is smaller in that the expectation is that less public money will be directed towards policing services. It is smarter in that it will have to make better use of its informational and human assets. It is sharper because, with less resources available, it will be important that any interventions enacted are precisely targeted to where they can make a difference.

Setagainstthebackdropofa 20percentreductioninpolice funding,thepracticalquestion aboutwhetherthepolicewill beabletoservicetheincreasing publicexpectationsand demandsislikelytobecome evenmorepronounced As such, rather than doing more with less, the police will have to find ways to do less with more – involving more people and delivering more impact. There are doubts though as to whether the Coalition government’s current approach will facilitate this. The proposals contained in the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill manifestly increase the capacity of citizens to influence the priorities set for the police but they say far less about ways of engaging the

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public in delivering social control. There is then a tension between what we might term the ‘steering’ and ‘rowing’ functions. Set against the backdrop of a 20 per cent reduction in central government police funding, the practical question about whether the police will be able to service the increasing public expectations and demands is likely to become even more pronounced.

Such pressures are liable to become especially acute in an era likely to be defined by more conflictual social relations, as suggested by the recent instances of mass public disorder in London and other English cities.

How then should we understand and interpret the current set of reforms to the police? In summary, they encapsulate a process of ‘evolution within revolution’. That is, the approach being pursued is consistent with a broader and deeper direction of travel to ‘democratise’ UK policing that has been emerging over the past 10 years, and has been supported by political parties of both the left and right. It is a trend particularly evident in the kinds of processes and systems that have been brought to the fore by neighbourhood policing. However, while acknowledging the evolutionary incrementalism of the current reforms, we should not lose sight of the fact that the overall longer-term shift is potentially more profound and revolutionary.

Martin Innes is a Professor in the School of Social Sciences and Director of the Universities’ Police Science Institute at Cardiff University.

Carr P (2006) Clean Streets, New York: NYU Press Halpern D (2009) The Hidden Wealth of Nations, Cambridge: Polity Press Innes M (1999) A ‘ n iron fist in an iron glove? The Zero Tolerance Policing debate’, Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 38(4): 397–410 Innes M (2007) ‘The reassurance function’, Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, 1(2): 132–141 Innes M and Roberts C (2008) ‘Reassurance policing, community intelligence and the co-production of neighbourhood order’ in Williamson T (ed) The Handbook of Knowledge Based Policing, Chichester: Wiley Reiner R (2010) The politics of the police, Oxford: Oxford University Press Tuffin R, Morris J and Poole A (2006) An Evaluation of the Impact of the National Reassurance Policing Programme, London: Home Office

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never attended a PACT meeting or engaged with police other than to report a crime. As such, it significantly extended SWP’s connectivity into and across Cardiff’s neighbourhoods.