What’s Going On?
This arrived in my inbox from TheBinarySurfer
The across-board incompetence and undermining of the public services demonstrated by the government in the last 4-5 years, deliberate or accidental in your opinion?
Personally, I’ve looked at it and I have to wonder: is public confidence and trust in the police being deliberately undermined by the government with the eventual goal of privatisation of the force as a whole?
By undermining of public confidence, I refer to things such as; FPN’s, cuts in response police, removal of the officer’s discretion, lower sentancing / releasing without charge (which although not actually the fault of the force is often perceived police not bothering) pushing schemes that are wildly unpopular amongst the public into the police’s remit (speed cameras etc), cuts in funding and salary, non-custodial sentencing etc etc – the list goes on and I’m sure you can name many more than me.
I wouldn’t have even contemplated this two-three years ago, but I’m seeing a similar picture via my friends and contacts in other public services such as Ambulance, NHS and Probation…The blogs i read in those areas merely reinforces the impression that this is a national issue.
We all know that any government that suggested privatisation of the police outright would be ousted at the next general election, and I suspect they know that too. So rather than risk their own or their party’s neck(s) on it I wonder if they hit on the cunning idea of turning it into several big positives. Allow me to explain my train of thought here by slightly digressing into two examples of privatisation one successful, one not:
* The privatisation British Rail was a disaster in terms of service levels, prices etc for the customer, but for the government it was a big win – massive savings in outgoing as the company’s provide the service for (usually) significantly cheaper. The overall outcome here has been a disaster for the rail user, but a big windfall for the government in terms of reduced costs and the ability to blame future problems on the companies running the networks now.
* The privatisation of the Defence Sector. Many previously MOD run operations from cleaning to aircraft/tank maintenance have achieved huge cost-savings (in some cases of nearly one third. I know this for a fact as I work for a business that often becomes involved in MoD related work).
With the above examples in mind, you can see my point of comparison. In both the above examples the government let public dissatisfaction slip to the point there was demand for something to be done (in the case of BR the terrible service and constant delays, and in the case of the MoD contracts the fact that they were non-producing and horrendously overbudget).
The trick in both cases was to take subtle baby-steps forward until the public was at least receptive to privatisation, preferably asking for it (bearing in mind it had MUCH better PR back then than it does now with the benefit of 10+ years of hindsight).
If popular opinion is behind a big change in the police, they could actually carry off a triple-win by doing it. Make the police completely compliant with political whims, visibly save the taxpayer money, and have an issue to push forward to re-election on. I’m sure we both know the actual benefit to the safety and security of the taxpayer would but nil at best, and negative at worst…
If you’re wondering how this theory came about, I was thinking about all these public sector changes and where they’re heading with them all (i.e. what the “big plan” was) in the long run. What’s your thoughts on the above; A bit too much of a stretch, or a decent theory?
I think its a decent theory. I 100% agree with the underlying mechanics but I think the purpose is probably re-casting us as a European style hierachy of forces. I also think we are being nudged root and branch to a whole European Criminal Justice System. More of that another time
NJ
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13 Responses to “What’s Going On?”
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What The People Say
No Offences Disclose… on A Modest Proposal Ben on Only 24 Hours To Crack The Cas… Tony F on A Modest Proposal PCSO Bloggs on A Modest Proposal Kate on A Modest Proposal -
Where The People Are
Frankly I think the whole thing is just so much baloney. Yes, some public services are short of cash, but in many cases that’s because demand is outstripping our (i.e. the nation’s) willingness to pay for it.
In other cases (the NHS is to the forefront here), there has been a lot of money put into them but it is not always spent wisely. The NHS now gets twice as much in real terms as it did before Labour came to power. Unfortunately our GPs now get paid considerably more for doing considerably less.
Can you honestly see any government reducing their control of the police? They are much more likely to grasp it tighter. Remember, the police are in the front line in keeping the government (of whatever colour) from being torn apart by disgruntled citizens!
Mark UK @ 1
The problem is not lack of cash. The problem is
partly how the cash is being spent
partly how we are allowed to do our job
partly how we are directed and tasked
partly having expensive bolt ons like PCSO’s and the ever increasing record keeping and “accountability.”
The money into the NHS was blown deluxe. Funny thing is, for the people at the sharp end, those actually delivering the services, nothing much has changed except they have more managers and a dizzying round of expensively changed corporate identities as NHS Trusts have melted, merged and re-shaped themselves. Oh and massive “off balance sheet” debts through PFI.
Twice as much “in real terms” sounds great but trust me, it wasn’t spent at the sharp end. If it was we would have cleaner hospitals and happier staff. The NHS does however now have world class HR and Health & Safety departments which they never had before, So do the cops.
The point is that the Government shouldn’t have “control of the police.” Sadly history from the Spitalfields Massacre through to the Miners Strike shows that this idea is honoured only in the breach. The will always be a tendency for governments trying to use the police for Political aims. Our job is not to protect the government from being torn apart by the citizens. Our job is to keep the peace, preserve life and property and investigate crime.
I can’t see HMG wanting to lose control of the Police ( if only because the other lot will have that control when they win the next election ).
But perhaps they are undermining them sufficiently to force them ( sorry, Service them ) into regional Services exactly matching Englands Euro Regions to enable their future takeover by the EU.
http://www.regionalassemblies.co.uk/17221.html?*session*id*key*=*session*id*val*
Privatisation of the police is unlikely, although no doubt some PFI is possible. I do understand that some very bizarre beliefs exist inside government and management in public services, but I think that you will find that most of the police problems are caused by targets and trying to “manage” the unmanageable.
As in medicine, the police do many different jobs and it is difficult to be certain that they do them well. Take “lowering crime” - where would crime be without police intervention, how much is lower, what crimes is one talking about. Then there is the problem of the bad cop, a problem that can range from underreporting crime to perjured testimony. The correct answer is to have a strong professional monitoring system with external input and some transparency. So doctors had the BMA, cops had HMIC +police complaints. The problem was that they were too lax in some cases and didnt proactively chase things - thus Alder Hey [no one minds if we take these organs], Bristol heart unit [whoops], institutional racism in the Met. The correct action would have been to beef up the professional monitoring system and inject more transparency. Difficult, but effective. Instead we got targets, tick boxes and micromanagement. Ineffective, but hey no one gets any blame any more.
Knee jerk reactions and poor planning have created a terrible mess. NCRS is an answer to underreporting of crime. A sledge hammer to deal with a very small nut. A sociologist I know studies another professional field - their description of the box ticking exercises - arse covering exercises that dont really contribute to dealing with the underlying problem. Because of some really stupid incident (that should have been dealt with internally) everyone gets more red tape, rather than changing the professional monitoring. Targets are almost a universal bad - they distort incentives and almost never do what they are meant to do.
What do I mean by this? People want less crime. Typified by burglaries. Police ordered to concentrate on burglaries. Burglars disappear (caught, move on, reclassfied), but because all resources concentrated on burglaries, street crime rises. People still afraid of crime. Target redundant. Takes months to change priorities. Wouldnt it be better if the local bosses worked out what was important to them this week? But that requires trust and politicians and bureaucrats would rather trust to the blunt and useless target. That way they can say “burglaries reduced by 30% in response to our target.” Never mind that people are really angry about all the other crime.
I blame spin and bad management ideas (the use of targets is useful in some businesses, but you really have to be careful about what you are targetting.)
I don’t subscribe to the poster’s idea of some big plan - actually, I think it’s quite the opposite. The government is lurching about because it has spent all our money and borrowed to the hilt. It is looking for spending cuts anywhere it can find them. It reduces (in real terms) police expenditure, resulting in chief officers going for old billing on the cheap - an ideal case in point being PCSOs. You’re right - there’s plenty of money but it’s badly spent. The government aren’t concerned, so long as the books balance and they can blame the police for problems. It’s the same in many public services.
If you look at government policing policies since 1997 (and, actually, well before that) you can see a centralisation of power, away from local accountability, and an erosion of discretion.
MOP San
Thank you for that well reasoned and enlightening post. That’s most of what I ever wanted to say about the strategic control of Policing nobbling our ability to respond tactically.
Ginger
Cock up rather than conspiracy? There is though as you say that underlying current of centralisation of power and ersosion of discretion.
Whichever way we are headed, whether there is a captain at the wheel or we all sail in confusion boats, great changes are being done to the way we organise and provide Policing and they are not good. In 15 years we have symbolically changed from tunics and truncheon to bullet proof vests and tasers.
I am a fan of the large sociological sweep. I’m much less keen on the MOJ psychologists who focus on the individual. However, there is correlation between pulic issues and private troubles ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociological_imagination
Whilst I watch those politicians at their work, I don’t claim I have the answers to societies ills. I am reminded, however, of a modern day football chant often thrown at incompetent and beleagured managers.
“You don’t know what you’re doing, You don’t know what you’re doing”
This idea that GB or DC will somehow guide us through the next 20 years without severe mishap and pain is just laughable.
JVIP
As with any major conspiracy theory - it makes good, entertaining reading.
However, you’ve _seen_ how Blunkett, Straw, Smith, Prescott, Brown (etc.) really are in terms of building and following a plan - this lot couldn’t successfully conspire on so grand a level.
This plan (it it exists) would have to be run by a brain of such machiavellian complexity that there’s only ONE man in the UK who could be masterminding it: step forward Jeffrey Archer.
If Archer buys shares in Group 4, I’ll begin to believe this…
The cock-up theory of history is far better than conspiracies (for one has to believe that people can keep their mouths shut, and we know they cant). However, this doesnt mean that there are no really stupid managers out there with A PLAN. I have heard the theory that some incompetent management types in the NHS think that their main problem is the cost and power of doctors. They therefore went back to the economics class they were taught in their MBA and said “if only there were an excess of doctors, we could cut their pay and put the fear of god into them.” Thus explaining why there are 10,000 or so junior doctors a year who are surplus to requirements. Each of whom cost the better part of a 250K to educate.
The problem is senior doctors (who cost a lot and have power) (do not equal) junior doctors (the ones being shafted). No one said that the NHS managers were smart.
Then again, the NHS has managed to create lots of excess midwives, physios and doctors, so maybe this is just a standard cock up.
Bottom line as far as policing goes - more jails => more sentences => more deterrence = > less crime. This would be helped by a little more intelligence in the way that policing is targeted. I dont know if we will be able to turn back the idiotic tick box form culture. It is a relatively new phenomenon, and reflects the rise of computers that allow us to play with lots of numbers. And as the police and the NHS have discovered bureaucracy is self perpetuating and voracious.
It should be said that treatment and rehabilitation are also terribly important together with more jails. And as a good economist I am in favour of legalising (and taxing) drugs.
JVIP: Social imagination theory is a bit of a stretch as it requires the individual to be pressured by the changes. Personally, i’m not!
One fairly major point that i think some commenters have gotten the wrong end of the stick: Privitisation or PFI would both INCREASE the government’s strategic control over the police, although admittedly decreasing fine/daily control. There’s reasoning and precedent behind this and again the Defence sector or BR stand as good examples.
To illustrate: anyone can tender on a PFI however there are tender conditions and service levels / timescales to be met. Anyone not able to meet those doesn’t make it through the tender process, and later doesn’t get paid if they don’t meet the targets / timescales etc - thus the government can finally be assured the police’s focus would be the targets they set!
Bottom line - whether or not i’m right specifically about privitisation etc matters not, what i do believe (along with NJ here) that there is some bigger plan at work that bodes ill.
When I said PFI, I meant selling the buildings and leasing them back - not PFI the police force. PFI is useful as it takes stuff off the government balance sheet (and adds them to the profit and loss as a big annual cost). It can be useful if some of the risk of the project falls on the private sector and there are efficiency gains to be made. This is a very complex area.
Anyway, contracting out the police (paycops of Quatermass fame anyone?) wouldnt increase strategic control. Why? Because it would run into the same problem that the existing police force has - how the Dickens do you measure what the police do? TBS the police are trying to meet the targets that the government sets. But this is a situation called “incomplete contracts” sice you can never specify in every detail and every situation what the police are contractually obliged to do.
Do you go for “Lower crime” (define crime, define lower - lower relative to a certain time period, relative to where it would have been?) More specific targets “lower burglary in Lower Blandshire” (define burglary, lower how? What if there is a massive kidnapping murder case?). This doesnt mean the halfwits inside government dont try a la the railways, where I believe that the contracts now look like the encyclopedia Britannica. But contracts like this always end up incomplete.
If you thought the SMTs of existing police forces weasel when it comes to meeting targets (redefine, redirect resources, claim special circumstances) it is far less than private sector contractors do when faced with a PFI project with poor contractual definition.
So no privatisation for the police force, although possibly some PFI for buildings (where you discover that while they are obliged to maintain the building some civil servant forgot to define the payscale for this - so the electrician repairing a lightsocket is charged at £300 an hour. Yes, it does happen.)
Many of the Government belong to a group with a rather strange vision in which the criminal becomes the hero. They are convinced that they are right and that this leads to a more perfect society. So sure are they that no amount of counter evidence will suffice to change their mind. The vision is very clear in the BBC/Guardian/New York Times/Independent and it is well described by Thomas Sowell in The Vision of the Anointed. Read that and much becomes clearer.
I was once lectured by an aged professor who was an adviser to the Blair Government. He was anti-industry, anti-technology, anti-science, anti-police and anti–libertarian. When the facts didn’t suite, he made them up. When his lies were challenged, he became aggressive and it became clear that your marks would suffer if you didn’t have the right sort of thoughts. Most people just shit up; those that weren’t sicophants that is.
If resources are stretched and the police have to jump (as ordered to by the Home Office) from Burglary to Robbery etc which are serious crimes due to difficulties with resourcing how come there are still so many petty crimes e’g shoplifitng, drunk and disorderly, criminal damage, s5 POA , document offences etc. Surely if it’s out of control, the police should be prioritising the more serious offences?