Just four years shy of the 200th anniversary of the creation of modern, democratic policing in 1829 by Sir Robert Peel through his founding of the Metropolitan Police, policing in England and Wales arguably no longer follows the same model.
Explicitly created to be a preventative, accountable force embedded in the communities which it serves, the British model of policing became known as policing by consent. An amorphous and hard-to-pin-down idea, policing by consent is usually summed up by Peel’s Nine Principles. Despite there being no historical proof that these were ever invented by Sir Robert, the ideas they encapsulate are a useful shorthand for policing by consent – largely the idea that policing happens with a population and not to a population. This may seem like a semantic difference, but it is explicitly what the British model is about. Instead of enforcing laws and protecting the state, the idea is that the police exist to mediate disputes between citizens and to prevent crimes from happening.
Leading to a popular belief in the paternalistic ‘bobby on the beat’, this model was best illustrated by TV shows such as Dixon of Dock Green, Heartbeat and The Bill. While the fictional officers in these shows do deal with criminals, they are also heavily engaged in preventative actions such as foot patrol, using discretion to not criminalise people via arrest and offering advice to law-abiding citizens. These fictional officers also know the communities they serve including people’s names, businesses and home addresses. All of this informs their actions when dealing with people who’ve stepped across the legal boundary and have committed criminal acts. This wider knowledge often sees them go out of their way to help solve the underlying issue behind the offending. In turn, this maintains the community’s trust that the police understands the issues it faces and has a stake in the place and its people.
Austerity has killed such policing, and it is unlikely it can be resurrected.
With the reduction of police budgets in 2010, police forces have lost approximately 70 per cent of local stations, 36 per cent of non-warranted police staff and 20,000 police officers. These cuts have removed both a physical presence from communities and seen officers with extensive knowledge of people and places retire or leave their role. This alone would have severely dented police forces’ ability to maintain consent, but it could nevertheless have been maintained had the focus remained on the prevention of crime. However, in the name of ‘doing more with less’, policing seems to have adopted a centralised, response-only model. For proof of this, ask yourself the following questions: how often do you see officers patrolling on foot, outside of city centres, airports or football matches? Do you know any police officers by name and face?
Added to this centralised response model, metrics such as arrest numbers have started to filter back into policing as a means of measuring success. The problem with such metrics is that they encourage officers to move away from solving problems and towards seeking low-hanging fruit which leads to arrests. So gone is the locally known, paternalistic problem-solver in the custodian helmet and synonymous blue garb. Instead, we have the black and hi-vis-clad anonymous crime fighter who responds once a crime has been committed and a person victimised. Overworked, because demand outstrips the supply of such officers, this crime fighter is unlikely to be able to do much more than offer a crime number and a promise of an investigation. Months or even years may pass before the investigation progresses to becoming a case with the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) which will then add its own delays.
All of this leaves victimised individuals feeling uncared for, unsupported and dubious that the police can provide the security they desire. Is it any wonder then that both the number of unreported crimes and the number of victims revoking their support for prosecutions are climbing? The growth of such figures is a clear indication that communities are starting to revoke their consent to be policed, and such a path ends in some very dark places.
However, police officers are not to blame. They very much want to help the communities they serve. Instead, this is a rallying cry for the wider population to demand that politicians fund our police forces properly so that they can put time and effort into prevention, reduce demand and attempt to resuscitate the policing-by-consent model which once made policing in England and Wales the envy of the wider world.
John Bahadur Lamb is Senior Lecturer in the Institute of Policing at Staffordshire University.
50 Facts Everyone Should Know About the Police edited by John Lamb, Max Hart, James Treadwell, Adam Lynes and Craig Kelly is available to pre-order on Policy Press for £16.99 here.
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