WRITTEN ON December 2nd, 2004 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Across the Board, Save Time and Money, What do we want?

Another thought on policing.

Say you get dragged into a fight by a drunken teenager (or “yoot”) who has barely wiped the milk from his face before filling it up with factory brewed lager which pretends to be imported (“best served ice cold so you can’t tell how awful it is”). What happens?

David Copperfield, he of the blog, sent over the realist insider’s view –

Let’s take a fight as an example:

1. You report that you got in a fight and you want to make a complaint.
2. You wait a day or so for the police to arrive.
3. The police turn up and take a statement.
So, at this stage, you think that your complaint of assault is being dealt with by the police officer who met you and took a statement from you, right?

Well, kind of.

You see, the officer will need to speak to witnesses and take statements from them, check CCTV, arrest the offender arrange a lawyer and interview him, arrange the ID parade if he denies it, arrest you if he makes a counter allegation and then put the file together and get it to court and then arrange an interpreter if the offender does not speak English.

So when does a patrol officer have time to do all these things? Never, because there’s always a queue of people trying to report robberies or assaults and never the time to conduct a proper investigation. So next time a police officer asks you for a statement about an incident that occurred a few months ago, or you wonder why a relatively simple matter has taken so long to get to court, now you know why. If you can think of a less efficient way of working, let me know.

On enquiry, David also sent us his wibbi .

The answer lies in having dedicated investigators (not necessarily police officers) who can go and gather statements from witnesses, collect CCTV, arrange ID parades and put together files. CID obviously do this for serious crimes, but for routine stuff it is still the duty of the uniformed officer who attended the incident to follow through the whole crime from start to finish.

The actual arresting would be done by the uniformed police officer, and the uniformed offficer would have to do all the enquiries at the scene (eg take the IP statement and arrest the offender if he was still there), but what’s the point of having uniformed officers spending most of their day either in the office or in people’s homes, taking statements?

People are most satisfied when they see a uniformed police presence on the streets, keeping a lid on disorder and , by their presence, preventing crime (which was the whole point of the police in the first place).

This seems an eminently sensible post-event wibbi, and it points to a whole rich seam of ways in which front line professionals’ time could be better used with better administrative processes. These would be worth collating systematically.

At same time, I suppose as well as evident policing there’s also a pre-event wibbi to do with better educated yoot, less boring schools etc, licencing and tax regimes that don’t encourage binge drinking, more stoned yoot and less drunk yoot. But that’s a wide canvas.