Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation

OVERVIEW
Unprecedented
change
An introduction by Peter Neyroud
Peter Neyroud is former Chief
Constable of Thames Valley;
former CEO of the National
Policing Improvement Agency;
and Editor, Policing UK 2013
Policing is going through a period
of change unprecedented since
the 1960s and possibly since the
19th century. This is not just in the UK,
but also across the English-speaking
world, in Europe and across many
developing countries.
There are a number of factors driving
the change. Unprecedented investments
in policing and security over the past
25 years have raised expectations and
sharpened the political focus on policing.
Our scientific understanding of policing
has radically altered effective practice.
The police themselves have been
pushing for a more professional service.
Crime has fallen and now, across the
developed world, budgets are falling
faster. Police, politicians and citizens are
now faced with stark choices about the
future policing of their communities.
This ‘Strategic Review’ has been
conceived and designed to help a wider
understanding of complex and wideranging
change in a public service that is
not always well understood by politicians
and citizens alike.
A complex reality
British policing tends to evoke golden age
mythic images in many people’s minds.
While most British citizens are too young
to remember Dixon of Dock Green, the
image of a down to earth, local ‘copper’
dispensing pragmatic justice provides
a comforting morally suffused ideal,
which challenges modern policing and
its mechanical, bureaucratic certainties.
The reality is much more complex than
the myth. The real Dixon would have
been a member of a police force which
harboured such serious corruption
that, when Sir Robert Mark took over
as Commissioner, he is said to have
remarked that the usual hallmark of a
good police force is that it “catches more
criminals than it employs”.
Mark faced a corrupt Criminal
Investigation Department and
widespread abuse and malpractice. Far
from a golden era, the era before the
last Royal Commission on the Police
had serious problems, which was one
key reason why the then Conservative
government set up the Commission.
The Royal Commission, which
reported in 1962, was also focused on
the leadership and governance of the
police. Both are key issues in the reforms
of 2012. Many other countries, such
as Sweden and the Netherlands, have
also been debating the organisational
structures of the police.
Indeed, the UK, divided as it is
between three distinct jurisdictions for
policing – England and Wales, Scotland
and Northern Ireland – is about to
pursue three very distinct organisational
and governance strategies: in England
and Wales, a structure of 43 police
forces, each responsible to a local
elected police and crime commissioner;
in Scotland, a national police service
responsible to ministers and accountable
8 | POLICING UK