LOSING THE DETECTIVES: VIEWS FROM THE ... - Police Federation

•&interviewing arrested persons;
• performing a Gatekeeper function by reviewing the quality of
evidence and advising on additional requirements before
officers present a case to the CPS; and
• acting as Crime Managers responsible for reviewing the
actions completed on each allocated crime and assessing
whether the recommended outcome for closing the case is
appropriate.
The specialisation that is evident in these examples is unequivocally performancerelated.
It is aimed at improving and sustaining the performance of the BCUs in
relation to force and national targets and to ensure work meets the standards which
all investigations, reports and files are now required to attain.
Several of my detectives have been abstracted onto a Volume
Crime Unit which is answerable to me in the first instance. It’s been
set up this week to investigate street thefts and robberies. Six
officers work 8am to 10pm, two on each shift. They are needed
because the standard of investigation by the average uniformed
constable is so poor. This results in low detection rates. These
Units are responsible for ensuring investigations are conducted
properly.
The BCU senior management teams’ habit of forming these specialist units was
often criticised because it was perceived to be an unnecessary ‘knee-jerk’ reaction to
performance targets which deflects investigative effort from the crimes and criminals
who represent a genuinely serious problem. Concentrating resources in this way is
considered to be wasting a considerable amount of effort and to produce a load of
spurious detections (see Chapter 6).
They’ll form a squad to deal with a particular problem which
shouldn’t be a priority because it’s not a serious problem per se.
The problem is that they haven’t reached the detection figure they
should have. Usually it starts around November/December time
because they’ve got to get the figures by the April. So they draw
people, detectives to start with, but they’ll pull uniformed officers as
well. They’ll put a DS in charge and say, ‘right I need you to go
through all the last year’s burglary dwellings to see if there’s any
that have slipped through the net'. You know, where forensics
haven’t come back or not been looked at, any fingerprint packages
that have come through and been missed. A lot of effort but when I
see the result I often question whether it was worth it.
Cuts in the number of posts in GO CID
One explanation offered for the reduction in CID posts is force restructuring.
Positions in the CID have been designed out, and departments have disappeared
completely, with the combining of smaller BCUs into larger units. Management and
supervisory posts in the hierarchies of some of the original BCUs have been
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