January 2024: Resources vs choices
Police chiefs claim the future of their forces hangs on a knife edge, but are they making the best use of what they've got?
Dear StopWatchers,
We see in the new year with some big statements from a senior officer, while forces ramp up their use of facial recognition technology.
We attended the official launch of the Art Not Evidence campaign in parliament, featuring lawyers, academics, music industry figures, and Nadia Whittome MP speaking on the misuse of rap music lyrics to criminalise aspiring young Black artists.
You can read more about the campaign and the push to introduce a draft Bill seeking to create a threshold for admission of creative expression as evidence on the Art Not Evidence website.
Topics in this newsletter include:
Institutionally racist and cash-strapped: senior police officer joins small group of chiefs who accept the term, but also claims improvements won’t come without greater investment in forces
Police misconduct figures published: New Home Office dataset published
Terrible tech: Policing minister encourages greater take-up of Live Facial Recognition technology, in order to ‘see who gets caught’
Thanks for reading.
Institutionally racist and cash-strapped
2024 begins with at least one senior officer determined to follow their new year’s resolutions to hold the force to higher standards of transparency and accountability (The Guardian, 5 Jan).
To echo the sentiments of the Independent Scrutiny and Oversight Board set up to provide overview and external scrutiny of the Police Race Action Plan, admitting your problems is the first step to properly dealing with them.
That said, identifying the correct problems is a tricky task in its own right. Take the issue of resources: Gavin Stephens, chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, also told The Guardian that the institution faces a ‘£3.2bn cash shortfall’, with ‘6,000 officers having to work away from frontline crime fighting to fill gaps caused by a funding crisis’ (5 Jan).
The Home Office insisted they’d provided ‘more support than ever before for policing’, including a ‘30.7% rise in cash terms in the last three years’ and a 7% pay rise for officers amounting to ‘over half a billion pounds’. So why isn’t a ‘record number of police officers, including a record number on the frontline… more police working in public protection, in local policing and in crime investigations’ enough for the police?
According to criminal justice think tank Crest Advisory, police numbers aren’t keeping up with the growth in the general populace: although we have the highest number of frontline officers in England and Wales on record, forces need an extra 18,000 officers to keep up with the 9.1% increase in population since the start of the previous decade. Apparently there are now ‘just 3.88 officers for every 1,000 people – down from 4.42 in 2010’.
But members of the public like Sarah Goode from Blackburn might argue that even when you call on the police to solve a crime, they don’t want to. What Goode told the BBC Panorama documentary ‘Will My Crime Be Solved?’ (8 Jan) – that Lancashire Police officers assigned to deal with a burglary on her home ‘were not prepared to do anything’ – smacks more of incompetence than the pressures of an ‘increased workload’ and ‘more complex and severe crimes than before’. So the idea that per population officer numbers is the most pressing concern begs the question: how would employing even more officers improve things?
Judging from the complaints and grievances of victims of crimes who felt they deserved a better service, the answer to the question very much depends on the decisions made by officers interacting with crime victims and the operational limits of the decision-making possibilities set by their bosses. In other words, it is a choice to prioritise some policing tactics over others regardless of their effectiveness. For instance, the decision of chiefs and commissioners to increase stop-search for knives sits at odds with the fact that no further action is taken in roughly seven out of every ten of them. There are too many frontline officers whose presence is wasted on the periphery of a stop-search; we know this from the experiences of so many people who have either been stop-searched or have witnessed one.
So, is it the best use of their officers’ time? And do we take the right responses to the problem of violent crime (especially involving the use of knives) when it does occur?
Banning the sale, ownership, and possession of knives became a talking point in the news towards the end of the month, in light of the trial of Valdo Calocane, who has been sentenced to indefinite detention in a high-security hospital after admitting to the manslaughter of three people in Nottingham last year. But what would it achieve? On the supply-demand side of things, the government has been restricting the sale of knives for some time, and while it may have had some effect on reducing violence, it definitely has spurred new innovations in design. To take zombie knives as an example: a previous attempt to ban them under the Offensive Weapons Act 2019 defined them as having three properties: 1) a cutting edge; 2) a serrated edge; and 3) ‘images or words that suggest that it is to be used for the purpose of violence’. This means a knife which does not contain the last one is not a zombie knife. Now the government seeks to close that loophole by banning zombie knives ‘with no threatening words or images’.
But policing minister Chris Philp conceded to the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme that some swords will still not qualify under the new ban, owing to the difficulty of differentiating between those that could be used for violence and those that are kept for historical or religious reasons (Evening Standard, 25 Jan). In short, it is harder to legislate knives away than some may think.
On the possession-usage side, it is important to note that not all knife violence is the same. Calls to impose stricter sentences on carrying knives in light of this incident neglect the fact that the killer also used a van to run people over. There have been no calls to punish people in possession of vans. Why? Partly because we understand not to confuse the means with the motive. A person desperate enough to inflict harm will operate beyond any law.
And as many a survey has shown, the average young person’s motives for possessing a bladed instrument are quite different from that of an individual who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia before he carried out his attacks. In 2020, a British Youth Council investigation found that ‘young people are primarily motivated to carry knives out of fear, and a desire to protect themselves’, and if they could choose one solution to help combat knife crime, they would consider education to be most effective and additional stop-searches to be least so.
Anyone who spends any time engaging with people vulnerable to the risk of violence knows this is a rational response to a fearful local environment, as does actor Idris Elba, a prominent campaigner on knife crime (BBC, 25 Jan). He echoed the sentiments of many young people in an interview with BBC Breakfast on the matter, and spelt out the nature of the daily dilemma they face.
“He's walking through a neighbourhood, and thinks I'm going to protect myself here – he ends up in jail for five years. You wonder, are we winning?”, The Wire and Luther actor asked.
Elba added that a deterrent to make young people know they will pay a penalty for carrying a knife is important – but argued there are “gradients” to the issue.
“As a deterrent it's a really important step to consider, but it's not one size fits all,” he said.
Later in the article Elba declared that he was ‘still going to fight for youth services to be bolstered’ in the interests of keeping young people safe from knife harm. But where is the political will to resource non-punitive interventions when mainstream discourse is dominated by calls for more funding? Austerity hit all public services, but only one of them gets media attention over it.
Senior officers including Gavin Stephens ought to know that austerity is not the sole or even primary reason why Devon and Cornwall, the Met, Staffordshire, West Midlands, and Wiltshire police forces are currently languishing in special measures. Similarly, institutional racism did not begin in 2010. The nature of police operations is just as much about the politics of decisions made and the beliefs that underpin them as any quibbles about resources. It is why significant racial disproportionalities in policing (such as stop and search) have persisted across all economic cycles of boom and bust. Perhaps if there is any difference between yesteryear and today, it is the creeping normalisation of the police as the solution to all social ills, when it is clear that they are not always best-placed to give complex problems the care they deserve. To quote a government-commissioned Policing Productivity Review published towards the end of last year:
Whenever a force posts a police officer where their powers or specialist expertise are unnecessary, it is in effect paying an additional £16,000 per year to do something that someone else might in fact be better qualified to deliver.
Deaths from police contact, cases old and new
Andrzej Kusper
The police watchdog has said a Met officer failed to properly search a man who died in police custody after choking on a package of drugs. An inquest at East London Coroners’ Court found that Kusper died as a result of a ‘foreign body airway obstruction’ (Leyton Guardian, 20 Jan).
Jay Abatan
Officers in a police force that bungled the investigation into a suspected racist killing, allegedly went on holiday, dined and partied with suspects arrested over the attack (The Guardian, 28 Jan). The new claims come on the 25th anniversary of the death of Jay Abatan’s death, who was attacked outside a Brighton nightclub in January 1999. No one has been convicted for the fatal attack on Jay or the assault immediately afterwards on his brother, Michael. Both were set upon by a group of white men as they left the Ocean Rooms nightclub. Michael said a new force should take over the investigation and a public inquiry was needed: ‘I just want the truth and I am sick of being lied to and treated like a fool. I trusted the authorities to do their job and they let Jay down.’
Chris Kaba
Lawyers and family members of alleged victims have accused the force of applying anonymity protection for officers in misconduct hearings and criminal proceedings ‘without really thinking it through’ (i news, 22 jan). This comes as the date for revealing the name of officer NX121 who fatally shot Chris Kaba was delayed to March of this year (ITV News, 26 Jan). Legal representative of the family, Daniel Machover, said that there seems to be no good reason for the idea that ‘somehow [the police] gain some special status and acquire a right to anonymity where other professions and other people held to account in other disciplinary contexts don’t’.
Clippings
Police dismissed for wrongful car stop: Metropolitan Police officer PC Martin Binala has been dismissed from the force after he dragged a man out of his car during a stop and search. The mishandled operation left Karo Grigoryan traumatised and requiring hospital treatment for his injuries. The hearing found that Binala had been dishonest in claiming to smell cannabis coming from inside the car. It also criticised his fellow officers’ delay in calling for an ambulance, and leaving him handcuffed for an excessive period after discovering no drugs in his car. Furthermore, the misconduct panel stated that if they had correctly completed the intelligence checks on Grigoryan’s number plate, the officers would have reached the conclusion that his vehicle was linked to no criminal activity (Justice Gap, 10 Jan).
Stop-search disparities challenged by Gloucestershire Community Legitimacy Panel: Representatives of Gloucestershire Police promised to reduce stop-search disparities during a meeting with local residents in Tredworth where police were questioned on their Race Action Plan. Black people are stopped roughly four times more often than white people in Gloucestershire. The meeting was also told that the force will no longer stop people because they smell cannabis, the reason being it is very difficult to prove an officer smelt anything (BBC Gloucestershire, 12 Jan).
Airport cops interrogate UK teen over Palestine protests: openDemocracy obtained footage of a 40-minute ordeal in which counter-terror police stopped a teenage boy wearing a Palestine flag at a UK airport and quizzed him over his attendance at pro-Palestinian protests and his views on ‘the situation in Palestine’. The boy and a family member were also handed a leaflet and told that they were legally required to answer any questions under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 (openDemocracy, 17 Jan).
Met officers afforded ‘special status’ by anonymisation: Lawyers and family members of alleged victims have accused the force of applying the protection on behalf of officers in misconduct hearings and criminal proceedings ‘without really thinking it through’ (i news, 22 jan). This comes as the date for revealing the name of officer NX121 who fatally shot Chris Kaba, was delayed to March of this year (ITV News, 26 Jan). A lawyer representing the family Daniel Machover said that there seems to be no good reason for the idea that ‘somehow [the police] gain some special status and acquire a right to anonymity where other professions and other people held to account in other disciplinary contexts don’t’.
Releases and announcements
Undercover: Police Officer Mark Kennedy aka ‘Mark Stone’ is unmasked by the friends and lovers he was sent to spy on. Andy Whittaker investigates how he and other ‘spycops’ operated (BBC Sounds, 23 Jan).
College of Policing publishes new Code of Ethics: The new code outlines the professional behaviours that the public can expect to see from officers, staff and volunteers. The Code of Ethics will work alongside a separate statutory Code of Practice for Ethical Policing, which was launched in December and sets out the actions that chief officers should take to support people in their force to use the ethical policing principles and to demonstrate professional behaviour (College of Policing, 24 Jan).
Police misconduct, England and Wales, year ending 31 March 2023: New Home Office dataset finds that from tens of thousands of police complaints, conduct matters and recordable conduct matters, 972 officers were referred to misconduct proceedings, of which 828 were guilty of misconduct (Home Office, 30 Jan; table of findings below).
Please follow the Twitter link for a summary of the findings.
Section 60 watch*
Essex
Harlow (25 Jan)
Greater Manchester Police
Oldham (22-23 Jan)
Merseyside
Wirral (13 Jan)
West Midlands
* This is not a comprehensive list
Terrible tech: ‘See who gets caught’
Predictably, facial recognition is hitting our streets in a big way already. The Croydon borough of the Metropolitan Police wasted no time in boasting of the merits of Live Facial Recognition (LFR) in snaring eight individuals amongst the tens of thousands profiled in the area earlier this month (Twitter, 24 Jan). Policing minister Chris Philp has openly encouraged other forces to borrow the LFR vans to ‘see who gets caught’, as if false positives aren’t a thing (House of Commons, 16 Jan).
Meanwhile, one supermarket chain has installed nearly three times as many Facewatch live recognition cameras in the poorest third of neighbourhoods in England as there have in the richest (The Guardian, 27 Jan). Although assurances were made that there is no ‘watchlist’, we would not be surprised if local police forces were able to easily obtain access to any profiles stored as and when they want.
None of LFR’s backers seem concerned about the lack of preventative oversight regarding the technology’s use and impact, expressed in a letter to home secretary James Cleverly by the Lords’ Justice and Home Affairs Committee, or indeed what kind of nation it makes Britain (Independent, 27 Jan).
The one thing that can be guaranteed from the increasing use of this technology is ever more abuses of power, like that of a former Metropolitan Police officer given a suspended sentence for intentionally accessing police records of people known to him without any legitimate purpose (IOPC, 8 Jan). For already overpoliced and underprotected communities, their civil liberties are being dismantled by the creation of an apparatus for surveillance of their every move in public.
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StopWatch.