MAY the FORCE BE WITH YOU

I had thought that, depending on the hurdles thrown into the path of independents, I might put myself forward as a candidate for the elected office of county police commissioner next May. These functionaries have been dreamed up to replace local police authorities and supposedly to make the police more accountable.

I am not the only observer to suspect that what will happen in practice is that these roles will largely fall to party apparatchiks, thereby bringing police more directly under the control of government policy. This eventuality needs to be countered. However, the House of Lords last week put a spoke in the government’s plans by throwing out the clause of the justice bill that establishes the principle of elected commissioners. There will ensue a power struggle between the Lords and the Commons (which the latter will certainly win) but, if the government’s timetable is to be preserved, it shortens the time for preparation.

Below is a first draft of a stump speech I have been considering in case the elections do indeed go ahead and my circumstances do not prevent me from standing. I would welcome feedback.

A custodian helmet of the Metropolitan police force

Ladies and gentlemen,

When did you last set eyes on a police officer? I don’t mean on television. Of course there are myriad cops on the box every night, some of them even British. The fictional ones, unbeatable detectives all, are apt to be so-called mavericks who bend the regulations but not in a way that practical people would disapprove because they get results. The real officers on the streets, most often seen on the news, usually look like paramilitaries and appear to be carrying out some brutal regime crackdown in some god-forsaken country, until you realise that they’re actually in London.

No, I mean a police officer in the flesh, traversing your community with a watchful, friendly eye, either on foot or in a squad car temporarily perched at some prominent vantage point. I mean a visible local law enforcement presence.

When I was a child in the 1950s, the “bobby on the beat” was a familiar neighbourhood figure, like the postman and the milkman, the newspaper boy and the rag-and-bone man. He –- there were some women but the vast majority were men – was reassuring but at the same time slightly menacing, gruff but indulgent, all-seeing and all-knowing. There was a saying back then: “if you want to know the time, ask a policeman”. It perfectly caught all the qualities that the public imagination invested in the police: approachability, reliability, flexibility, trustworthiness, public service.

The foot patrol policeman was an unmistakeable figure. He was so conspicuous in his elongated, dark blue pith helmet that was properly called a custodian helmet. Do they still wear those? Are you absolutely sure that you know the answer to that question?

Dixon, an idealised uniformed copper

Of course, nobody advocates a return to the “Evenin’ all” world of long ago. Although, don’t forget that Dixon of Dick Green’s first manifestation was in a feature film of 1950 called The Blue Lamp in which he was shot at point-blank range by a rather unconvincing desperado played by Dirk Bogarde. PC George Dixon was brought back from the dead for the reassuring and cosy television series.

Community policing is not a service that most communities are presently aware of. The only time I have seen any officers in the small town near which we live was occasioned by a local councillor, puzzlingly elected under the banner of the BNP, coming to claim his seat at the town hall. There was a demonstration that drew the local television news cameras and a small but suitably angry crowd.

Another day, I went to the local police station to report a dangerously parked vehicle. The station was locked and I spoke inconclusively to someone through an intercom at the door. I have never passed by and seen any evidence that the building is occupied.

Morse, an idealised television detective

Many factors have changed the culture of Britain’s streets but the absence of police officers is certainly one of those factors. I don’t think we ever used the word “mugging” in the 1950s. Crimes committed in broad daylight were outrageous enough to provoke comment. But the whole of society has altered profoundly since then. We routinely have about us items that are pretty expensive and desirable: gadgets and gizmos and jewellery worn routinely, not just on high days and holidays. Even sneakers get stolen while being worn on the pavement, a crime that peaked in the 1990s. You just couldn’t have credited footwear theft in the 1950s.

Back then, people thought nothing of walking to their destination. Shopping was done at a series of high street retailers, not at one huge hypermarket that can only be reached by car. But, apart from shopping, women were much less likely to be seen alone on the street, especially at night. In the 1950s, a woman entering a pub or a restaurant alone was liable to raise eyebrows. Now, women expect to be able to walk at any hour and in sometimes surprisingly provocative clothes without putting themselves at risk, yet the risk has greatly increased along with the provocation.

Contemporary community policing

And the greatest difference, as everyone knows, is that children no longer go out to play. The possibility of a copper heaving into sight served a double psychological purpose – it kept the kids feeling safe and it made them think twice about getting into trouble.

It’s impossible to draw these kinds of comparison and not mention government cuts. This is not the place to argue a general case for cutting more slowly or for making cuts in different areas from the ones the government has chosen. Even so, I cannot resist remarking that if as much were spent on domestic policing as on attempting to police internal strife in other countries around the world, the crime and detection figures here would be greatly improved.

But any police commissioner worth his salt is bound to make funding a major concern and to use his position to put pressure on the Home Office and the Treasury to do everything possible to sustain front line policing. And not only front line either. It’s too tempting for politicians to make cheap points about back office waste but the police have many functions, duties and services that the public do not readily see but which make a difference in subtle, subtextual and far-reaching ways. Moreover, it behoves a useful commissioner to campaign for a reduction in red tape and bureaucratic regulation. Successive governments’ preoccupation with statistics and targets has done the police no favours.

Younger every day

Most important of all, it seems to me, is that a police commissioner be free of party interest. Policing should not be a political football. No party has a monopoly on constructive policies concerning law enforcement. Indeed, I rather suggest that many thoughtful police officers believe that no party has any very practical and progressive policies on policing. That at any rate is my own view and I am proud to offer myself as someone who has never been compromised by membership of a political party. In this election, there are candidates who will be taking for granted the votes of those who support the party that has put them up for election. I suggest that their bias is of little benefit either to the force itself or to the public. An independent representative, able to draw his own independent conclusions from the evidence before him, is best able to wield the daunting but undoubted power that comes with this post.

But if the election of a candidate such as me might in some ways represent the worst nightmare of party politicians, it might also fill the chief constable with trepidation. It happens too often that reported and video-recorded behaviour by police officers falls well short of the standards the force publicly sets for itself, let alone the standards that the public have a right to expect. Let’s consider the case of the Melksham station sergeant who dragged a woman to a cell and then threw her to the ground, opening a wound on her face. It ought not to have taken a court case before that sergeant was dismissed the service. Indeed, it ought not to have taken the leaking of CCTV footage of the assault to the media for any enquiry to be conducted into the sergeant’s behaviour. The police have a duty of care for anyone in their custody, however abusive, awkward, uncooperative or unpredictable such people might be. “We will always treat you fairly with dignity and respect” says the national policing pledge and that must include everyone, even the guilty.

Contemporary riot gear

On this as on many other disciplinary matters, the fact that the force – like the military and parliament – act as judge and jury only reinforces the public perception that they do everything possible to look after their own and to neutralise embarrassment. This is plainly unacceptable and a police commissioner ought to involve himself with all such cases, taking as a given that each will be considered on its merits and that no attempt will be made to protect the good name of the police at the expense of the truth.

Some of the instinct to close ranks when civilians allege ill treatment or other sorts of wrongdoing clearly derives from a culture that has difficulty adapting to social change. Few can doubt that the police – like the military, the judiciary, the financial sector, professional sport and, certainly, parliament itself – have been slow to re-educate themselves out of an instinctive misogyny, racism, homophobia, ageism and cultural exclusivity that keep the predominant blokes feeling strong and safe. Sensitivity to difference has to be inculcated into recruits from the outset; eradicating age-old habits of attitude and behaviour in more senior officers may be even more challenging. But chief constables need to require such sensitivity and to crack down hard on all evidence of its lack.

Kettling

It seems to me that one of the most fraught areas of policing is the relationship between uniformed officers and young members of the public. Adolescents and those in their early twenties require particular patience because they are not yet skilled in calibrating the impact of their behaviour. I do not suppose it is a pressing issue for this county, unless reinforcements are ever required in Bristol, but the conduct of police at demonstrations and in handling outbursts of rowdy and destructive behaviour is especially ticklish. Chief constables feel that they have found a useful tool in the new techniques of containment – what the media have dubbed kettling – but the indiscriminate nature of this method of control is deeply resented by those caught up by it. Operations that alienate the public may be useful in the short term but can have consequences for the way that the authorities are perceived by a whole generation. I acknowledge that, in crowd control situations, the police are usually on a hiding to nothing. But more strategic planning is required, along with a greater readiness to be self-critical.

Something that does drive a wedge between the police and young people in this county is the long-standing policy of picking up and charging people in possession of small quantities of recreational drugs, plainly acquired for personal use. I don’t know if this is a policy dictated by a desire to swell the numbers of convictions. I do know that it sows discontent that in small ways and – who knows? – perhaps in large ways may come to be a matter of regret.

The responses to drunkenness in town centres is also a matter that requires thoughtful anticipation. For my part, I would argue that the police (and paramedics too) should be permitted to charge fixed fees when they are obliged to tend to people rendered incapable by their own stupidity, especially if such people are accommodated in cells overnight. Charging a fee would help to ensure that the duty of care be carried out properly – after all, someone who has paid a fee is entitled to complain if he has not received the due service.

There are, as you can see, many aspects of policing that deserve renewed consideration and in which a police commissioner ought to be intimately involved. I undertake to you that, if elected, I shall make my presence felt without fear or favour towards anyone save you, the electorate, in face of whom all public servants, elected, uniformed or appointed, should quake.

And, by the by, the question of custodian helmets is not simple. Some forces do seem to be phasing them out. The requirement that they be worn has generally declined. I call that a pity. There’s much to be said for distinctiveness.

LIFE STUDIES

On GMTV yesterday morning, Denise Fergus gave a live studio interview. Given the press interest in the continuing crime drama in which the woman played a leading role, this must be considered quite a coup for GMTV. In practice, the interview was something of a nightmare because Fergus is not living in the real world.

Fergus was previously called Denise Bulger and it was her two year-old son James who was bludgeoned to death by two ten year-old boys in February 1993. That the perpetrators were so young marked out the case and made it especially notorious. Moreover, there was plenty of material for the media to work on, beginning with the haunting CCTV image of the child being led by the boys from the shopping centre where they had spotted him wandering unsupervised out of a shop doorway. Once they were found guilty, the trial judge allowed the identities of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables to be revealed. Their police mug shots were also released. These photographs underlined the shocking youth of the boys, the youngest convicted murderers of the century in Britain.


Venables and Thompson: the mug shots

They were sentenced to a minimum of eight years in custody, quickly increased to ten by the Lord Chief Justice. Sections of the press then began a campaign to have the sentences increased further. The Home Secretary of the day, Michael Howard, took it upon himself unilaterally to raise the minimum tariff to fifteen years. The increased term was overturned in the Lords, where the Home Secretary was roundly accused of “playing to the gallery”. The two were released on life licences in 2001 and given new identities. The terms of their licences put strict conditions on their future behaviour, including that they not return to their native city.

That city was one more significant aspect of the case. The protagonists were all Liverpudlians. Consequently, the drama was more pronounced than it would have been had it taken place in any other British community. The people of Liverpool do nothing by halves, nor do they go in for subtleties, even-handedness or doubt. It has to be said that an element of vigilantism, vengefulness and justice-by-the-mob is not unheard of in that city. Once released, the killers would have reason to fear for their lives, if ever exposed.


James Bulger's grave

The headstone erected over the grave by Denise and Ralph Bulger would have seemed a little overstated had it marked the final resting-place of a head of state, even one hailing from Croxteth. For a child of two, it is – let’s not mince words here – ridiculous. Moreover, it is decorated with a legend that sets out to sound like verse but does not sustain the effort. The opening couplet reads: “There is not a day that goes by/That we think of you and cry”. You might agree with me in considering that a stonemason with a modicum of sensitivity (and, I imagine, a pretty hefty invoice) would take a deep breath and point out the egregious error there perpetrated to resound down the ages.

Fergus sat on the GMTV sofa with her present husband. He only got a word in at the end when invited to contribute by co-presenter Phillip Scofield. Fergus is an archetypically forthright Liverpool woman. She doesn’t go in for understatement, nor is she evidently bothered if her argument hangs together or not. She was there because Jon Venables (as was), now aged 27, has been taken into custody. “I’ve had sleepless nights” she declared, “I’m not eating again. I’ve had to pull my kids out of school. It’s just one massive rollercoaster for me and I can’t believe that they’re putting me through this” – this latter reference, I believe, is to “the authorities”.

Immediately, Fergus reveals herself as someone who has worked herself into a lather. A dispassionate viewer – me, for instance – is quickly given to wonder what the present situation has to do with Fergus at all, why she is being invited to play any part in the re-detention of someone against whom she had satisfaction 17 years ago.

The answer is that, during those years, Fergus has not let the matter rest. Two years before Thompson and Venables secured their release, their lawyers went to the European Court of Human Rights to argue that they had not received a fair trial. The Court upheld this appeal in part and also ruled that the action by Michael Howard had prejudiced any future appeal hearing in the case.

Meanwhile, Denise and Ralph Bulger had also gone to the European Court to try to establish a right for victims of crime – or, in this case, relatives of victims – to be permitted to exercise influence on sentencing policy, a gambit that was thankfully rebuffed. Until their release, the victim’s mother ran a campaign called Justice for James, the aim of which was to have the killers’ sentences extended.

Fergus believes she still has a grievance. “It’s about time now I started getting answers” she told GMTV. “I’m just fed up with them closing doors in my face. It’s about time they started telling me what I think I should know. As James’s mother, I have a right to know”. It was never entirely clear what it is that she thinks she isn’t being told, aside from a complete account of the charges being brought against the newly detained Venables. But whatever she thinks she has a right to know, she in fact has no rights whatsoever in the matter.


Denise Fergus campaigning

Fergus also says that “whoever’s been protecting and looking after Venables over these nine years of his release, I’m calling that they should be sacked”. By this I take it she means those responsible for monitoring his observation of the terms of his licence. Her judgment here depends on taking at face value all the speculation about the licence breach that has appeared in the press.

Scofield, who generally steered Fergus very competently and quite subtly explored the contradictions in her position, asked whether the killer should now be given a further new identity. “No, certainly not” she replied. “Why should we spend more money on him? There’s millions been spent on him already. I’d sooner give the money to kids that need it … There are more and more kids now killing other kids because of Thompson and Venables’ release, because they’re being rewarded for what they’ve done rather than punished. They’ve been given the best of everything. They’ve been treated and still are treated like stars”. Every part of this outburst strikes me as not far from being unhinged.

The difficulty for the “authorities” including Jack Straw, the Justice Minister (who gamely met the Ferguses later yesterday) is that it would take very little to allow Venables’ lawyer to argue that he cannot receive a fair trial on whatever turns out to be the new charge. The press has been typically irresponsible in its speculation about the circumstances in which Venables finds himself in detention. Fergus is clearly not someone whom Straw could entrust with any confidence about the case, even if he thought she deserved to know anything. But the woman is a loose cannon. She thinks she has entitlements that simply do not enter the equation. And I rather suspect, in fact, that it is she who is being treated – and expecting to be treated – like a star.

If Venables has committed some serious crime – as the media evidently believes – or even some minor breach of his licence, he should be subject to the same exacting standards of justice as anybody else. The trouble is that, in their thirst for ammunition with which to attack him, both the press and Denise Fergus are making it less and less likely that Venables will ever end up in jail.

FREEDOM from INQUISITION

Today’s report that the Home Secretary is prepared to consider outsourcing the national database is one of the most alarming developments so far in the shaming story of New Labour’s flight from its own base, both in terms of its increasing instincts to control every damned thing and of its growing love affair with the private sector. As The Guardian put it, such a move “would be accompanied by tougher legal safeguards to guarantee against leaks and accidental data losses”, but of course there can be no such guarantee, however “tough” the safeguards.

We know already that the security applied to supposedly encrypted and/or confidential data is close to non-existent and that those who behave in a cavalier manner with sensitive material are almost never in practice subjected to penalty, either through the courts or even in their career paths.

I would like to make a modest proposal. Let Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, build into the premise of the operation of the national database’s security a provision that, in the event of a leak or a data loss, the then holder of the office of Home Secretary along with Ms Smith herself (whatever her then status) be obliged to serve a term of not less than two years’ detention in a maximum security prison. Such a provision would offer a rather more reliable “guarantee” against leaks and data loss and, moreover, would furnish both the then Home Secretary and Ms Smith with useful first-hand experience of “tough” security.

It never ceases to astonish me that politicians cannot envisage situations in which the powers that they wish to arrogate to themselves might be considerably more oppressive, for instance in the hands of some as-yet unforeseeable successor. In my lifetime, several European nations, not so unlike Britain, have laboured under dictatorships, usually of a military stripe. It is sadly not beyond the power of imagination to picture Britain too being governed by a regime even less concerned to protect the freedom of the individual than is New Labour. In fifty years from now, Britain will doubtless be a Muslim state. How much more effective will it be to inflict upon the nation the extremes of Sharia law when the Blair and Brown governments have created the infrastructure of surveillance that will allow a future mullah-turned-Interior-Minister to enforce orthodoxy on a British people who once rejoiced in their non-conformist traditions.

Rather more urgent – because the present economic climate makes it unavoidable – is the certainty that forms of access to the national database will be sold for profit to commercial organisations. Once the control of the data moves out of the hands of central government and into the hands of entrepreneurs who are answerable first to shareholders, the rush to cash in will become a stampede and government, having acceded to the thin edge of the wedge, will be powerless to prevent, say, your insurance company having total access to every financial transaction you conduct, every email you send or receive and details of every visit you make to a website. Is that what you voted for?

Sir Ken Macdonald, lately Director of Public Prosecutions, told The Guardian: “The tendency of the state to seek ever more powers of surveillance over its citizens may be driven by protective zeal. But the notion of total security is a paranoid fantasy which would destroy everything that makes living worthwhile. We must avoid surrendering our freedom as autonomous human beings to such an ugly future. We should make judgments that are compatible with our status as free people”. I couldn’t put it better.

Regulation is a perfectly honourable instinct in the make-up of the left. The current catastrophe of capitalism makes the case for regulation of the markets as no politician, however eloquent, ever could. But there is regulation and there is oppression. I do not say that the present government has turned to oppression … yet. But we are on a worrying path. Already more CCTV cameras gaze upon Britons than the residents of any other nation if measured by head of population. The suspicion that most of the cameras do not actually function properly helps to make the Brits relaxed about this chronic level of surveillance. After all, as a nation we are – we have always been – hopeless at maintenance. Count the clocks in public places that have stopped, the great majority of them not during the past month either.

If the level of surveillance actually delivered what it promised, there would be no shooting, no arresting and no convicting of innocent civilians. There would be much less theft, shoplifting, criminal damage and breaking in; much less speeding, hitting and running, dangerous driving and illegal parking; much less rape, kidnap, assault and child molestation; much less gang culture and fewer sink estates. The cost of this vast network of surveillance is nowhere near justified by its results.

So what the hell does the government want of this love affair with data-collecting? The knee-jerk response – that it is a crucial weapon in the front line of “the war against terror” – is a busted flush. The government could enact all manner of targeted controls on the community from which terrorism emerges if it were not so squeamish about giving offence to Islam. Faced by the loss of confidence in Labour among the non-Muslim population, part of it fuelled by the resentment at the imposition of oppressive regulation on communities that do nothing to justify it, you might think that Mr Brown’s advisors would suggest that he cut his losses and pursue a more broadly popular agenda.