A sad day for UK Counter Terrorism

Posted on July 22, 2011 by

The resignation of Met Assistant Commissioner and head of counter terrorism John Yates is a very sad day for Counter Terrorism in the United Kingdom. We have lost a dedicated and immensely capable officer who oversaw counter-terrorism operations at a time when the threat from Islamic extremism was arguably at its peak and the warnings signs of an increase in Irish Republican terrorism appearing almost daily.

His personal role in providing the leadership of the Metropolitan Police’s response to the threat from terrorism will, no doubt, one day be given a fuller airing. Until then the Metropolitan Police, with its mind on the security measures that need to be put in place for the Olympic Games, has appointed Assistant Commissioner Cressida Dick as his replacement. Let there be no doubt, despite her actions at Stockwell being exonerated, there are some that regard the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes as unfinished business. Her every action in her new role is going to be scrutinised in great detail.

However in the kind of febrile atmosphere created around the phone hacking scandal it would appear that anyone with even the slightest issue to be questioned about – such as acting as a ‘mail ‘box’ for a job application from a loose acquaintance’s daughter – suddenly becomes a reason to be referred to the IPCC. From the position of an outside observer looking in, this all appears to have got out of hand very quickly.

Whilst it is vital for Police Officers to uphold the highest possible levels of integrity, to damn senior police officers whose careers to date have been unblemished at such speed is deeply disturbing.

It almost appears that some old scores are being settled – the speed with which some senior police officers have been judged to be guilty is very concerning. Rights written into the Magna Carta in 1215 seem to have been forgotten as political leaders, fuelled by speculation in the media, have sought to place the label of wrongdoing on people without any detailed scrutiny of the evidence. It would appear people are not being treated as innocent until proven guilty – a point noted today by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons. If that is the case it is a very sad day for the country.

If the next Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police has to know everything about their organisation and all the potential links and sub-links that might come back to haunt them in some unforeseen way when another scandal arises, that will be a sad day. Anyone taking on that job would rapidly be driven to distraction just trying to keep their arms around the organisation. Forget any time for strategic thinking or leadership. The legacy of the events of the last few days for a future Commissioner just might make the job almost impossible.

Policing Today Security Correspondent, Dr Dave Sloggett 

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Calm at the eye of the storm

Posted on July 22, 2011 by

The Metropolitan Police’s part in The News of the World phone hacking scandal has presented one of the biggest public trust challenges that the Service has seen for a long time. However, there will come a moment (albeit possibly months from now), when the air has cleared sufficiently, and we have the opportunity to step back and survey the landscape.

In terms of public relations, clearly, the situation unfolding around the Met is hardly what you would call a success. Media opinion has not been kind to the four high-ranking officers that appeared before the commons home affairs committee last week. The Met’s employment of former News of the World Deputy Editor Neil Wallis as media adviser, and the subsequent resignations Sir Paul Stephenson and John Yates, meanwhile, could legitimately be described as a PR catastrophe. 

Having said all that however, I’m not sure I agree with one contact who referred to the situation as a ‘brand disaster’ – at least not entirely. After all, as we speak, the Service is learning a hard lesson – and learning it very publically – about how it needs to be seen to be conducting itself both in front of the cameras and behind the scenes.  

As the past few weeks have proven, the serious press in this country is in robust health, at least in terms of influence (the muck-raking press, perhaps not so much). Add to this the ongoing challenge of 24-hour media, citizen journalists and online opinion-formers of all shapes and sizes (not to mention the accountability-above-all things requirements of the Big Society), and it doesn’t take a genius to work out that any opportunity to learn how to work smarter in this area is a good opportunity. (For more on social networking, see my previous blog – http://bit.ly/mVpa5B )

One of the most interesting breakout sessions at this year’s ACPO conference in Harrogate was called ‘Media Intrusion – the effect on the day job’. Beginning ostensibly as a discussion on the effects of the media on operations and investigations, it soon became clear that the subtext was the need for cooperation, understanding and above all openness on both sides. Journalists may get further with the police if they respect the privacy of local populations whose lives are already being disrupted by potentially dreadful events happening in real time. Likewise, there may be less resentment on the part of journalists if forces become more understanding of their need for a story. (Without, obviously, employing them if there’s a chance they may be implicated in a major scandal).

From the policing side, this echoes what the Chairman of the ACPO Editorial Board has to say about the Force’s relationship with the media in the latest issue of Policing Today magazine. Pointing to the work that the Met did with Liberty during the TUC March for the Alternative earlier on in the year, he suggests that the only way to maintain fruitful relationship with the media/public is to be transparent right from the start.

Sir Paul Stephenson has said that one of the reasons he is stepping down is because the current firestorm is taking attention away from the good work being done by his organisation in keeping Londoners safe. Likewise, it’s a shame that last week’s massively positive British Crime Survey statistics are currently being buried under a mountain of bad press. Surely, this is the point. UK policing is doing more and better work than ever before with a pool of ever-dwindling resources, both in terms of keeping the public safe and bringing criminals to justice. If through this experience the Force can better learn how to forge closer links with those it serves while avoiding the pitfalls that detract attention away from its core mission, then all of this won’t have been for nothing.

Philip Mason

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Computer world

Posted on July 22, 2011 by

In March, ACPO told the government that forces across England and Wales will lose a total of 28,000 jobs over the next four years due to the level of budget cuts outlined in last November’s Comprehensive Spending Review. If true, that would translate to eight per cent less officers, a loss of one in six civilian staff – a 12 per cent cull of the current national total of 224,000.

The government says that by re-balancing workforces, different approaches to administration and technology, the cuts can be accommodated and at least some jobs saved. Consequently the Home Secretary has used examples from forces such as Suffolk and Norfolk, where a so-called shared services platform for back office support functions is being set up that may lead to annual savings of at least £10m going forward.

What should we make of all this? In the UK public sector at the moment, the police are hardly alone in having to deal with some very difficult challenges. After a decade and a half of expansion in the state, the emergency brakes were applied and UKHMG came to a screaming halt. As a result, everyone is being asked to, if not do more with less, at the least look to cut as much as possible without affecting ‘front-line service delivery’. So leaders in councils, the other emergency services, education, the NHS have all been asked to do much as May suggests: ‘be clever in the back office and you can save the front office’.

The police though, may be a different public service to re-engineer. The highest element of cost in the British public sector is wages. Therefore, the simplest way to save money is to cut jobs. But cut ‘bobbies on the beat’? That does not bode well for public consumption.

But as we saw in March, when the Minister of Justice had to admit to a Parliamentary Committee that nobody in his department had ever really defined what back office means in a police context, it is one thing to suggest de-duplicating your stationery needs with the Town Hall at the next motorway junction and quite another to work out how many SOCOs you can share with the next county along.

Am I saying that literally every back office, non-uniformed, civilian support role is 100 per cent crucial to fighting crime and keeping you and I safe? Patently not, although I am not sure I agree with one speaker from employer’s club ‘CBI’, who airily told a London conference on efficiency and reform in the public sector that British policing was obviously inefficient as ‘43 per cent’ of all headcount worked in the station.    

Though a Platonic example in its own way of IT mystification, all the term really means is using the power of the internet to centralise and rationalise computing processing and applications. This is purely and simply another way of saying instead of having an email system per station, by using networks you can have one across a force. And you could even, within reason, rent that system. You are talking about curbing internal IT resourcing, and to a quite radical extent – certainly as radical as a Francis Maude would like.

That also means you would need less of an internal IT function, which is bad news for police ICT staff. But it could mean more core specialists escape the firing line, and in these times I think that has to be a decision to take by police leadership.

The bottom line is that technology can and should be used to clean up some of the back office. Shared services make sense in some contexts, but Theresa May’s confidence that on its own it means no frontline impact is flawed. It helps trim budget, not deal with decimation.

That is a reality both the Ministry and ourselves need to be equally sure about. The debate as it should, continues.

Technology Correspondent, Gary Flood

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The social network

Posted on July 22, 2011 by

One of the new realities if you want to work in newspaper or magazine publishing these days is the need to become involved in social networking. Facebook, Twitter and the like are now essential in the creation of any meaningful cross-platform brand identity, particularly if you want to achieve the monetisation holy grail – forming a ‘relationship’ with your reader. (By the way, if you do want to follow Policing Today on Twitter or Facebook I would urge you to. Everyone’s very friendly, and we have cakes on a Friday).

As someone that follows pretty much every force going on Twitter, it’s difficult not to conclude that a similar situation confronts the UK Police Service. Getting beyond the Luddite part of my brain that occasionally screams Too much information! at the top of its voice, it’s impossible not to be excited by the myriad opportunities that now exist to reach out to communities. As well as giving updates into investigations and launching appeals for witnesses, forces can now communicate directly about the implications of policy, cross agency working, community policing and partnership, and so on. The possibilities, it seems, are endless. (There are any number of examples of forces doing fine work in this field, but I would direct you to ACPO Lead on Digital and Social Media Engagement DCC Gordon Scobbie’s Tayside to show what can be achieved – http://www.Tayside.police.uk).

At a recent conference addressing this exact issue in Chicago, DCC Scobbie urged police forces to embrace social networking for all the reasons given above. However, he also highlighted the need to take this type of media seriously particularly in relation to bigger incidents occurring in real time. As events proceed, he said, forces now need to be seen to be on top of things like never before. If not, they run the risk of losing the agenda to any number of commentators in a potentially hostile, infinitely competitive information marketplace. Or to put it another way, if forces don’t do it – and do it properly – everybody else will, or at least try to.

Chief Constable Andy Trotter highlighted a similar theme from a different angle when I interviewed him for the current issue of Policing Today. Pointing out the need for absolute clarity of information, he suggested that in such a savvy, information-rich (and litigious) environment he could foresee a situation where investigations or even careers are put at risk if what is posted online is not completely accurate.

Both scenarios illustrate the dangers of becoming involved in social networking by hinting at the medium’s main strengths – the way it democratises information production, and its capacity to bring literally anything into the public gaze and scrutinise it from every angle. They also pose the questions, how prepared are we for the chaos that will inevitably ensue from that democratisation, and more interestingly, how does UK policing position itself as it gets dragged into that chaos?

By its nature, chaos creeps in around the edges, generally when you’re not looking – something that can be seen happening already, even if so far it’s only in a small way. Looking at the issue purely from a pragmatic, PR perspective, one of the areas that police officers probably need to be careful about for instance, is that they’re not tweeting when they ‘should be doing other things’. And indeed, following West Midlands’ recent ‘tweetahon’, it took all of five minutes for a Guardian commentator – rightly or wrongly – to suggest that she would rather the officers involved were spending their time catching criminals. (http://bit.ly/mQePCz)

A correlation to the above worry is the possible perception that in simply running a Twitter account with a policing identity, individual officers may – even worse – be seen to be not taking their job seriously. Again, this may or may not be reasonable and the debate around to what degree it’s necessary to show the ‘human face’ of policing will continue. (Personally, I reckon it’s very necessary to see policing’s human face, both in relation to community working, and in more informal ways too.) However, it will only take one misstep in the current environment for full media scrutiny to bear down on whatever force is involved.

As ever, UK policing walks a fine line – particularly in the light of the pressures in current economic climate. At the risk of stating the obvious, this is a harsh realm we find ourselves in – both virtually and in reality.

Philip Mason

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Why has Irish extremism returned?

Posted on April 12, 2011 by

The death of Police Constable Ronan Kerr at the hands of dissident Irish Republicans will inevitably raise the question, why has Irish extremism returned? The simple fact is it never went away. It just changed its focus for a few years, biding its time until members of some communities in Northern Ireland became disaffected by the lack of social and economic progress in the wake of the peace treaty signed in 1998.

Thirteen years ago the collective sigh of relief around the province must have been quite discernable. The Troubles were behind them, it was time to move on. Some, however, did not agree that violence should end. Their view was that the struggle had to be maintained. These were the irreconcilable members of the Irish Republican movement.

The size of groups such as the Real IRA, Continuity IRA and Òglaigh Na hÉireann can be measured in tens of people. They are small but individual groups that are tightly woven with each other, bound by trust and an agreed common purpose – the re-unification of Ireland. The three dissident groups operate largely independently from one another; each following its own chain of command and approach to terrorism.

However in the 13 years since the signing of the Northern Ireland Peace Agreement in April 1998 the groups have tended to follow similar paths. In the wake of the terrorism atrocities in the United States in September 2001 many sources of funding traditionally available to the IRA from supporters in America dried up.  Local fund raising efforts, largely based upon criminality, have been used to provide the funds needed to replenish the weapons and explosives needed for a terrorist campaign.

The discovery of significant arms stores during the investigation of the death of PC Kerr shows that the dissident Irish Republican groups had managed to leach away some of the armaments that the Provisional IRA had declared ‘beyond use’ as part of their negotiations associated with the peace treaty. However, armaments and finances are only two dimensions of a terrorist campaign. Another important element is people willing to become involved in kidnapping, murder and indiscriminate bombings. That is an altogether different issue. This is were the dissidents have a problem.

The depth to which the PIRA had been penetrated by the United Kingdom Security Service has become all too apparent since the signing of the Peace Treaty. The Security Services were well versed in who in the PIRA was active and what planning for attacks were in development. This poses problems for dissident groups seeking to recruit new people. To return to the mainland and mount attacks in the United Kingdom as a whole the dissident groups need recruits. How do they establish that they are trustworthy and not MI5 moles?

One approach used in the last two years has involved social networking sites. Potential recruits are identified and sifted from sites where candidates express a desire to become involved in Irish extremism. Tests are set through the contacts established in the social networking sites that establish a candidate’s level of commitment.

One way in which this recruitment process has manifested itself is in a series of botched or amateurish attacks that have occurred against members of the security forces in Northern Ireland. Over the last two years several attempts have been made on people’s lives. Some have succeeded, such as the attack that resulted in the death of Stephen Carroll, a 48 year old police officer in March 2009. This was claimed by Continuity IRA. Others have been less successful. It is apparent that some of the failures arose because they were undertaken by people seeking to establish a degree of credibility with the established groups, in effect trying to pass an entry examination.

The recent increase in attacks and attempted bombings however show that this initial stage of building capacity may be coming to an end. The statistics bear this out. In the whole of 2009 only 22 attempted attacks occurred. In the period from January 2010 to August 2010 this doubled to 49.

It is not by chance that the threat level associated with the dissident groups in Northern Ireland was raised from Moderate to Substantial on the 24th of September 2010. A re-rating of that to Severe is on the cards placing Irish Republican terrorism alongside the threat posed by Muslim extremists. This is a spectacular rise in the threat that many had hoped had died in the wake of the peace process. Ending terrorism, it turns out, is not that easy.

Dr Dave Sloggett

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The importance of police leadership and training

Posted on April 6, 2011 by

Policing is undergoing a radical transformation, as evidenced by the publication of a large number of far-reaching and influential reports, including Hutton, Winsor and others. In the light of the volume of such documents it can be easy to miss publications that do not smack of the ‘here and now.’

I sincerely hope therefore that Peter Neyroud’s Review of Police Leadership and Training is not one of those that are consigned to the ‘not important at the moment’ basket!

As it happens, this report should be required reading for any police manager, and in particular those with responsibility for education of police staff – as well as outside providers of the same throughout the country. The report considers the future of police education in the light the economic situation, as well as the ideas of ‘transferring power back to the people’ and the creation of the National Crime Agency (NCA).

As an advocate of the shift of policing from a ‘craft based occupation’ to a ‘true profession’, I support any move that increases knowledge, skills, abilities and understanding of all police employees within the Service. The proposals within this document include the creation of a police professional body which will oversee such items as the National Standards for Policing and will ‘reposition’ ACPO by merging its functions. Pre-entry qualifications are also discussed along with different routes for entry.

What is really being discussed in this report is the future of policing in England and Wales. That may sound dramatic, and slightly out of kilter with current concerns regarding structure and delivery in a very difficult economic framework. However, police officers and staff deserve to be educationally equipped to deal with the myriad of problems and incidents that they face now and in the future, and educational and leadership must be the cornerstone of any future service delivery based on efficiency and effectiveness. This report steps up to the plate and bravely starts the process of seriously rethinking the way in which staff are educated. To avoid this report and its implications is, in my opinion, to avoid planning for the future of policing.

Dr Colin Rogers, University of Glamorgan

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Disability hate crime and the creation of victimhood

Posted on March 30, 2011 by

As someone who had a previous life working for a disability charity, I don’t think I could have been more pleased when I read the recent comments by DPP Kier Starmer on disability hate crime.

For the benefit of the link-averse, the crux of his statement went something like this: that the prosecution of those who attack disabled people is the ‘next frontier’ for the criminal justice system – not just in terms of the nuts and bolts process of bringing these people to justice, but also in order to better reflect a society where disabled people don’t expect to be victims.

In his Sussex Law School speech, he made two rather disturbing claims. Firstly that there is evidence to suggest that a great many cases of harassment and violence go unreported each year, primarily because this behaviour is not ‘recognised’ as a crime when it happens – either by the authorities or the victims of it themselves. (Or to put it another way, it is so widespread and seemingly so unremarkable it is merely a matter of routine for all concerned.) And secondly, that even when reported, prosecutors were less than willing to rely on evidence given by disabled victims or witnesses when cases were brought to court. This, you assume, is either due to a lack of faith in the voracity of the evidence given in the first place or, as he identifies, in the ‘acceptability’ of those giving it.

One of the things that we saw most often working out of our little office in Bognor Regis was evidence of a pervading – for want of a better word – violence against people with disabilities at the level of discourse itself. That is, the tendency on the part of society to conceive of disability according to what is known as the ‘medical’ model. In other words, to imagine the person’s illness represents the very core of their being, thereby reducing them to the level of merely something that needs help and tacitly excluding them from any decision-making in relation to their own life.

(The medical model stands in stark contrast to the ‘social’ model, which conceives of disabled people as integrated members of society, and that the notion of disability itself is in fact ideological and imposed externally).

Violence against the disabled, it seems to me, is the logical, and actually blindingly obvious, extension of the effects of the medical model. There exists a personality type that will both hate anything it perceives as different and abuse anything that it regards as ‘helpless’. There also exists – still -, at least if DPP Starmer is to be believed, an unwillingness at an official level to accept that disabled people can be allowed to speak for themselves. Society, as so often, creates its own victims.

DPP Starmer’s speech was a real encouragement – just like Chief Constable David Whatton’s presentation on victim-centred investigation of rape at last year’s ACPO conference. Rest assured that if there is anything Policing Today can do to help break this most vicious of cycles, we will.

Philip Mason, Policing Today Editor

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