In 2006, the Labour Home Secretary Charles Clarke announced, ‘in the interests of efficiency and effectiveness of policing, forces will merge into a series of regional ‘super-forces.’’ Labour remained in power for another four years, during which they failed to bring about the police reform they had promised.
This week, Labour Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood told a conference of police chiefs, ‘the structure of our police forces is, if we are honest, irrational’.
Plans detailing the merger of some police forces will be announced in a government White Paper next month. Will Mahmood succeed where Clarke failed nearly twenty years earlier?
A precedent was set for the amalgamation of smaller forces into one huge organisation in 2013, when eight regional forces and some specialist law enforcement agencies merged to become Police Scotland. The jury is still out, considering its verdict, as to whether or not the formation of this super-force has been a good idea.
Not surprisingly, huge savings have been made. The purchasing power of such a large organisation has enabled it to drive down costs on uniforms, vehicles, and a raft of other equipment.
Training has been standardised, and the number of systems previously used has been reduced, all of which has resulted in trimmed-down budgets.
Police Scotland has around 23,000 officers and staff. The police forces of England and Wales employ around 236,000 people, so the potential for savings through the coming together of some of those forces would be considerable and would definitely appeal to politicians.
Politicians of all persuasions always try to reform the police once they gain power. Theresa May, as both Home Secretary and Prime Minister, inflicted huge damage on the nation’s police, and the public suffered as crime went up and detections plummeted.
There are no guarantees that Mahmood’s vision for our police will work, but in the unlikely event that she is reading this, I’ll give her some advice.
Reforming the police won't cut crime. The rot runs much deeper than you could ever imagine - Peter Bleksley
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Reforming the police on its own won’t work. The entire criminal justice system is in a state of flux. Policing does its work at the sharp end. Next comes the Crown Prosecution Service, politically swayed, underfunded and under-performing.
Then we come to our courts. Leaking roofs, outdated IT equipment, and insufficient judges to sit in courts that often remain empty. And a huge backlog of cases.
From our courts, the guilty are often sent to prison. Recent stories of prisoners being released by mistake are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what is wrong with our prison estate.
Drugs aplenty, insufficient and inexperienced staff, overcrowding, a culture of fear, and a failure to rehabilitate prisoners are just some of the issues that plague many of our prisons.
Once released, it is the job of the probation service to monitor convicts on the outside. Surveys tell us that the probation service adequately oversees only a quarter of its workload.
So, Home Secretary, you need to fix the entire shambolic system, but if you really want to reform the police, you will need to address what they actually do, not just how the furniture is arranged.
Police chiefs will wail, ‘operational independence’, but the state of the country is becoming so dire that they must be forced to do something that their officers stopped doing many moons ago, which in turn has led to the epidemics of knife crime and shoplifting, and so much more lawlessness that plagues our nation; they must walk the beat.
I can hear chief constables whingeing about how they haven’t got the resources, and that they have other priorities, and that wearing out shoe leather is ineffective, but one of the main reasons that trust in the police is tanking, and why so many people no longer respect the police is because they abandoned the streets to the criminals, who gleefully and profitably took over. They’re still running amok. You must act now.
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