Where Are All The Police Officers?

Where Are All The Police? – An Analysis of Police Resources

The roles in the forces that we visited included Local Investigative Officers (LIOs), Custody Investigating Officers, and staff who assisted with tasks involved in prisoner processing and care.

Some officers in the groups expressed positive views about the impact of civilian staff taking on the more routine and time-consuming tasks that officers had traditionally performed, particularly in the custody suite. However, there was little evidence of any significant impact.

This was understandable given that the civilian posts had been introduced so recently and in such very small numbers. As a consequence officers often had to fill the gap when these resources were not available due to staff shortages or their restrictive shift patterns.

Even where civilians were undertaking tasks which did free up officer time, this then raised questions over the diffusion of ownership of investigative work as no single individual had a complete overview of the case. Officers also expressed concerns with regard to the potential threat to the richness and diversity of their role posed by breaking it down into sections and doling it out to civilians leaving a limited range of tasks for police officers to perform.

We therefore advocate that the extension of civilianisation needs careful consideration to ensure that staffing levels are sufficient to make a significant impact and that the investment required to create that impact is sustained. We also raise the concern that the re-engineering of the work force needs to be undertaken with knowledge of the risks attached to compartmentalising the traditional police role.

Conclusions

Having considered the experiences and voiced opinions of the officers we encountered we were left with a picture of a 24/7 service that was beginning to struggle when the Government’s Police Reform Programme was instigated and which appears to have been allowed to deteriorate since then. We conclude that the Home Office, ACPO and police authorities are either unconvinced about the contribution 24/7 response policing can make to their aim of providing reassurance and a premium service to the public, or that they are unaware of the detrimental effect that under-resourcing is having on the service. If it is the latter then that would suggest that the scope of the existing monitoring and inspection systems needs to be broadened. It is for this reason that we disagree strongly with the proposal to grant freedom from inspection to police forces and BCUs receiving an excellent performance grading and argue that, on the contrary, these BCUs should be subjected to close scrutiny to identify how that excellence is being achieved.

A clear message received from the focus groups was that the Police Reform Programme and the speed with which it is being implemented is at the root of the problem of 24/7 response policing. The picture we were presented with was one of front-line officers struggling to cope with the realities of rapid reform and constant change.

We discovered a number of conflicting demands that the Reform Programme has either brought about or exacerbated:

• Freedom from bureaucracy v. organisational control through bureaucracy – officers are promised that their time will be freed-up by reducing bureaucracy but many of the systems relied on by management to control and monitor the work of officers is based heavily on bureaucratic procedures.

• Trusting rank-and-file officers v. mechanistic organisational control – officers report that management controls mean that they are no longer allowed to utilise their experience and discretion yet the successful implementation of neighbourhood policing relies upon pro-activity and initiative.

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