The police are changing sides. Where once they were the voice of conventional law enforcement, senior officers are now among its most outspoken critics, searching for alternatives among the cracks in the armoury of the criminal justice system.
In Bristol three years ago, a divisional commander called Rick Palmer noticed how the same offenders kept shuffling through his custody. He researched the histories of the 110 most familiar faces and found that between them they were committing some 50,000 offences a year, including 65% of the city’s burglary and mugging. And the system was simply processing them, without changing their behaviour.
Palmer set out to do something more effective. It meant raising money outside mainstream funding, it involved persuading key partners to take a risk with the targets they had been set by government, it took 18 months of effort, but eventually he created the Prolific Offenders Unit which now stands as a small signpost to what can be achieved when local agencies are allowed to develop their own solutions to crime.
The unit uses probation staff, housed in police stations, to run intensive supervision of offenders who, according to police records, are committing the most crime in the city. Some are picked straight from the local prison, where a specialist officer identifies them and starts to work on their problems before they are released. Once they come out on licence, the unit will meet them face to face three or four times a week, whereas an overworked probation officer can often do no more than phone an offender once a week. If they need drug treatment, the unit will by-pass the clogged channels of the national treatment agency to buy it anywhere in the south west of England. If they have problems with housing, training, employment or health, the unit will help them. And if they or the police pick up any hint that they are still offending, they have a fast-stream process to revoke their parole licence and put them back in custody within 24 hours – a process that normally can take up to two weeks. If their licence has run out, the police will make a priority of arresting them.
In the last year, they have worked with 25 prolific offenders, 13 of whom have been released back into the community. All 13 had been Class A drug users. Each of them had been committing between three and forty-two offences per week. The unit tracked them over an eight-month period and, using police intelligence, found they had committed 380 offences, compared to the 1,597 they would have committed if they had stayed with their previous behaviour. On Home Office estimates of the cost of crime, that work on those 13 offenders saved £1.9 million.
The partnership between police and probation officers has delivered other benefits: spotting lies in one offender’s submission to the parole board, which would normally have been missed by the system; recording crime detections from offenders who decided to co-operate with the unit’s staff; opening up an intelligence link to the local prison; driving offenders to court so that hearings are not delayed; producing pre-sentence reports which are far more thorough than those which can be produced by probation officers alone. The unit, which began work in north Bristol, has now been rolled out across the city and is in the process of spreading across the whole of Avon and Somerset.
And yet this whole scheme was created outside the mainstream of the criminal justice system. It grew from the initiative of one individual. He had to spend 18 months making presentations to local agencies to raise money for the unit’s first year. When that run out, Palmer (who has now retired from the police) had to go to the Recovered Assets Fund to keep the unit going through this year. Beyond April 2004, the unit has no funds. The probation service have had to compromise one of their national targets which requires them to cut the reconviction rates of their clients by 5%: by spotting any early sign of offending, the unit hastens reconviction. To keep their offenders in Bristol Prison where their officer can work with them, they rely on the goodwill of the governor.
This process had its serendipity. Rick Palmer originally planned the unit to have its own base but, unable to raise enough money, he squashed it into a corner of his own station in North Bristol. This turned out to be the prime source of co-operation between probation officers and police, who have a history of mutual suspicion. The Home Office says it is monitoring the unit’s work. As yet, however, it has not adopted it, and the solving of problems continues to struggle to find its way in the mainstream.
