The trouble with crime is that it’s illegal. Which means it’s secret. Which means that all the king’s forces and all the king’s men and women at every level of every criminal justice agency in the country don’t really know what’s happening.
David Blunkett has not been getting on too well with his chief constables. Last autumn, for example, the Home Secretary unveiled his brand new National Policing Plan, which is to guide the 43 constabularies of England and Wales in all their efforts to deal with crime and disorder.
In April last year (2002) Tony Blair launched a crusade against street crime. He personally chaired eight meetings of ministers and chief constables, which chose to spend £261 million on a concerted drive to arrest, try and convict street thieves in the ten forces where the problem was worst. Blair assigned a minister to each of the ten forces and made it their personal responsibility to deliver results and then declared publicly that they would crack the problem by September – only six months after the initiaitive started.
Here is a safe bet: at some point in the future, there will be a major scandal in this country when police are exposed for submitting fictitious reports of their work; specifically, we will discover that they have been cheating in their recording of crime and cheating in their claims to be detecting it.
There are a lot of chief constables who would happily strangle George Dixon. It’s not so much that the old BBC copper with his folksy winking ways makes any real officer look inadequate, nor even that he had the infuriating advantage of scriptwriters to deliver his perfect results. The real problem is that Dixon is cemented into the public imagination – and he’s not very good at his job.
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.
Right there. That’s where they got the Yardie guy. He was in that pub, the Jolly Roger, over on the corner of All Hallows Road and, although it’s dark now and our van is racing, we can still catch a glimpse of the lamplit pavement where he lay with his blood pooling over the kerb and onto the tarmac street.
They hanged Huffum White in August 1813. When he was offered a last wish, Huffum told the priest he’d quite like somebody else please to take his place on the scaffold, but criminal justice had its way with him and celebrated a great achievement: they had just hanged the last highwayman in England. In truth, it was no achievement at all.
The National Policing Plan runs to fifty six pages and requires all forty three police forces in England and Wales to produce three-year plans which incorporate ten Public Service Agreements with seventeen key performance indicators; four strategic priorities with ten core actions, seventeen local actions and nineteen more key peformance indicators; six performance domains with twenty one Best Value Performance Indicators; and three reform-priority areas with fifty one local planning points.
Richard Elliott couldn’t stand it any more. For nearly two years, he had been acting as the government’s drugs envoy in Bristol, running the city’s Drugs Action Team, handling millions of pounds a year, linking together police and health workers and social workers and voluntary agencies into one big drive against drugs, but earlier this year he realised he just couldn’t stand it any more, so he quit.
