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Creating crimes, creates criminals

When watching Big Brother, it is sometimes very difficult to avoid criticising the police. Yet we know that often it is not the officers that are to blame, rather the culture of law enforcement handed down to them from on high – the real Big Brother.

Acpo_badge This morning, the Chief Inspector of Constabulary, Denis O'Connor, has released a report into policing that shows how difficult the job of keeping law and order in Britain has become in 2009.

According to the Daily Telegraph:

Denis O’Connor said that forces have “drifted away” from the basics of front-line policing and serving the public.

He accused ministers, local authorities and police chiefs of “too many knee jerk reactions” to the problems of law and order.

“The principles of policing get drowned out in the noise,” he said. “You need to look at the number of units and departments at the Home Office, all the officials and the different committees and ask this question: do they think about the principles and values of the British model of policing?”

Centrally imposed targets have been criticised for distorting local police priorities, while red tape has diverted bobbies from the beat. Labour has created new crimes at a rate of nearly one a day since 1997. A separate report will say today that individual police officers solve an average of only nine offences a year.

It is that last paragraph which is the most shocking. When officers are having to deal with new offences at an average rate of a new crime a day, it is no wonder that we hear so many stories of people being arrested for spurious and frankly uncriminal acts.

There can be no doubt that there are plenty of cases of police heavy-handedness – and the rest of Mr O'Connor's report details the absurd tactics of the Met during the G20 protests – but every now and then we should spare a thought as to why our police behave like this.

More often than not it is because of – in the Chief Inspector's words - "knee-jerk" policies from above. And that, surely, is where the real problem lies.

By Dylan Sharpe

Posted on November 26, 2009 by Big Brother Watch Posted in Overbearing state
  • http://niklowe.blogspot.com/ Nick

    “drifted away”. Run “full tilt” is more like it.

  • Gareth

    “It is that last paragraph which is the most shocking. When officers are having to deal with new offences at an average rate of a new crime a day, it is no wonder that we hear so many stories of people being arrested for spurious and frankly uncriminal acts.”
    Presumably all done with the agreement of ACPO. This is what you get when the politicians and technocrats put aside their differences for the sake of expediency. This has been a very liberal Government – very liberal with the authority we lend to them, letting any old technocrat make very serious decisions and neither the technocrats or politicians bear any responsibility for them.

  • http://www.delphiusdebate.blogspot.com Delphius1

    Its long been a steady decline in Policing standards.
    Along with targets, we have a huge number of new laws, making a huge new set of criminals, with the law framed so as to afford easy prosecutions and so rely less on “real” police work.
    Take the Violent Porn Law: Making it illegal to own pictures of activities that aren’t themselves illegal (thereby entrapping people), then framing the law so that mere possession of an image is enough to determine guilt (no Police work involved other than logging onto a computer or mobile phone and confirming the existence of such images) and a court case with a jury directed to find guilty if such images exist, disregarding any extenuating circumstances.
    Its the Policing equivalent of GCSE’s its dumbed down Policing to a previously unforseen level.

  • http://faustiesblog.blogspot.com FaustiesBlog

    A Commons select committee this week was horrified to find that ACPO is 51% owned by private organisations, such as IBM, whose interest is to make a profit.
    How can it be that ministers are only just waking up to this after nearly 13 years?
    Police should never be forced to derive its operational funding from private sources. There lies the path to tyranny.