Post by naymissus on Aug 21, 2010 16:14:35 GMT
This is an extract from the Spectator by Alisdair Palmer on police reform
Take for instance the goal, shared by national politicians and ordinary citizens alike, that the police should ‘bring more offenders to justice’. Labour adopted this innocuous-sounding goal as a ‘target’ for the police, and it ended up causing them enormous problems. The biggest was that it encouraged the police to focus on petty rather than serious criminals: petty criminals are the easiest to arrest, and the quickest way senior officers could increase the overall number of offenders they brought to justice was to focus on arresting petty criminals. That had the consequence that serious criminals were not being targeted by the police with the rigour and effectiveness that they should have been.
When she was Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith tried to get that target changed so that it related only to serious offences: murder, rape, wounding, gun and knife crime. But she failed. The reason was that the then Justice Secretary, Jack Straw, refused to agree to it: he pointed out that if the police targeted serious criminals, they would catch more of them, which would mean more serious criminals would be sent to prison — and there weren’t the prison places available, or the money to build them. So it was better that the police shouldn’t target serious criminals.
This was clearly a crazy result, leading to a situation where the police were deliberately set to focus on petty criminals rather than serious crimes
Remarkable, isn't it , how our 'democracy' works
Take for instance the goal, shared by national politicians and ordinary citizens alike, that the police should ‘bring more offenders to justice’. Labour adopted this innocuous-sounding goal as a ‘target’ for the police, and it ended up causing them enormous problems. The biggest was that it encouraged the police to focus on petty rather than serious criminals: petty criminals are the easiest to arrest, and the quickest way senior officers could increase the overall number of offenders they brought to justice was to focus on arresting petty criminals. That had the consequence that serious criminals were not being targeted by the police with the rigour and effectiveness that they should have been.
When she was Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith tried to get that target changed so that it related only to serious offences: murder, rape, wounding, gun and knife crime. But she failed. The reason was that the then Justice Secretary, Jack Straw, refused to agree to it: he pointed out that if the police targeted serious criminals, they would catch more of them, which would mean more serious criminals would be sent to prison — and there weren’t the prison places available, or the money to build them. So it was better that the police shouldn’t target serious criminals.
This was clearly a crazy result, leading to a situation where the police were deliberately set to focus on petty criminals rather than serious crimes
Remarkable, isn't it , how our 'democracy' works