By making non events as the dropping of an apple core in a public place a 'criminal' offence, the police can now score easy points by reporting that apple core dropping has been massively reduced in their area, whilst the real crime of burglary mugging and theft goes on unabated.. That is the modern way of showing crime reduction, and is clearly a political phenomenon.
In order to make us believe that 'crime' is constantly being reduced and our Police Officers are being overworked, the politically 'on message' Police forces in the UK, under direct instruction from the Home Office and the ACPO have embarked upon a policy of PR instead of policing.
This article from Heather Brooke (who recently had the success of getting MP's to divulge their expenses) shows just how much of your tax, your money, is being spent by Police forces around the country on trickery, make believe policing and their policy of smoke and mirrors.
A three-month project by James Ball and I using the Freedom of Information Act to examine police spending on public relations, press offices and marketing concluded with two pieces in today’s Times:
Long arm of police spin-doctors costs almost £40m a year
Tough on crime - or on the image of crime?
We found that police forces across the UK are spending £39m each year on press and PR - enough to fund an extra 1,400 full time officers and more than enough to cover the annual police pay rise withheld by the Government. The force at the top of the league (Police Service Northern Ireland) spends eight times more per person on PR than the lowest (Derbyshire). Meanwhile, forces spend nearly ten times more on PR (what police want us to know) than on FOI (what we want to know).
Also while resources are pumped into PR, we found a distinct lack of interest in responding to our FOI requests. Only 19 of 53 forces responded to our requests on time. All the rest broke the law. They had a variety of explanations though some offered none at all. Police Service Northern Ireland had the most novel excuse – their FOI officer was on an advanced driver training course. It had no affect in speeding up their tardy reply which came more than a month late. If any of us were to break the law I doubt such excuses would carry much weight. Even those committing non-crimes such as parking get no leeway.
When we called the press offices for comment, however, it was remarkable how quickly forces found the time to re-examine their figures to decrease the amounts, often claiming the initial figures they’d given us were incorrect.
There is lot more detail than we could get in the newspaper so check out the summary or the full database for the full story on how your police force responded.
Summary of press and PR spend in the 52 police forces questioned
Full Database (Excel). Here you’ll find a sheet with the main findings, a summary sheet and finally the full detail of all our requests to 52 police forces.
The police are paid to enforce crime not manage the public’s perception of crime. If police are serious about keeping residents informed they should put more money into freedom of information which deals with answering questions people actually want to know.
Also all crime incidents should be published, broken down by either street level or first section of postcode. Then we would all know precisely how safe or endangered we are. This information is already available to certain privileged people. That’s not right. Everyone should have access.
There is no doubt that Policing is now a political event, rather than a Civic task undertaken by Civil Servants.
If you want the cynical view of the front line police that have to enforce this garbage, then I can suggest no better reading than Inpector Gadget, or PC Bloggs. (do read their other contributions, you too will realise that these Police Officers really do want to do proper policing, real policing instead of this politically correct non-job stuff).
It is also worth noting that the cost of all this smoke and mirrors PR is more than the cost of giving police their full pay rise (£30m). Such a waste of your tax money.
The sooner we get around to changing the way in which policing in the UK is done, by electing local police chiefs, who will police their areas the way the local people want to be policed, returning to the historic nine principles of policing and to break the political links, the better.
Only the Libertarian Party have promised to change policing in this way.
