Reviving policing

“We’ve got to live within our means, we have to reform our public services, we can’t just tax and spend our way to a better NHS, better schools, to a better functioning police service”.

Rachel Reeves, Chancellor of the Exchequer. Sunday November 3, 2024

Prevention is preferable to detection; what community policing provides is a positive contribution at both ends of the community safety spectrum; from the protection of citizens to identification, apprehension and prosecution of offenders.

The present day is the right time to implement proactive community policing. Artificial intelligence (AI) is driving policing initiatives across the length and breadth of England and Wales. Strategies exist: Precision Policing, community intelligence-led policing methodology (CILPM), and evidence-based policing.

Analytical products exist: Project Insight.

Technologies exist: Drones, facial recognition, ANPR, and West Midlands Police’s ‘Andi-Esra’.

Policing initiatives exist: Operation Loki (Devon and Cornwall), and Operation Enhance (Cumbria).

These are mere examples balancing representation of the 43 domestic forces in the UK.

The level of recorded crime demands attention. Take one example, the insurance company NFU Mutual estimates the cost of rural crime in 2023 was £52,800,000. The Crime Survey for England and Wales estimated there were 2,800,000 theft incidents in the year to June 2024; the Office of National Statistics (ONS) further estimates there were in the region of two million victims of violence, with 591,000 people receiving physical injuries. A harsh reality is presented when considering the ONS’s figures of 620,861 victims of stalking and harassment, plus police data of 830,926 offences of domestic abuse, in addition to sexual offences standing at 94,434 plus 69,184 rapes.

Reiterating that concentrating on prevention in preference to detection in the first instance is advocated, where CILPM is unrivalled is in locating the minutia, securing the detail of recalled accounts; recollections, perceptions, conversations, observations; of what was seen, heard, imagined or shared across local communities.

It offers a facility for members of the public, officers and staff alike to communicate knowledge, concerns, hunches, opinions; or submit a contribution to understanding of an event, crime, investigation, complaint, action, incident, accident, and that of anti-social behaviour. It adds a layer of corroboration, authenticity, scrutiny and accuracy to intelligence products, either about a person or persons unknown, of an object, vehicle, building, or an event. Community intelligence underwrites incident reports, occurrence notifications, crime complaints, intelligence submissions, investigations, and partner-agency referrals.

Government statistics show recorded crime figures of 5,366,752, including those with violence against the person crimes standing at 1,984,344.

All at a time when Crime and Policing Minister Dame Diana Johnson is on record stating: “In the year ending March 2024, the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) showed that around 35 per cent of respondents personally witnessed or experienced anti-social behaviour in their local area…”  (although more than 58 per cent of offences were not reported).

Society reassuringly requires openness in terms of trustworthiness, safety, accountability, equality and justice because there are very different realities: rural/urban, inner city/town centre, and neighbourhood/community. One fact transcends all – each statistic involves an actual person in some regard.

The benefits for policing at grassroots level, within multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, city centre landscapes, or of rural, or domestic urban town centre neighbourhoods of obtaining information on the apparent insignificance of everyday social life was devised because at its core it offers a pragmatic, proactive, transformative methodology.

A system is required to progressively and prejudicially address the levels of crime and anti-social behaviour being recorded across England and Wales, evidenced in the Government’s commitment to policing in its Autumn Budget promises:

“The Chancellor’s Budget is structured to allow the Home Office to form a wider police reform package to rebuild confidence in policing. The settlement will support the Government’s priorities to tackle violence against women and girls and knife crime, which includes implementing Raneem’s Law to put domestic abuse specialists in control rooms and establishing trailblazer Young Futures Hubs to prevent young people being drawn into crime; a Budget designed to tackle anti-social behaviour, putting the Government on track to start to deliver the commitment to deliver 13,000 neighbourhood police officers and PCSOs and establish trailblazer Young Futures Hubs.”

Autumn Budget 2024: Fixing the foundations to deliver change

This is the opportune time to implement innovation, to give officers qualifying under the Neighbourhood Policing Pathway incentive, direction and purpose in fighting crime. It is not just about placating distraught victims or undertaking follow-up inquiries, it is a system to emphasise value and evidence teamwork starting at a grassroots level.

CILPM delivers a collective pathway to constructively communicate information into the centre, a way to provide analysts and AI with data that can be interpreted into positive policing action through evidence-based policing and the National Intelligence Model.

Dyfed-Powys police covers the largest physical landmass force-area in England and Wales, with similar issues of isolation present across the length and breadth of the country, predominantly all forces have rural communities, remote, inaccessible, secluded, out-of-reach, likewise they have urban communities facing the same complexities within cosmopolitan cities or urban conurbations.

Gifting community police officers with the tools to extract material from everyday life will defeat criminality. A flexible system, understood by all, presented in a reliable, transparent, framework for the technology exists, furthermore it is in current use.

Foresight and training are its only limitations as the College of Policing is in unison with the Government on this pathway. What external observers offer is direction, support, imagination, reassurance and the energy to encourage change, development, and improvement.

An environment of statistical reasoning or mere justification of actions is not conducive to progressive policing as policies of increased visibility and novelty projects appear to the general public to be prepared only to satisfy the publicity hungry media or to counteract social network trolls, this is not advancement, this is not better functioning policing.

CILPM is an innovative yet an altogether conservative theory, it provides a well-established framework for the 64,565 officers currently deployed in local policing roles, it offers reliability and confidence through a familiar process.

Where neighbourhood policing benefits its communities is in the routine of regular, local encounters, and more so it is a reciprocal one. What is absent is a framework for collecting and collating information pertaining to each beat or more specifically, each community.

A farming union recent warned of a rural crimewave that gripped areas of West Wales. NFU Cymru said it was aware of up to 20 thefts from farms in Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire during the past few months…

Dyfed-Powys Police officers said they believed the culprits were likely to have checked farms out before striking.

These crimes as described are typical example of where a community intelligence led policing methodology is required: implementation of rural patrol strategy, complemented by deployment of AI supported technology across the force area, for example, incorporating object analytics in HD CCTV systems as illustrated by Cumbria Police.

The sharing of information, examination of community collated data collected from the incidents of theft reported on social media across the area including, Llanwnnen, Crosswell, Milford Haven, Rosebush and the Gwaun valley is invaluable in supporting traditional policing tactics and exactly what the Chancellor is requiring.

A further realism is presented in the words of the Federation of Independent Retailers’ national president Mo Razzaq, who succinctly captures public and business sentiment: “Inadequate responses from the police and a slap on the wrist for offenders means that shoplifting is soaring, and offenders are becoming more aggressive and brazen.”

Materially it is a fiscally challenging UK environment; Lincolnshire’s police and crime commissioner warns of a £19,000,000 shortfall in its constabulary’s accounts. Maximising what technology can provide is going to be the lifeblood of policing, that and combining new AI data analytics with a shared community level generated intelligence framework further illustrating where reform will prevail.

With 64,565 local officers across the country offering CILPM submissions to their constabulary’s intelligence systems it begs the question; what is the likelihood of someone, somewhere having the required ‘local knowledge’ of a crime (or one in planning) or incident of anti-social behaviour?

Furthermore, the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced in the Budget an additional 13,000 neighbourhood officers and PCSOs.

Let us not overlook the fact that there are 147,746 police officers in England and Wales, expanding the information source base further, what I also envisage is compressing all employees of the police service, on or off duty into the methodology.

CILPM’s inclusivity fosters those who in their capacity as a private citizen attend public forums, council meetings, neighbourhood watch, their local village association, or religious gatherings, protests, ceremonies. Be it formally or informally, officially or unofficially, for those who shop, walk their dogs, exercise, tend garden, or socialise within their neighbourhoods to contribute to their local community, bridging observation and conversation undertaken within the ritual of everyday life.

How many more articles are required to quantify the benefit of CILPM? A sombre, solemn context is that of 620,861 victims of stalking and harassment, or 830,926 offences of domestic abuse, repeat sexual offence victim figures standing at 94,434 offences, and that 69,184 rape victims are not mathematical statistics, they are predominantly women (mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, nieces and cousins); furthermore, they are all people, neighbours, family, friends, associates, acquaintances, teammates, colleagues. Any reform of policing must combat these figures and reduce the human suffering experienced by such a high proportion of our citizens.

The strength of CILPM is similarly borne out in predominantly urban and city environments, those offences categorised as ‘neighbourhood’ crimes: robbery, selected thefts from the person, domestic burglary, vehicle-related theft, stand at a CSEW estimate of 1,600,000 crimes. Likewise, new anti-social behaviour reports remain annually in the vicinity of 1,000,000 offences, public order is recorded at 469,111, with shoplifting at 469,788, illustrating scale of the issue. Community safety reform is achievable across the country.

Neighbourhood policing is the heart of civil society, community safety an adhesive cementing factions together. A question of a dichotomy being the contradiction of individual privacy balanced with that of community policing is a valid distinction, however, expanding the approach to address objectively the issue of privacy in context of increased public trust in policing and that of the greater good is positive, progressive, transformative and innovative.

What is private? Here is where the body politic and the individual citizen differ, privacy for the general public is a two-fold consideration of what is personal, that is, metaphorical space or personal information. CILPM is the repayment of that trust for the infringement of privacy, counterbalanced by the opportunity for all members of communities to have their views, opinions, thoughts, beliefs, observations, experiences, heard and accepted by their local force.

Government ambition of reform for a better functioning police service will be clearly realised.

Steve Dodd is a retired South Wales Police detective. He is a subject matter expert on police intelligence having authored the force’s Community Intelligence Force Policy. An adviser on the College of Policing’s Intelligence Professionalisation Programme, he was deployed on the Government’s working group on the Western Balkans Serious Organised Crime strategy. An international liaison officer, he is an international airline certified extradition officer, plus National Financial Investigator qualified. He is currently writing his ‘Community Intelligence-Led Policing Methodology’ including the octahedron pyramid, a transtheoretical approach, and an inverted strategy thesis.