PSA joins growing police backlash over early release of Harper's killers
Nick Smart, the president of the Police Superintendents’ Association, has become the latest senior policing figure to speak out over the early release of offenders, warning that the scheme risks eroding public confidence in the criminal justice system.
His comments come amid mounting anger over the prospect that two of the three people convicted over the death of PC Andrew Harper – who was dragged to his death behind a car in Berkshire in August 2019 – could become eligible for release halfway through their sentences under the Government’s prison overcrowding reforms. A petition calling for Harper’s killers to be excluded from the scheme has now attracted more than 650,000 signatures, and other policing bodies have separately called on ministers to reconsider.
Smart said the situation facing prisons was “deeply concerning” and a “dangerous and damaging” consequence of long-term underfunding across the justice system.
“We face the exceptionally traumatic situation in which victims of horrendous and deeply harmful offences are seeing the perpetrators of their crimes being released early, and ultimately failing to see true justice,” he said.
He said calls for a wholesale overhaul of the system had gone unheeded for years. “We were promised a Royal Commission seven years ago, which never happened. This has not been a priority for over a decade, and has been allowed to decline into the state it is now.”
Every part of the system, he added, was “understaffed, underinvested in, and overwhelmed by demand”, leaving it unable to function “in harmony” – a situation he said the public and victims did not deserve.
Smart warned that police would bear the brunt of any collapse in public confidence. “The early release scheme does nothing to instil confidence in the criminal justice system within the general public, and it is likely that police will face the brunt of this as the visible side of this system. This loss of confidence will be hard to turn around.”
The Superintendents’ Association is backing calls for offenders serving sentences linked to attacks on emergency service workers to be excluded from early release, in line with the treatment of those convicted of the most serious offences.
Smart also pointed to the knock-on effect of pressure elsewhere in the system, warning that police would be left to “pick up the pieces” as probation services struggle with workloads and prisons fail to properly prepare offenders for release.
But it was the impact on victims that should be of greatest concern, he said. “It is hard to imagine what they must be going through when knowing their offenders are being released far earlier than their sentence dictated. They have been let down.”
He reiterated the association’s position that reform of policing “cannot happen in isolation” from wider changes across the justice system. “Reform of our entire criminal justice system is essential and must happen now.”