CID report – ‘Losing the Detectives’

An independent study by the Joint Central Committee (JCC) of the Police Federation of England and Wales has been released highlighting the problems currently faced by the CID in recruiting officers and dealing with a shortage of detectives.

The study was commissioned after the JCC became concerned at the reports it received of the seriously diminished resilience of General Office CID (GO CID) teams, as well as a shortage of trained and experienced detectives.

It was conducted by setting up 27 focus groups across nine forces in England and Wales and followed a similar project which looked at the resilience of 24/7 response teams.

It reports that while offices are typically operating with between a half and a third of their establishment of detectives, posts are remaining vacant due to serious recruitment problems.

Trained detectives are unwilling to leave specialist squads for the pressured environment of GO CID and posts for trainee detective constables are unattractive to many uniformed police constables due to a perceived reduction in status of the CID and the adverse affects such a posting has on work/life balance.

The increased threat of terrorism and the promotion of the National Intelligence Model and intelligence-led policing have resulted in the “haemorrhaging of detective experience and expertise” through transfers and long-term secondments to specialist units, squads and Major Incident Teams (MITs) at force level. While detectives see resources being poured into the production of what are perceived to be spurious sanction detection rates, they struggle to find the time to investigate the more serious crimes on their case loads.

The study reports that convictions are considered not to be of concern to senior management because, unlike sanction detections, they are not counted as a measure of police effectiveness under the current performance assessment regime. This failure to adequately resource GO CID comes as a direct result of the senior management’s lack of experience of the criminal investigation process as well as their fixation with targets.

The consequences of under-resourcing have lead to many detectives working extra hours in order to complete their routine business raising important issues concerning the welfare of these detectives.

The study also questions the quality of service that these detectives are able to provide to victims and witnesses. The Police Federation has called on the Government to specify a minimum number of fully-trained detectives that each force should maintain as a proportion of its police officer composition.

The full report can be found at http://www.polfed.org/ Losing_the_Detectives_final.pdf