British policing has “lost its way” and officers should stop taking actions – including ‘taking the knee’ and wearing partisan political badges or symbols – that could be seen as ‘woke’ by a public which has lost confidence in many forces across the country, a hard-hitting report has warned. MailOnline has more.
A manifesto by the Policy Exchange think-tank has urged Britain’s next Prime Minister to implement a series of drastic reforms that would protect citizens from a mounting tide of violent crime and disorder and restore public confidence in policing.
The report, entitled “What do we want from the next Prime Minister?”, makes 11 recommendations including a “return to basics” and “focus on fighting crime”, “no more taking the knee and other acts that could be seen as ‘woke’”, tougher laws to clampdown on road-blocking eco-zealots and left-wing statue vandals, and a drive to recruit “hacker cops” to tackle a surge in fraud and online sexual abuse.
The author – David Spencer, a former Metropolitan Police officer and the head of Policy Exchange’s Crime and Justice department – also suggests abolishing the College of Policing, developing an app so local residents can report a range of offences directly to police, from violent crime to street-drinking and aggressive begging.
Critics have accused many of Britain’s police forces of “going woke” – whether by officers “taking the knee” as they did during the Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd in the U.S. in 2020, “going soft” on eco-protesters from Extinction Rebellion and one of its offshoot factions, Just Stop Oil, or adopting the LGBT colours of Pride parades.
Just earlier this month, Lincolnshire Police came under fire for dancing the Macarena at a Pride event in Lincoln – and appearing to boast about this by sharing video of officers performing the routine from the force’s official Twitter account.
Mr Spencer said: “If the past few years have shown us anything, it is that British policing has lost its way. An overhaul of police leadership is needed which is capable of delivering for the public. When institutions become closed shops they cease to be effective – this cannot happen with the institution that exists to protect the public from crime and disorder.
“We need to breathe new life into British policing so that new approaches to crime can be applied, particularly to growing areas like cybercrime and online fraud, which are already costing Britons and the wider economy billions each year.”
The report warns that public confidence in the police is being eroded, partly as a result of the failure to tackle rising burglary and robbery.
Pointing out that clear-up rates for these offences are “woefully low”, it adds: “The proportion of police-recorded crimes which resulted in a suspect being charged or summonsed has followed a downward trend in recent years, from 15.6% in the year to March 2015 to 7.3% in the year to March 2021.
“Similarly, out-of-court disposals (such as ‘police cautions’ and ‘cannabis warnings’) have fallen over the same period from 9.1% to 4.4%. Policing’s ability to solve more common crime types is woefully low with only 3.5% of reported residential burglaries, 6.3% of reported robberies and 4.1% of reported thefts solved during the financial year 2021/22.
“There may be a host of reasons for these trends, including victims being less likely to be willing to support pursuing a prosecution or increasingly stringent crime recording standards.
“However, there appears to be no doubt that the ability of the police to solve crime once it has happened has reduced significantly over the last decade.”
Burglaries, thefts and robberies increased by 24% between March 2017 and September 2019. There was a reduction from 2020 driven by lockdown but inspectors expect to see an increase in the post-pandemic figures.
Worth reading in full.
You can read the Policy Exchange report here.
Stop Press: Boris has defended the police from the charge of being too ‘woke’. The Telegraph has more.
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“One possible argument for the hasty production of reviews is that there was an emergency, and we needed something, anything, to direct decisions”
How is that when the only virus was the media!
“One possible argument for the hasty production of reviews is that there was an emergency, and we needed something, anything, to direct decisions. “
Grandma’s dictum: decide in haste, repent at leisure.
Two things medics are often taught:
Don’t just do something! Stand there.
50% of what we teach you will turn out to be wrong. Trouble is we don’t know which 50%.
and from the military:
Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.
The actual decisions during ‘Covid’ were more:
We must be seen to be doing something! Whaddayagot?
It’s the same with NET Zero, twenty years on.
As the chair of a political committee might say: “Something must be done. This is something, so lets do it”.
Here is an extract from Factfullness by Hans Rosling and the dangers of the Urgency Instinct. What’s the relevance? It’s about saving lives again and the law of unintended consequences.
Chapter 10 – The Urgency Instinct
“If it’s not contagious, then why did you evacuate your children and wife?” asked the mayor of Nacala, eyeing me from a safe distance behind his desk. Out the window, a breathtaking sun was setting over Nacala district and its population of hundreds of thousands of extremely poor people, served by just one doctor – me.
Earlier in the day I had arrived back in the city from a poor coastal area in the north named Memba. There I had spent two days using my hands to diagnose hundreds of patients with a terrible, unexplained disease that had completely paralyzed their legs within minutes of onset and, in severe cases, made them blind. And the mayor was right; I wasn’t 100% sure it was not contagious. I hadn’t slept the previous night but had stayed up, pouring over my medical textbook, until I had finally concluded that the symptoms I was seeing had not been described before. I’d guessed this was some kind of poison rather than anything infectious, but I couldn’t be sure, and I had asked my wife to take our young children and leave the district.
Before I could figure out what to say, the mayor said, “If you think it could be contagious, I must do something. To avoid a catastrophe, I must stop the disease from reaching the city.”
The worst-case scenario had already unfolded in the mayor’s mind, and immediately spread to mine.
The mayor was a man of action. He stood up and said, “Should I tell the military to set up a roadblock and stop the buses from the north?”
“Yes,” I said. “I think it’s a good idea. You have to do something.”
The mayor disappeared to make some calls.
When the sun rose over Memba the next morning, some 20 women and their youngest children were already up, waiting for the morning bus to take them to the market in Nacala to sell their goods. When they learned the bus had been cancelled, they walked down to the beach and asked the fishermen to take them by the sea route instead. The fishermen made room for everyone in their small boats, probably happy to be making the easiest money of their lives as they sailed south along the coast.
Nobody could swim and when the boats capsized in the waves, all the mothers and children and fishermen drowned.
That afternoon I headed north again, past the roadblock, to continue to investigate the strange disease. As I drove through Memba I came across a group of people lining up on the roadside dead bodies they had pulled out of the sea. I ran down to the beach but it was too late. I asked a man carrying the body of a young boy, “Why were all these children and mothers out in those fragile boats?”
“There was no bus this morning.” he said. Several minutes later I could not still barely understand what I had done. Still today I can’t forgive myself. Why did I have to say to the mayor, “You must do something”?
I couldn’t blame these tragic deaths on the fisherman. Desperate people who need to get to market of course take the boat when the city authorities for some reason block the road.
I have no way to tell you how I carried on with the work I had to do that day and in the days afterward. And I didn’t talk about this to anyone else for 35 years.
Fourteen years later, in 1995, the ministers in Kinshasa, the capital of DR Congo, heard that there was an Ebola outbreak in the city of Kitwik. They got scared. They felt they had to do something. They set up a roadblock. Again, there were unintended consequences. Feeding the people in the capital became a major problem because the rural area that had always supplied most of their processed cassava was on the other side of the disease-stricken area. The city was hungry and started buying all it could from it’s second largest food producing area. Prices skyrocketed, and guess what? A mysterious outbreak of paralyzed legs and blindness followed.
Nineteen years after that, in 2014, there was an outbreak of Ebola in the rural north of Liberia. Inexperienced people from rich countries got scared and they all came up with the same idea: a roadblock!
…(continued)…
…At the Ministry of Health, I encountered politicians of a higher quality. They were more experienced, and their experience made them cautious. Their main concern was that roadblocks would destroy the trust of the people abandoned behind them. This would have been absolutely catastrophic: Ebola outbreaks are defeated by contact tracers, who depend on people honestly disclosing everybody they have touched. These heroes were sitting in poor slum dwellings carefully interviewing people who had just lost a family member about every individual their loved one might have infected before dying. Often, of course, the person being interviewed was on that list and potentially infected. Despite the constant fear and wave after wave of rumours, there was no room for drastic, panicky action. The infection path could not be traced with brute force, just patient, calm, meticulous work. One single individually delicately leaving out information about his dead brother’s multiple lovers could cost a thousand lives.
When we are afraid and under time pressure and thinking of worst-case scenarios, we tend to make really stupid decisions. Our ability to think analytically can be overwhelmed my an urge to make quick decisions and take immediate action.
Back in Nacala in 1981, I spent several days carefully investigating the disease but less than a minute thinking about the consequences of closing the road. Urgency, fear and a single-minded focus on the risks of a pandemic shut down my ability to think things through. In the rush to do something, I did something terrible.