How we do more to tackle crime in a time of less

In his principles for establishing the police service in London, Sir Robert Peel recognised that the first responsibility of the police is to prevent crime by cutting offending and reoffending; and that success in policing is the absence of crime, not the presence of activity.

But there’s a conundrum. Society requires of police officers immediate reaction and delivery. Equally, media portrayal of policing is about responsive activity; prevention doesn’t make good pictures. Frankly, the police do not prevent crime because it’s not what they are designed to do.

In fact, the levers that affect crime lie outside the criminal justice system, never mind outside policing. Crime levels are influenced minimally by the courts, but are greatly influenced by mental health, alcohol and substance misuse, unemployment, housing, violence within relationships and how we bring up our children. While ministers and police understand this approach it’s not yet fully understood throughout the system, particular in sentencing.

For example, the Sentencing Council’s responsibility to compare the effectiveness of different sentences on reducing offending is minimal. Yet the Justice Select Committee’s report Cutting Crime: The case for justice reinvestment bluntly states: “Prison is a relatively ineffective way of reducing crime for other than serious offenders who need to be physically contained for the protection of the public. For others, prison is a very expensive way of dispensing justice and seeking reform.”

Prison can act as a way of making bad people worse. Ending that cycle of despair requires well-motivated staff in well-resourced organisations, but severe cuts now threaten the effectiveness of many public services and the probation services are undergoing complex and confusing reorganisation.

That brings me to another key recommendation of the Justice Select Committee’s report, which says that a genuinely victim-based approach to crime should “go wider and deeper than providing supportive and responsive services for the victims of crime, and be focused on crime reduction and prevention as well as justice.”

In terms of crime prevention, youth offending teams are one of the biggest success stories. Taking a partnership approach and working together to tackle the needs and behaviour of young offenders, they have dramatically brought reoffending down amongst those under 18 years old.

Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships are also paving the way for an evidence-based approach to tackling crime. The best example is the current focus on violence in Cardiff, which is measured by the number who have treatment in A&E rather than reports to the police. The partnership involves the NHS in South Wales and many of the findings – which range from using glasses made of injury-reducing toughened glass, to encouraging partnership work in the night-time economy – have been imitated elsewhere. But such a method of analysing what crime happens where and why must become the starting point for all the agencies who share responsibility for public spaces and public safety.

Many policymakers pay lip service to localism and the truism that ‘prevention is better than cure’, while ignoring both in practice. But to be ‘tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime’, we need practical, evidence-based strategies that draw on the strengths of local partnerships. That’s why the fashionable but crazy idea of creating large regional police forces is completely redundant. The Chief Inspector of Constabulary, Tom Winsor, has rightly pointed out that “there is nothing that can be achieved through mergers than cannot be achieved by collaboration”.

Despite deep financial cuts and wholesale re-organisation of policing at a national level, the police in South Wales are not only doing more with less but are in better contact with the communities they serve than at any time in my 40 years in public life. Maintaining those local relationships will enable us to continue the downward trajectory of crime – as long as we don’t take them for granted.

Alun Michael is the Police and Crime Commissioner for South Wales. A longer version of this article was originally published in ‘Letting in the Light’, the Fabian Society’s latest policy report. Read it online here.