How to manage a medium-sized police force

Police forces around the world are coming under mounting pressure to
raise their performance, while reducing costs. In my book "Policing: A
Way Forward For the 1990s" - which I hope to complete early next year -
I put forward some practical solutions for addressing this
problem.

This article draws heavily on material in that book. If anyone is
interested in publishing it, please contact me as soon as
possible.

In recent years, the police have found themselves facing major
challenges.

Today, it is widely recognised by sociologists, criminologists and
others that the only way forward for modern police forces is to bring
in local volunteers to assist officers.

Initially it was anticipated that these volunteers would be asked to
handle less onerous duties such as administrative tasks, or traffic
supervision. Now it is clear that enthusiastic, public-spirited
citizens can be drafted into more front-line responsibilities.

They may not have the skills or experience, but a half day seminar on
good policing practices plus a couple of hours on a rifle range, is
often all it takes to bring these volunteers up to speed.

But let me emphasise, this is not a case of providing unproven
individuals with a uniform and a lethal weapon, before turning them
loose in your area.

Each volunteer would be assigned to a regular duty officer who would
supervise them until they found their feet. This probationary period
would last for several hours, but could be extended if, for example,
the officer felt the volunteer was "mentally unstable".

With proper counselling, however, most of these cases could be sorted
and the volunteer would eventually be passed as fit for unsupervised
duty.

Employing a large unsupervised volunteer police force brings many
benefits.

Those who volunteer for police service are often highly motivated
individuals with a strong sense of right and wrong and a desire to see
that the criminal fraternity "gets what's coming to it".

Having many volunteers to draw on, gives police chiefs a wider range of
options. These "new officers" can be despatched in large numbers to
handle a variety of situations from parking violations and crowd
control to cases of theft or murder.

A key attraction of this approach is that we can overwhelm the criminal
fraternity with our increased numbers.

Critics will argue that without payment, there is no incentive for
volunteers to turn up on time. They may pick and choose the jobs they
want, withdrawing at the first sign of trouble.

My suggestion is that an incentive scheme should be brought in to
motivate volunteers. We need to group the volunteers into teams, and
award points for results. High scoring teams will win discounts off
electrical products, or reduced prices for rail and air travel.

Once such a system is in place, we should see an entirely new kind of
police force at work. Instead of sending out a traditional detective to
solve a crime, senior officers could despatch three or four volunteer
teams to the same assignment. The first to achieve a result wins a
prize.

But this strategy alone will not be enough to redress the severe
shortage of resources that will increasingly bedevil our police
forces.

Further methods of funding must be sought. One obvious source of
finance is corporate sponsorship. Businesses are an integral part of
today's community, and they should be made to fund their part of
policing costs.

I have no doubt that large sums of money can be raised in this way. No
enterprise likes to have its headquarters raided regularly by police.
If every time you pass the head office of XYZ plc you see officers
loading files into the back of vans, customers will start to question
the firm's integrity.

Obviously, more injections of cash into the police, will mean more
money for additional hardware, which in turn will help to reduce crime.
But we mustn't just rely on technology. We should also learn to trust
the basic crime detection instincts of our officers, both regular and
volunteer.

When a crime is committed, there is a natural tendency to start looking
for fingerprints, sifting through evidence, accessing police databases
and calling in forensic scientists. But what about the gut feelings of
our officers.

Most people hearing about a crime for the first time, can very quickly
form an instinctive impression as to who might have done it and what
the motive was. And yet we tend to suppress these instincts.

The truth is, if you study a crime scene long enough, or hold a murder
weapon in your hand for sufficient time, you start to build up a
picture of the kind of person who might have committed the crime.

On further reflection you will probably start to see a face. Some of us
may even hear a name. It's these kind of intuitive insights which we
need to start bringing to the surface in police work.

Intuition can also be used to spot lawbreakers, for example, in an
identity parade. With a bit of thought most of us can tell the
difference between a criminal face and an honest one. Even if the
evidence isn't particularly strong, it may be possible by studying the
suspect closely to reach a conclusion as to his guilt or
otherwise.

Individuals with a special gift for this kind of facial assessment
could be employed full time simply to stand in busy railway stations or
shopping centres and pick out obvious criminal types, perhaps even
taking them off the streets before they commit any crime.

Another area where much police time and money is expended is in the
prosecution process. There is now a general consensus that this needs
to be modernised.

If a person is clearly guilty - and as we have already seen, this can
often be determined quite early on in the investigation - they
shouldn't have to go through a whole time-consuming legal process
before being sentenced.

What is needed is a fast-track justice system, for clear-cut cases. If,
let us say, four officers are agreed as to the guilt of a particular
individual, that should be enough to convict him.

Nor is there any need for expensive courtrooms with all their highly
paid staff. Surely in this modern age, it ought to be possible to carry
out judicial proceedings at the scene of the arrest. In this way, the
crime, arrest and sentencing can all be effected very quickly - in some
cases within just a few hours.

Undoubtedly there will be critics of such a system. Inevitably there
will be teething problems. But for all its faults it will at least
accomplish what most citizens have long demanded: the rapid creation of
a less crime-ridden society at greatly reduced cost.