A New Mode of Protection: The Case for Redesigning our Policing and Public Safety Institutions

It is no exaggeration to say we are living through change as profound as the Industrial Revolution. It was during the 1820s, a period of rapid urbanisation and political tumult, that Robert Peel decided that a ‘new mode of protection’ was needed in a new, complex, industrial society. This led to the Metropolitan Police and constabularies in boroughs and counties throughout the country.

We are now living through a period of change at least as radical as 200 years ago. The technological revolution has transformed the nature of economic and social relations. Half of all crime reported in the Crime Survey for England and Wales in the year ending June 2023 was fraud and computer misuse offences, crimes that simply did not exist forty years ago. There are also significant social changes that are transforming the public safety landscape. These issues cannot be tackled by the police acting alone and require much more extensive public service collaboration.

In the Strategic Review of Policing in England and Wales, the Police Foundation set out three challenges that require a response if policing is to meet the demands of social and technological change.

The capacity challenge

The first challenge is that of capacity: the police alone cannot deal with the complexity of the public safety challenges we face. Two steps must be taken to respond. First, the police must be clearer about their role. Alongside being an emergency service available at all hours, we should be clearer about which incidents require officer deployment. It cannot be right that the police have become the principal emergency service for mental health issues. Second, they need to operate as part of a much more comprehensive system to prevent harm and crime. The criminal justice system deals with crimes post-hoc. We lack a public safety system which aims to prevent crime in advance.

There are two main forms of crime and harm prevention around which a preventative system might be organised. The first is to try to prevent people from wanting to commit crimes, a people-centred approach to prevention. In its earliest phases it takes the form of ‘early intervention’, focussed on child development and parenting that rightly do not have crime prevention as their main objective. Nonetheless, these measures have the indirect benefit of reducing crime by keeping people on the straight and narrow.

The second general approach to prevention is to focus on reducing the opportunity to commit crime and harm. We know that the big falls in car crime and burglary since the 1990s occurred principally because it became harder to break into cars and houses through improved security. The arena where such an approach could pay big dividends is online, where so much crime is now committed. Very few fraudsters and cyber criminals get caught (just 0.6 per cent of reported frauds lead to a charge) but there is plenty to be done to make it harder for them to operate.

The capability challenge

The second challenge is that policing requires various capabilities to deal with crime. The most important capability of a policing by consent model is legitimacy: the public needs to have confidence in and to cooperate with the police to keep communities safe. Owing to a mix of police scandal and austerity-linked service erosion, public trust and confidence in the police have fallen. The police must remove bad officers they currently employ and tackle long-standing toxic cultures. Second, the police must rebuild their connection to local communities, eroded since the onset of austerity. All the evidence suggests that the best way to improve public confidence would be to restore visible neighbourhood policing.

The organisational challenge

The third challenge relates to the organisational platform upon which the police service operates. It cannot deal with cross-border crime, which is now most crime. It is inefficient because it creates enormous amounts of duplication and inhibits economies of scale in areas like procurement. It prevents the implementation of common standards in areas where the public or the evidence base demands greater consistency. It is also not an effective way to develop specialist centres of excellence.

However, the current policing model roots policing in local places and arguably provides for more effective local partnership working than, say a system of regional forces or a single national force. My own view is that most of the weaknesses in the system can be addressed without force mergers or a national police force. The key thing is to address the weak centre in policing.

What is required is a central body that can do three things: first, drive police improvement by supporting local forces in raising standards. Second, provide an organisational basis for specialist parts of operational policing that are better organised nationally (such as procurement, air support, digital forensics and fraud investigation). Third, support local forces by providing national technology infrastructure.

As we approach the bicentenary of the founding of the Met it has become clear that we have reached a similar moment to 1829: ‘the country has outgrown her police institutions’, in Peel’s words. The fundamental model of policing by consent remains sound: a form of policing that serves rather than oppresses the people and that uses force only as a last resort. But to ensure that model survives through the twenty-first century, we need to rethink radically the institutional form it takes.