Right person, wrong strategy for policing

What kind of service should policing be? Recently, this has crystallised around the idea of ‘Right Care Right Person’ (RCRP) which is code for trying to separate fighting crime from dealing with other incidents, specifically those brought on by mental health crises. RCRP entails that the police do not respond to mental health related emergency calls unless a crime or threat to public safety is involved; instead, the NHS or other bodies should respond with staff who have appropriate mental health training.

Contributors to PQ’s special collection on policing generally welcome the RCRP initiative, at least in so far as it aims to ensure that those responding to an incident have the appropriate skills to deal with it. Bird, Bryant and Kadiri from Stopwatch point out that the police have a poor record of dealing with people having a mental health crisis, often using excessive force, sometimes with fatal consequences. Adam Crawford agrees with the Stopwatch team that the police are dealing with incidents for which they are ill-equipped, having become ‘a default public service of last resort for all manner of problems’. This ‘mission creep’ is the product of austerity across public service provision, and it is undesirable because police involvement raises the risks of criminalisation and violence. For Rick Muir, RCRP is a welcome attempt to clarify where police skills and powers are best used.

Yet behind this agreement lie somewhat different interpretations of where RCRP leads. Muir sees it as a step towards more extensive multi-agency working, but Crawford’s account suggests that it could be the opposite. He emphasises that, while RCRP is supposedly a partnership, the police entered the agreement in a powerful position, backed by the threat of unilateral withdrawal from responding to mental health related incidents. Health professionals have expressed concern about mental health needs going unmet when the police do not respond. The clearest dissenting voice in the PQ collection comes from Neil Basu, who doesn’t comment directly on RCRP but does argue that the police should not resist or resent being the social service of last resort. On the contrary, this responsiveness has to be nurtured if public confidence in the police is to be rebuilt. Muir says something similar, placing the restoration of community policing at the centre of his proposals to restore public confidence. Yet community policing is not primarily about responding to and solving crimes. This implies that a narrow focus on crime is the wrong direction for a future police force to take.

Reform or defund?

Advocates of police ‘defunding’ see the implications of RCRP differently: as an opportunity for a broader reassessment of the role of the police. The point of defunding is to shift resources from policing to social services and social infrastructure which can more effectively protect the population from harm. More investment of this kind is surely desirable, but there is no mechanism whereby savings on policing are transferred to other services. As Bird, Bryant and Kadiri point out, funding for the police was reduced under Cameron and Osborne, but so was funding for everything else. Still, they see potential for defunding to be done right, and as something that should be done as the police are irretrievably entwined with the carceral state. This suggests that community policing will never be a reality.

Yet there are good reasons to revive and sustain community policing. An organisation set up to provide first responders to incidents where there is potential for harm to the public will always be needed, and the already-existing organisation is the police. Furthermore, community policing seems to be good for the police themselves. Recent scandals have often involved specialist units which spend too little time nurturing the skills of negotiation and containment that are needed to navigate low level crime and social disorder. A workable version of RCRP would see police responding but also improving their cooperation with other agencies, which might make for a less insular culture.

Getting along with politicians and the public

In Labour’s 2024 Manifesto there is a strong plug for ‘community policing’ and ‘bobbies back on the beat’, which, the Manifesto argues, are needed to restore public confidence in the police. Furthermore, the public should be able to expect that, ‘when you call the police, they should come’, an apparently banal idea made salient by RCRP. Traditionalists among the senior ranks of the police may bridle at these edicts, as they bridle at any political interference with what they see as the efficient deployment of their resources. But the recent riots in England gave the government a chance to demonstrate support for the police, which it took with both hands. The public were also on side: for all the bad publicity of the last few years, people were shocked to see the police under attack. Questioning of police strategy nowadays comes more from the political right than the left, a strange alignment given that the right is the traditional ally of forceful policing. This presents both the police and the government with an opportunity they should seize to promote community policing and minimise criminalisation and violence.