Dancing (The Macarena) before the Storm

What do policing and tsunamis have in common?

Today, a tale of organisational culture. The organisation is UK Policing, melting down faster than a Soviet-era nuclear reactor. I retired from the Metropolitan Police four years ago. The reactor was already burning, the management like nuclear engineers from the TV series Chernobyl. Dissenters were banished to the gulag (which in the Met was a local CID office). The Met felt like North Korea run by David Brent. Internal force communications were like those of a Soviet tractor factory, trumpeting outstanding but utterly fictional production figures.

Anyhow, UK Policing is, to put it politely, fucked. To explore this topic in an accessible, intelligent and reasoned way I direct to you to my old friend and colleague Iain Donnelly’s brilliant podcast and book, Tango Juliet Foxtrot. Iain is clever and kind.

I’m neither.

So this is a more jaded view of why Old Bill paves the road to hell with good intentions. It’s long and a bit technical, but hey that’s the beauty of Substack. It’s a place where you can find stuff like this if you’re interested. If not, no biggie.

Right, are we sitting comfortably? Don’t worry, this isn’t a police training course. We don’t have to tell each other ten facts about ourselves or play a clapping game.

During my service I was always fascinated by the relationship between law, policy and outcomes. In other words, what we were meant to do versus what we really did. Quite often, British police officers are guilty of the French civil service dictum: that might work in practice, but it would never work in theory. Fear of losing a promotion, of criticism at a public inquiry, of a bad front page in The Daily Mail… these are all cosmic horrors for coppers of a certain rank.

I did twenty-five years and was catapulted to the rank of detective constable, so I don’t care about all that jazz.

Anyhow, after many years working in a risk-laden area of policing, compiling decision logs and policy papers and applications for all sorts of skulduggery, I noticed a trend which I call ‘Tsunami Management’. As you might know, a tsunami is caused by seismic activity under the sea. From this, a modest displacement of water occurs (sometimes less than a metre). As this diminutive wave builds, still only centimetres high, it gains incredible speed and mass. By the time it hits the nearest landmass the wave is a hundred feet high and… you know the rest. 

Virtually every piece of crappy decision-making in the police is due to Tsunami Management. There’s a fuck-up. It might concern matters of race or gender or sexuality. It might concern tactics like stop-and-search or use of force. It could be anything. This is the initial seismic activity. It’s played out on social media, the TV news and in the peanut gallery of Westminster. Something Must Be Done.

That ‘something’ is the metre of displaced seawater. The people thinking it up are either clueless about its eventual impact or don’t care. This is ‘The Thick of It’ or ‘W1A’ territory. The wave grows bigger as everyone and their uncle (self-appointed community leaders, pressure groups, a celebrity) adds their tuppence. Then the monstrous wave of Something hits the poor bastards patrolling the shore of reality. They’re swamped with regulations, laws, working practices and political pressure from inside and outside the force.

This is what it feels like. Sure, there are bad coppers. Lazy coppers. Indifferent coppers. But disasters are tapestries made of many threads.

Then, of course, the tsunami causes another mistake. Something Else Must Be Done. Rinse and repeat.

Now it isn’t a tsunami, or even a cluster-tsunami.

It’s waterboarding.

I’ll give you an example. Much of my work involved the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA). Most journalists writing about RIPA haven’t a bloody clue what it means or does, but suffice to say it regulates who can or cannot snoop on you, and how. It’s controversial, complex and necessary to protect our civil liberties from coppers, spooks, local authorities and so on. Remember, though, the people working with this piece of law are trying to operate while swimming against a raging tide of churning, tsunami-generated seawater.

RIPA came about partly because of cases where police overstepped the line while carrying out surveillance, although the real driver was the (then) New Labour government’s determination to shoehorn English and Welsh common law into a European (i.e. Napoleonic Code) system. And, of course, the Human Rights Act.

Thanks, Matrix Chambers. Did you all buy Tuscan villas off the back of your hourly rate?

Anyhow, from this piece of seismic activity came a monstrous and needlessly complicated piece of legislation with no case law to back it up. That created years of navel-gazing while interested parties tried to work out hitherto obvious things like What is Surveillance? Having worked in that world, I can tell you it’s hide and seek played by adults, but that’s not important right now.

All of a sudden hitherto simple policing activities more or less ceased. For example, local officers would frequently sit up on disqualified drivers to see if they were still using their vehicles. The courts take a dim view of ‘disquals’ and more than a few are career criminals. Suddenly, some bright spark in a policy office began wondering if two coppers sitting in a marked car at the end of a road at 0600, to see if a disqualified driver was going out in his Mondeo, counted as surveillance?

The upshot? More than a few police officers thought “sod this for a game of soldiers” as of course they were sent passive-aggressive emails marked ‘for strict compliance’. Of course it wasn’t surveillance per se, or in the spirit of the act. However, rather than someone taking responsibility and issuing a force-wide policy, the police offered ‘guidance’ and left it to individual officers to figure out. More distance learning, anyone? On a computer that doesn’t work?

Classic tsunami management. It affected CCTV placement and innocuous activities like Neighbourhood Watch (given the definition of a Covert Human Intelligence Source, is Mrs. Miggins at No 8. technically an informant?). All sorts of unintended consequences taking up time and energy.

The only people who benefited, of course, were lawyers.

Another example: the initial detective training course at Hendon featured a lengthy module on Honour Based Violence (HBV). HBV is a culturally sensitive topic after indisputable police failures in taking victims seriously. The training, in and of itself, was fine. Detectives in a city as diverse as London need an almost anthropological antenna for people of different cultures.

However, there was a catch.

The issue was so politically sensitive, the accompanying tsunami displaced other training; in this case meaning there was only an hour of Disclosure instruction concerning the CPIA (Criminal Procedures and Investigations Act). Disclosure is one of the most important topics for any detective. Successive CPIA failures have led to serious miscarriages of justice. As I said to an instructor, a gnarly DS, “what if your HBV case goes pear-shaped because you haven’t been trained to manage the disclosure properly?” He shrugged a ‘The Job’s Fucked’ shrug.

The course ended with a Commander more or less telling students to stop complaining about the lack of investigative resources to victims of crime. it was embarrassing the Commissioner. Like I said, North Korea run by David Brent.

With this in mind, let’s talk about the Macarena.

Officers from Lincolnshire Police attended a local Pride event. Attending Pride events, if social media is to be believed, is the UK Police’s raison d’etre, scruffy coppers in yellow jackets dancing cringeworthy dances while sporting rainbow face paint. This time it was the macarena. Such events are meat and drink for culture warriors, one side accusing the police of excess Wokery, the other insisting police atone for years of homophobia and marginalising gay people.

The rest of us in the middle let out a long sigh of frustration and wonder how it all came to this.

Well, I’m not saying Tsunami Management is the sole cause, but it’s certainly part of it. As someone who was serving when the Macpherson Report came out, I’d suggest this was THE classic tsunami-seismic event, informing all subsequent police inclusion and diversity strategies. The police, while I was serving, developed a sort of self-loathing. It assumed everything it did was wrong and the answer was outsourcing policy decisions to pressure groups. Some of these groups, incidentally, were never going to support the police. Indeed, they were positively Gramscian in the way they seeded the tsunami wave with ‘progressive’ ideas.

This isn’t to say the police didn’t need to change – of course it did. The question was how. But I’m pretty sure Macpherson never imagined his road to good intentions would lead to bullshit like Hampshire Police arresting people over their right to free speech on social media.

Yet it did.

Then came other waves of the Macpherson tsunami – pseudoscientific theories of Harm Reduction, cross-agency partnership (i.e. turning the police into de facto social work auxiliaries to make up for government cuts to other agencies) and community engagement as a form of policing in itself, as opposed to old-fashioned activities like, er, solving burglaries and robberies. And, as a retired copper, I’m obliged to quote Peel and all that jive about the metric by which we should judge an effective police force is the absence of crime.

Are we in the endgame? I do wonder if the police becoming part of the establishment blob in the culture wars will sink it for good. Maybe that’s no bad thing. Maybe it’s time for some creative destruction.

All I’d say is, when they do reinvent the wheel, please remember the tsunami.