'Going for a Walk'

The slow, sad death of foot patrol

Foot patrol. It’s good for the soul

---

One of the old sweats at my first nick, only six months off retirement, suddenly declined to drive police cars. He spent every shift on foot patrol instead, rain or shine, answering calls on a crackly Storno radio. He was tall and broad-shouldered, a surly misanthrope with no time for new officers. He’d put on his beat duty helmet, head for the police station door and growl, “I’m going for a walk.” You wouldn’t see him again for eight hours.

We all knew what he meant. Going for a walk. Foot patrol. Some officers diligently structured their patrols. Some needed telling what to do by their sergeants. And some loafed. Depending on how crappy your week was, you might do all three. Everyone has a bad day at the office - especially when your office is a brutalist council estate where people occasionally push fridges off the roof while you’re wandering by.

If the weather was decent and the streets lively, I occasionally enjoyed foot patrol. Often though, if quiet, ‘going for a walk’ could be deathly dull. Trudging around the streets on a rainy evening, watching the comfy glow of TV sets from sitting room windows? Purgatory. You’d find yourself wishing for anything to happen - even stuff like death, traffic process or shoplifters. Members of the public in leafier areas would roll their eyes, commenting how infrequently they saw the police. Anyone joining the police for popularity or gratitude will deservedly drown in the jacuzzi of disappointment.

Academics have spent many, many years trying to analyse the effectiveness of police foot patrols, coming to occasionally contradictory conclusions. So I chuckled when I recently saw this article about the latest reinvention of the wheel (spoiler - shockingly, foot patrols in high-crime areas reduce crime), so I decided to write about my short-lived experience of foot patrol for posterity. Well, it was nearly three years on-and-off, which in any other job wouldn’t count as ‘short-lived’. But in The Job? Not really.

Then, as I wrote the piece, I realised it was also about the slowly lingering death of foot patrol. And, specifically, community policing. Performance stats, a social-work policing model and funding cuts spelled the end of coppers going for a walk.

---

I was in my third week of my post-Hendon training, out in the real world. “What road are we in?” asked Richard, one of my street duties instructors.

“Er, I dunno,” I replied sheepishly.

“That’s 50p,” Richard sighed. There was a fine for not knowing where you were - there was no radio geolocation. “If you get into trouble, what will you tell the CAD room? How can they send any assistance if you can’t tell them where you are?”

“Sorry Richard.”

“No problem,” Richard replied. “I’ll be asking again soon.” All the money from fines went into a kitty for end of course drinks. All of us kept getting caught, but after a fiver or so it became second-nature. Even now, I clock any road name I walk into.

Richard called this ‘streetcraft’. You were shown the radio black spots where the crappy personal radios didn’t work. You were encouraged to find a ‘tea hole’ (a place to shelter from the rain, and to gossip with the locals). You always patrolled facing oncoming traffic. This was so you could stop oncoming vehicles by signalling ‘in the approved manner’ if necessary (probably too dangerous nowadays). Amazingly, 99% of motorists complied. We were taught to examine tax discs from a distance - remember paper tax discs with different colours every year? They got rid of them nearly ten years ago. A stop for a tax disc, we were told, was important. Why? Well, apart from it being an offence, you couldn’t get insurance without tax (insurance details weren’t on the PNC back then). People who didn’t insure their cars were a menace and, often, criminals. I stopped a car with a tax disc that turned out to be a colour photocopy of another vehicle’s. After arresting the driver for ‘uttering a forged instrument’, a look in the car boot revealed a dozen stolen leather jackets. Such is the crime-fighting serendipity of foot patrol.

If you don’t look, you don’t find. And if you aren’t on patrol, you can’t look

---

At Hendon, the primary learning resource were the infamous ‘White Notes’ (just for fun, here’s a link to the infamous spoof, ‘Teamaking for Probationers’). One I remember was called ‘Planning Your patrol’, which explained how you should spend your eight-hour shift. It was reasonably useful, advocating a general plan for your day (which you, as a constable, were meant to do by yourself). This required officers to understand their beats; what the problems were and who were your primary customers (i.e. criminals).

There were other demands on foot patrols - for example school crossing duty or patrolling an area experiencing high levels of burglary. Then there were calls on the radio. Newer officers were expected to volunteer for the tedious jobs (such as the time I was asked to investigate a stag beetle in someone’s kitchen and, no, I’m not making this up). Unlike today, there were few suicide watches or sitting in hospitals with mental health patients. Guarding crime scenes was a rarity. There were no PCSOs to pick up the patrolling slack. Looking back at it, there really was a remarkable amount of operational latitude. It was up to you how you spent your time, although you were expected to show ‘a return of work’.

I suppose I was always destined for intelligence roles, drawn as I was to learning everything about our ‘prominent nominal’ offenders (known as PROMNOMS). My patrol would involve passing their homes, their cars and hangouts to see who was talking to who. What they were wearing. What times they could be found at what places. I would make entries in the collator’s book (the pen and paper intelligence system we operated at the time). This served me well when I moved to a robbery squad at another station.

Early turn was usually the most peaceful shift, as in my experience criminals don’t get out of their scratchers before noon. There were thefts from motor vehicles, as people woke up to discover their cars had been screwed. We’d take a report and (yes) look for evidence and knock on doors. If you use common sense it doesn’t take long. They’d even send out a scene examiner if there were fingerprints. Yes, for a humble car stereo. After all, catch one thief and you prevent dozens more offences. I remember the kids would use sparkplugs on a piece of string to smash car windows - when we found suspects with sparkplugs in their pockets we’d pinch ‘em for ‘going equipped’.

Then, as a probationer, I’d look for traffic offences before patrolling the high street to fly the Met flag. Then? Onto the estate, to see if any of the local truants were disturbing the Queen’s Peace. I’d check the places suspected of selling gear, and the stair wells where addicts would shoot-up. That often lead to stop and searches for drugs. I’d chat to anyone who wanted to, even the young lads who wanted to take the piss (one would eventually share gossip about a fatal stabbing, information which ended up with the murder squad). I’d pop my head around the door of shops I knew suffered from shoplifting, especially independent traders.

At ‘refs’ you’d write up fixed penalty notices and crime reports. By the early afternoon, as the shift wound down, you’d hope there was no last-minute calls to keep you on duty. As a uniformed constable, your shift ends when your sergeant says it does. There would be a small gathering in the station office before you were released, to make sure everyone was accounted for.

Late turns were usually busier. Most burglaries would occur in the afternoons, while early evenings were when the muggers came out to play. Autumn was lively; darker nights, youths and fireworks were a recipe for trouble. There were always domestics, which often led to arrests for a ‘Breach of the Peace’. Late turn ended at 22:00, which meant night duty had to deal with pub chucking-out time and nightclub mayhem. Want to know about what really happens on night duty, by the way? I wrote an article on the subject, which you can find here.

In the 1930s, this central London subdivision was split into numbered beats. Officers would be assigned to a beat for the duration of their shift and be expected to check-in with the station from a police telephone box

---

From a theoretical perspective, I can see why academics and other experts are drawn to studying the efficacy of patrol. You’ve got a bit of geography, some social science, resource management and psychology (what deters criminality? Getting caught). Loads of statistics. This, I suspect, leads to over-analysis as well-intentioned people try to develop a patrol panacea. The one true patrol model to rule them all.

Guys, it doesn’t exist.

It seems axiomatic (well, to me at least) that every community is appreciably different, requiring bespoke patrol models based on (a) local demands, (b) available resources and (c) implemented by switched-on, well-led coppers who fully understand their operational environment (at this point I usually mention the relevance of the ‘Strategic Corporal’ concept to policing, so here it is again).

There have been a dizzying number of strategies; beat policing, sector policing, micro-beat policing, pulse patrols, proximity patrols… it’s like pizza - fundamentally the same dish but with different toppings (with sector policing being ham and pineapple). Then came the decision to make community policing and response policing entirely separate. Response would concentrate on taking emergency calls. Neighbourhoods would play Dixon of Dock Green. This reached its zenith in 2006 with Sir Ian Blair’s Safer Neighbourhood teams, a genuine attempt to move the dial and embed community policing into the organisation. I’m not a fan of Blair’s, but I’ll acknowledge his passion for community policing was entirely genuine.

The initiative was partially successful, proving popular with local communities (Met corporate propaganda on the subject went into near-Maoist levels of overdrive). However, I began working on anticorruption when the system had bedded in and noticed two recurring problems; the first was leadership. The teams had a great deal of autonomy (which was good) but needed a shedload of sergeants to lead them on the hurry-up (which was bad). The Met doesn’t do gradualism.

I’m not going to knock the majority of Safer Neighbourhood officers, most of who admirably performed the job they were posted to do. However, working on DPS some of the most egregious piss-taking I saw was on SN teams working in satellite locations with inadequate supervision from inspectors (who, in fairness, were given unrealistic numbers of sergeants to manage). On one operation, we ended up installing covert audio and video in an SN team office. Several officers and PCSOs were sacked for all sorts of naughtiness, including leaking intelligence to local drug dealers. The team sergeant seemed oblivious. The DPS gossip was when Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson allegedly saw the recordings, he was so appalled he considered ditching SN altogether.

The second problem was boredom. Safer Neighbourhoods work involved patrolling a small area, some of which were quieter than others. Furthermore, the ‘pastoral’ style of community policing isn’t for everyone - not that the Met cared. It did what it always does, and simply told people where they were going. It was hardly a recipe for morale, and SN work slowly became to be seen as a punishment posting.

As usual, the Met’s approach was all-or-nothing - Blair introduced massive top-down structural change without the necessary cultural shift or staff buy-in. I can’t help but think a beefier version of the older ‘Home Beat’ system, with smaller teams of dedicated community officers, was better (it put round pegs in round holes, for starters). Blair, however, had his vision - his legacy - and nothing was going to stop him. Then Islamist terrorism decided to pay London a visit, and the Commissioner’s attention was drawn elsewhere. I formed the view Sir Ian Blair was never wildly interested in counterterrorism - he was fixated on local policing. Then Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, more or less sacked him.

Then came the cuts and Bernard Hogan-Howe went in the opposite direction. As Baroness Casey identified, BHH threw local policing to the wolves.

Lord Bernard Hogan-Howe and the rest of the Met’s Management Board sacrificing community policing to the austerity goddess, Theresa the Apocalyptic

---

I’m not going to comment much on the new ‘Basic Command Unit’ model many forces have adopted. Anything I know comes second-hand from serving coppers I’ve spoken to. Their comments chime with Baroness Casey’s findings; local policing is under-resourced, the areas covered are simply too large (when, before, they were too small) and there’s a disastrous lack of experience in the junior ranks. My street duties instructors all had between ten and twenty years’ service. Now it’s two or three. The Met has a mountain to climb if it wants to rebuild anything near as ambitious as Blair’s Safer Neighbourhoods experiment. It simply can’t afford to.

I’m going to end, though, on happy note. A fond memory of foot patrol, and why I’m glad I did it. This is the experience direct entry detectives and managers miss out on to their peril.

My second police station was in a swanky part of London. Notting Hill, then undergoing rapid gentrification. I remember a foot patrol on a balmy spring late turn. My first job was arresting an ageing rock star, who was quite drunk, for dancing naked on a wine bar table. Sent to the southern end of the division, I waved hello to Paula Yates before stopping and searching a guy on Westbourne Grove. I found some crack. I found a confused patient from the local psychiatric hospital wandering around and radioed for him to be given a lift back to St. Charles’s. Then, on Portobello Road, a gaggle of young Israeli tourists asked for my photograph. I spent a happy twenty minutes chatting with them. Finally, walking back to the station, a black cab pulled up next to me. The guy in the back, a smartly-dressed chap in his sixties, was sitting with his glamorous-looking missus. “Officer, may I ask you a favour?” he said.

“Of course, Sir.”

“Can you recommend a decent restaurant? Somewhere modish. We’re not local.”

Indeed they weren’t. They were far too polished. Surrey, perhaps. Notting Hill still had a whiff of rakishness about it in those days. “Well, Sir,” I replied, “Tom Conran’s ‘The Cow’ is local and comes highly recommended.” The joint had just opened and everyone was talking about it.

“That sounds wonderful,” he said, “driver, take us to The Cow.”

The cabbie winked at me. “Only in Notting Hill would you ask a copper where to take your missus for dinner.”

There you go! A half-competent police officer on the beat is like a Swiss army knife; arresting drunks and keeping the peace. Taking drugs off the street. Looking out for the vulnerable and engaging with the public. Sharing critical local knowledge to hungry out-of-towners. And, if I remember correctly, only the call to the drunken rock star came from the control room. The rest was simply me, wandering around wearing a silly helmet, doing police stuff. I was no big deal compared to my colleagues when it came to patrol. I really wasn’t.

This stuff shouldn’t be difficult. But, somehow, it is.

Now, how much is the grant for that new College of Policing and Home Office study on patrol patterns?

---