The Joke's on you, Robocop

The answer to 'curing' police culture isn't workplace surveillance

No need to check his phone: Robocop comes programmed with a range of Home Office-approved opinions

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Science fiction often concerns itself with law enforcement, from the idea of an emotionless cyborg cop (Robocop), to a fascistic judge, jury and executioner (Judge Dredd) to a utopia where policing atrophies into an ineffectual mess (no, not a documentary about today’s Met, it’s the oddly prescient Demolition Man). Bit of a plug, but I wrote a dystopian novel featuring policing too.

Then, of course, there’s the police state described by George Orwell in 1984. Which, for some, seems to be an instruction manual rather than a warning.

Enter Harriet Harman’s proposed Police Reform Bill, in part a response to the grisly Wayne Couzens affair (after which a number of nasty WhatsApp groups run by meat-headed police officers came to light. Some ended up in prison for their trouble). I would suggest half the problem is down to recruiting dross like Couzens in the first place, which I look at here.

Harman’s Bill legislates for (among other things) compelling police officers accused of misconduct to be contractually obliged to surrender their personal phones to managers, HR departments and / or professional standards units (fishing expedition? Moi?) if accused of misconduct. It effectively turns police officers into a class of citizen whose rights are diminished and monitored even beyond employment (Harman wants political control over the conditions whereby a police pension can be forfeited). It’s a spiteful, poorly-conceived and authoritarian piece of legislation, emanating from someone who was (oh the irony) a legal officer for the National Council for Civil Liberties.

You’ll be amazed to learn Harriet’s Bill is fully supported by London Mayor Sadiq Khan. Who is the, er, Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) for the Met. Sadiq, it will be remembered, was a human rights lawyer back in the day; he must realise much of the Bill, quite probably unlawful under the Human Rights Act, will be vigorously challenged in court. If only the Mayor put as much effort into helping the Met fight, say, knife crime.

I suspect the Home Secretary will feed the bill into the shredder, laughing manically, but this time next year there’ll probably be a Labour Home Secretary sellotaping it back together again.

Which brings me another piece of news that caught my eye, this time concerning the Conservatives (easily as clueless, in case you think I’m being partisan). The week after Harman’s Bill was submitted to the Home Office, HM Government decided to litigate against one of its own judges. Why? To protect private WhatsApp messages between politicians from the Sauron-like eye of the Public Inquiry into HMG’s management of the COVID-19 pandemic.

That’s right. On the one hand, part of our political class thinks it’s okay for Pc Snooks to have his personal phone seized because of a workplace spat with a colleague (trust me, this is how Harman’s proposals will end up being used), while others go to court to protect their private messages during a bloody national emergency.

If you think a Labour administration would behave any differently, by the way, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. A brief glance at the Iraq Inquiry demonstrates a number of “oops, we decided to invade a Middle-Eastern country but nobody was taking minutes” moments by Tony Blair and Co.

Ugh. Enough of politicians. I’ve just eaten.

Anyhow, the thought of HR being able to demand police officers’ private telephones begs the question; what paragon of virtue is the average police officer meant to be in the mid-2020s? What do the elites who shape policy outcomes really want? Have they even thought about it? And, do the people trying to create these new model police officers have any idea what’s it like to actually be one? The last question was, of course, completely rhetorical.

I’m genuinely interested in the way police wrongdoing is perceived. After all, doctors and nurses murder far more people than police officers. Teachers are easily as likely to abuse positions of trust with young people. Don’t even get me started on the church. Even hallowed institutions like the army have been found wanting. The BBC, for thirty-odd years, harboured a disgusting array of child abusers while senior managers looked the other way.

Yet police misbehaviour and culture – a profession more closely monitored and supervised than any other – easily causes the most concern. This isn’t a ‘it’s not fair’ moment by the way; I’ve proved I’m happy to walk the walk when it comes to police wrongdoing by helping lock up numerous coppers.

It’s almost touching, perhaps, that British police are meant to be so virtuous despite a litany of scandals. After all, police officers aren’t well-paid. They come from all walks of life. They’re completely normal people. They swear an oath, put on a silly hat and, hey presto! The system spits out paladins of justice. We take this for granted, because we don’t live in a failed state (yet) where the police routinely take bribes and act as de facto organised crime groups. If the police continues down its current path, especially in terms of pay, conditions and recruitment, I predict we’ll be there in a decade or so.

Harold Shipman, an NHS doctor, murdered at least 250 people under his care

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The most commonly-cited reasons for these high expectations? Police officers are (a) empowered to detain people of their liberty and (b) are mandated by the State to use force to exercise those powers. It follows, therefore, police officers should be subjected to special scrutiny (despite Peel’s famous dictum that ‘the Public are the Police and the Police are the Public’).

The dichotomy behind this expectation – that ‘police are a special case’ versus ‘the police are just like the rest of us’ seems irreconcilable. After all, police officers have a raft of restrictions on their private lives, with very few perks to reflect these responsibilities. They do, however have a discipline code that takes into account they’re occasionally subjected to vexatious and malicious complaints (yes, they really are). For this reason, they can’t be sacked at the whim of a toxic manager for flimsy personal, organisational or political reasons.

Unless, of course, Harriet Harman gets her way.

And the cases where the police can’t get rid of clearly unsuitable people? poor management from top to bottom. Having worked at the anticorruption coalface, I can assure you the carrot is far more effective than the stick when it comes to keeping police officers on the straight and narrow - if you’ve got something to lose, then there’s more reason to behave. That’s unsexy if you enjoyed ‘Line of Duty’, but effective recruitment, vetting, pay, conditions and management all combine to create that elusive thing – a culture – where people do the right thing more often than they don’t.

I’m not giving the Met a pass here, by the way. See my previous thoughts on this stuff, for example here and here. I’m simply trying to add context to a debate increasingly dominated by people who haven’t got a bloody clue what they’re talking about.

Which brings me back to poor old Pc Snooks (who thought an Englishman’s phone was his castle), who faces a complaint of workplace sexism and is ordered to hand over his phone. His private one. The one he pays for himself. Don’t worry, though, it’s only workplace sexism today. Tomorrow? It’ll be anything an increasingly intersectionality-fixated generation want to complain about on any given day. Which is to say, there’s a Heinz-type ‘57 varieties’ of grievance for everyone.

Which is why the police should stay the fuck out of politics as much as they possibly can. Sadly, and I’m misquoting Josef Stalin, ‘you might not be interested in the Culture War, but the Culture War is interested in you.’

I’m passionate about this. The ‘Without Fear or Favour’ aspect of policing is under threat in today’s increasingly censorious political climate, especially in the public sector where there seems to be a fixed position on social justice issues; one person’s funny meme is going to be another’s hate crime. At this rate, UK police forces will need to employ thousands of HR commissars and professional standards gauleiters. And so more people will leave. Those who remain will probably not be the best people when it comes to stuff like, er, catching criminals.

The BBC’s Hamish Macbeth was an awesome community policeman. He also smoked dope with the local GP in the custody suite.

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I remember attending the Met’s sergeant’s course in the mid-2000s. There was an interactive training video where a member of the public was complaining about the amount of immigrants moving onto his estate, saying it caused an increase in crime. The instructor asked if he should be ‘put right’ on that, given the Police duty to foster positive community cohesion under the Race Relations Act (or something). Several of us pointed out to the instructor we’d joined the Met, not the bloody Stasi, and his opinions (however misguided, as long as they were lawful) were none of our bloody business. At least the instructor opened it up to the class for debate. Fast forward seventeen-odd years later? The police are ‘checking people’s thinking’.

God help a police officer silly enough to keep a politically controversial text exchange on their telephone (although I’m sure Harriet’s commissars will spend a fortune on digital forensics). Many religiously observant people hold views on social mores that conflict with the average public sector HR / DEI team. Let’s not even get into the Maya Forstater can of worms.

The issue, at its most basic, is this: toxic police management want to get rid of an officer. They jump on any perceived error and spin his phone. Then get HR to sack him or her. This will happen. The only people who’ll get any satisfaction will be employment lawyers, and certainly not the general public who simply want to see police out on patrol, doing police stuff.

Hey, I can see the police market in cheap burner phones going through the roof in 2 years’ time (yeah, bruv, I keep that burner to contact my meme-dealer).

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And trust me, whatever the answer is, it ain’t workplace surveillance. I remember how, during long-term anticorruption operations, investigators would come across workplace misconduct by accident. This is especially true on jobs utilizing technical surveillance, the sort where you pick up conversations in cars or offices. It transpires an officer might have ‘slid’ off work early. ‘Borrowed’ an unmarked car to run an errand. Claimed an extra hour of overtime. Told a politically incorrect joke. You pick up personal information about people’s lives. During my time on Met DPS this wasn’t done lightly. In fact, we went to great pains to confine surveillance to as specific a window of activity as possible. This is part of what the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) terms ‘collateral intrusion.’

Nobody’s perfect. Nobody’s an angel. Everyone has a bad day at the office. It doesn’t matter if you’re the Prime Minister or a daytime TV presenter, it turns out we all have feet of clay.

Of course there were occasions where, once the stone was lifted, we found nasties wriggling underneath. It wasn’t always CID, either. One of the most awful examples of an out-of-control workplace I encountered was a community policing team.

Usually, the officer in charge (usually a DI or DCI) would put minor infractions to one side until the operation was finished. Nobody wants to crash a three-month surveillance job on a bent cop because someone’s pinching digestives from the team stash. Then, at the end, the IO would forward the ‘file of shame’ for local management to deal with. Sometimes a few people might be disciplined and others given a bollocking. The point being this; the anticorruption command wanted rank-and-file officers to know they weren’t wildly interested in low-level workplace stuff. Call it what you will; proportionality. Discretion. Realpolitik.

In fact, I remember one wily DCI who, after a cop was arrested for leaking intelligence to criminals, went to see their team. They all knew their office and cars had been bugged and were pretty shaken up about it. The DCI said, “I’ve been listening to you all for weeks. I even feel like I know some of you. And, you know what? You’re all great cops. You were let down by one of your own, and for that I’m sorry. Anyway, it’s good to know there are still people like you out there.”

Not only were the team of (quite young) officers as pleased as punch, two of them also offered up fresh statements against the cop who’d been arrested.

Like I said, wily. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

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It’s just carrots and sticks, really. Carrots should be plentiful and sweet for those who perform. The stick should be seldom seen, but when necessary? As my old superintendent used to say, ‘nail the crow to the barn door.’

If my time policing the police taught me anything, it was this - you need to hire the right people and lead them properly. Spot and deal with problems immediately - leaders shouldn’t be your mate. Officers need to be happy and have an esprit de corps. They should be allowed to let off steam. They shouldn’t be looking over their shoulder because somebody told a stupid joke.

And fear? It should be there, but only for the bloody guilty. You only need look at the history of eastern Europe to see how people act when they think they’re being snooped on. Most conform but do the bare minimum. Many inform. Some keep their heads down. But the brightest and the best? They leave or they rebel. I’m not being hyperbolic. By the time I left the Met, it was like North Korea run by David Brent.

So good luck, Commissar Harriet and whoever your next Home Secretary is. By the look of things, you’re going to need it.

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