Xbox Policing
Police Hubris and the Illusion of Control
Yes, you really can stop and search a virtual suspect via your Xbox. At least you won’t get a complaint.
A common complaint I hear from police officers, both online and off, is ‘nobody seems to know what they’re doing anymore.’ I’m not surprised really, as (a) there’s a chronic retention problem and (b) in any case, gaining experience nowadays is likely to get you fired.
This is one of the reasons savvy, ambitious coppers are well-advised to avoid, er, policing. It’s now entirely possible to achieve the seventy-plus grand pay grade of the superintending ranks without so much as handcuffing anyone outside of an officer safety lesson.
This absence of basic managerial competence conjured memories of my first Official Secrets Act (OSA) investigation (into an MI5 officer called David Shayler). Special Branch were responsible for OSA work, mainly because it possessed suitably vetted staff. It certainly wasn’t because of any amazing investigative ability, as our primary focus was intelligence-gathering. I leafed through a typewritten ‘Special Branch Guide to OSA Investigations’. The first line, highlighted and underlined, read:
FIND SOMEONE WHO KNOWS WHAT THEY ARE DOING AND PUT THEM IN CHARGE
This simple rule seems to have been forgotten. And this week I’m going to offer a few theories why.
And so to the legendary DS who ran the Special Branch surveillance operations room (I always look forward to ex-Branch types spotting who I’m talking about and sending me funny stories). This was the 1990s, so we’re not talking high-tech; a few officers with radios and ‘London geographia’ map books monitoring the teams on the ground. The monitors would pass on any information gleaned to a loggist, who’d generate actions for further investigation. In a poky room next door were a couple of security service officers, doing whatever it was they did. Occasionally, they’d pop their heads around the door to offer information of varying degrees of usefulness.
We could also patch into traffic cameras and government CCTV systems, but compared to the post-9/11 world it was fairly rudimentary. Ten years later, sitting with the Security Service cell during Op OVERT was a very, very different experience. The SIO on that job, by the way, Detective Superintendent Dick Gething QPM, was outstanding. He was definitely one of those people who knew what he was doing.
But back in the mid-1990s, the SB ops room’s job was to coordinate surveillance activity on the ground with wider operational objectives. I’m sure, if you haven’t worked in that environment, you’ll have seen something similar on TV or in movies. It could be tense, especially when our officers were following suspects carrying weapons or explosives. Many of our jobs back then, however, didn’t feature arrest or firearms teams. They were purely intelligence-gathering or ‘pattern of life’, slowly putting together pieces of a bigger puzzle.
Anyhow, the legendary DS (sadly no longer with us) was a surveillance veteran who’d worked with the old ‘Bomb Squad’ teams during their inception in the 1970s. We joked he’d probably had an observation post covering the Crucifixion. A bearlike man with the demeanour of an especially verbose London cabbie, he was deeply sceptical of the Security Service spooks squatting in his ops room. I remember an unfortunate, fresh-faced spy venturing forth from his cubby hole. “The coffee machine’s broken,” he complained.
The DS, sitting behind his desk in a fug of cigarette smoke, raised a bushy eyebrow. “You know what?” he growled. “That’s the first piece of accurate intelligence you’ve offered during this entire fucking operation.”
The MI5 bloke wisely retreated back inside his hidey-hole.
The DS had been on so many surveillance jobs he could predict the routes the teams might take, like an indigenous tracker sniffing the wind for prey. He’d intuit voices and callsigns over crappy COUGAR radios, when the rest of us heard only static. Any unnecessary senior officers setting foot in the ops room for a spot of vanity tourism (seriously, they can’t help themselves) were told to fuck off. They suffered his wrath because he held the mystique of a regimental sergeant major - the Commander SB would’ve backed him to the hilt if anyone complained.
He was a good example of how experience - not rank - should inform operational control. Mainly because he suffered no illusions about the extent he was actually in control. He was riding the operation like a Fremen surfing on a giant worm in the Dune movie - cognisant of the forces of nature he was grappling with; its dangers and opportunities and limitations. You will never learn that unless you’ve done the job, on a plot as a constable or sergeant, making scary decisions for yourself. There are no people-eating sandworms at the College of Policing.
Which is a shame.
Cressida Dick would learn this the hard way, during the Stockwell debacle a decade later. I’ve dealt with Cress professionally, so don’t say this out of any sense of animus; she’s a deeply intelligent and fundamentally decent person. She was also a victim (of sorts) of a hubristic, overly-macho, rank-driven command and control model. A model which whereby live ops could be managed like a game on an Xbox.
Shortly after the incident, I remember discussing the operation with a friend serving as an officer in the Royal Marines. An Iraq veteran, he was genuinely baffled when I described how the police model worked. “The decision to shoot? That’s down to the corporal with the target in his sights, not me.” Of course, this doesn’t map perfectly onto law enforcement on UK streets, but I’ve spoken to many people involved on that horrible day (from Special Branch, DPS and SO19) - I couldn’t help but think he had a point. How ‘situationally aware’ can you really be in a control room?
This feeds into the wider fantasy versus reality world of command and control, working groups, authorised professional practice and other theoretical models of policing. They are too often an aggregation of groupthink risk-aversion and mediocrity, designed to diffuse blame for public inquiries and discipline boards, not provide optimal outcomes for operations. I’d also suggest policing’s management culture - riven with ego, ambition and hubris - is also partly to blame.
I’m also going to mention something the public won’t want to hear, which is Bad Stuff Happens. As a society, we’re quick to ask why did the police fuck up? Far fewer ask why were the police there in the first place? We have a hopelessly cosseted public and an increasingly ignorant media to blame. We live in an era of risk-denial. Of ‘precautionary principles’. Of performative mask-wearing.
So I’ll say it again; Bad Stuff Happens.
Which means self-rescue. Response times are never quick enough. Take some responsibility for yourself. Yes, the police have a plan for all sorts of terrible eventualities. But, as von Moltke famously said, ‘no plan survives first contact with the enemy.’
From then on? We have to rely on experienced people to ride the Sandworm for us. Except we’ve run out of experience and we can’t just defrost a new packet.
A tribute to Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell Tube Station.
Another example of policing trying to nail jelly to a wall is the National Intelligence Model, or NIM. Like most roads to hell, NIM was paved with good intentions. In this case, it was how do police prioritise resources against problems by best use of all available information?
So far, so good.
The NIMbeciles (as they became known) decided all crime could be given a level between 1,2 & 3. level 1 is local crime, usually acquisitive (NIM was born around the turn of the century, before the police had fully morphed into a quasi-social service). Level 2 is crime that crosses force boundaries (County Lines gangs being a good example). Level 3 is serious and international organised crime, which is primarily the responsibility of the NCA… phew! What a relief.
The problem was, and remains, criminals don’t care about arbitrarily awarded levels of severity or geographical boundaries. All level 3 jobs sit on level 2 jobs (which is why, in another example of police trying to impose order on chaos, talk about going ‘upstream’ or ‘downstream’). Police love order and hierarchies. It’s a strange kind of comfort blanket. All of this horrible shit’s happening but it’s okay, we’ve given it a number and put it in a box.
Intelligence units ended up becoming info-dumping outfits, mindful of NIM-compliance (which, naturally, became a performance indicator). By imposing a numerical value to a type of crime, police risk missing context (we used to call this ‘criminal investigation’, in case you were wondering). I’ve had this conversation many times with local police DSU (informant or CHIS) handlers. How many times do officers from serious and organised crime units descend on local handlers to ‘co-opt’ their sources? (answer - frequently, I’ve done it myself during anticorruption cases). Why? Because the ‘low-level’ source (whose criminality might involve serving up ten quid bags of heroin) happens to be the brother / nephew / schoolmate of a level 3 bad boy. Then it turns out the ‘low level’ enterprise the source is reporting on turns out to be something entirely more substantial.
Then you’re playing catch-up.
These opportunities are missed all the time. There’s no experience, no appetite for the hard yards of intelligence development (which is notoriously difficult to map into the performance statistics beloved of the superintending classes) and an aversion to rolling up sleeves and dealing with ‘crappy’ low-level local criminality. All ranks, by the way, are guilty - I’m not just blaming the big bosses. In fact, some of the worst offenders in my time were at DI-DCI rank who only wanted to take out ‘proper gangsters’. Inexperienced seniors were too scared to dig them out.
The answer, in my opinion, is to (a) overhaul NIM completely and (b) return elements of level 2 crime to Basic Command Units (BCUs). This is a big subject, which I can’t cover in the detail it deserves here. Perhaps another time.
Sarge, is this door NIM Level 1, 2 or 3?
What does NIM do, then? Okay, as a resource-management and allocation model it’s okay-ish as far as it goes. I understand that. It helps, at a theoretical level, senior leaders to set strategies. They can’t get too stuck in the weeds, although the occasional spot of gardening won’t so them any harm either.
The problem is the tendency for large organisations to develop functions reliant on regulating and gold-plating such operating models. We’ve all seen it. And, if we’re being really honest? People most attracted to that sort of work are often least likely to have granular experience. I would have loved to see my legendary surveillance DS from the beginning of this piece let loose as a RIPA Gatekeeper.
Which means, over a period of time, models like NIM have become useful tools for not doing things. Or to pass responsibility onto others, or to defend poor decision-making. Nobody wants to be hauled up in front of a public inquiry, one where a snotty barrister will wave a copy of NIM in front of them. “Why, officer, didn’t you refer to section 3, paragraph 2, subsection A?”
I’ve discussed elements of this before in an article on SIOs, which you can read here if you’re interested.
Now, talking of RIPA…
The community engagement superintendent thought this was only fair and proportionate when deploying a new OP vehicle.
RIPA represents another example of risk aversion and remote control policing, whereby many senior officers find comfort in an approved - and not wildly innovative - tactical playbook.
The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA 2000, linked above) is a chunky, important, geeky area of law. Dealing with rules for how police and other public bodies conduct sneakiness like surveillance and informants, I spent a fair bit of my career grappling with it. It’s also a complete dog’s breakfast, but for the astute investigator that’s as much of a feature as it is a bug.
Why?
In a Common Law system, what isn’t forbidden is permitted. In a statute law system, what isn’t permitted is forbidden. This means English and Welsh police services, as long as their conduct is lawful and proportionate AND THERE’S NO STATED CASE LAW TO THE CONTRARY, are technically free to use novel tactics. Yes, these will be informed by law, procedure and third party input (for example, the CPS in certain cases) but generally speaking if you understand the law and confident you’ll survive the inevitable s.78 appeal under PACE (which deals with the exclusion of unfairly obtained evidence) you can be ‘lawfully audacious’ and win at court.
I know this because I’ve done it. I’ve devised strategies, written authorities and worked on successful operations resulting in early guilty pleas (the sweet spot for the majority of investigators).
I’m not particularly special, either; I simply came from a cohort of detectives cursed with a nerdy interest in a rarefied area of policing but little ambition to proceed in rank. There were a fair few officers like me working in more or less the same world. The other thing, of course, was there was no meaningful career progression for subject matter experts. You always ran the risk of ending up in a role where your skills would go to waste. SMEs also, by virtue of their job, know more than the bosses. That makes some bosses suspicious. Especially if you disagree with them. And you can’t Xbox control RIPA. You really can’t.
I refer you back to the first line of the Special Branch OSA guide…
The other bane of my life were national working groups, Accredited Professional Practice afficionados and seminars-with-buffets dwellers who loved generating new reasons not to do things. Don’t even get me started on RIPA and the Internet, although the date of the legislation is informative - six years before Facebook and the explosion of social media. It’s also why one of the most successful open source intelligence agencies on the planet, Bellingcat, has nothing to do with the police.
My point? The average chief superintendent knows relatively little about RIPA. To be fair, they’ve got loads of other stuff on their plates. The problem is I’ve met RIPA ‘Gatekeepers’ and Authorising Officers who view their role as preventing surveillance rather than enabling it. Sure, there are great AOs too, but getting a good one shouldn’t be a crap-shoot.
Flyers tend to avoid any messy, risk-laden RIPA work completely, which is closely regulated by a third party (the Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office or IPCO). Our system still means they end up running Gold Groups where RIPA-contingent strategies are set. Are you surprised when they err on the side of caution? Stick to the check box. What’s safe. What doesn’t constitute ‘corporate risk’. Button ‘Y’ on the Xbox controller. I’ve met chief superintendents who became ashen-faced when told they had to make a decision about a CHIS. Oh no! Scary monsters! Risk.
The net result of risk aversion is fewer stated cases, meaning the body of law doesn’t evolve. Which probably suits The Blob, given they prefer European-style statute law anyway (please check the link for my definition of what constitutes ‘The Blob’, it’s subtly different from other flavours).
The European Court of Human Rights, The Blob’s Happy Place.
Now we have a culture where increasingly inexperienced senior police leaders are caught between a rock and a hard place; an ever-evolving operational environment of information overload, one where the subject matter experts they rely on are either (a) equally risk-averse or (b) are rarer than rocking-horse shit.
This is compounded by the post-2012 culture of ‘Churn’ whereby more and more officers quit the service within five years of joining (the myriad reasons for which can be found elsewhere on this Substack).
Instead, police leaders increasingly turn to a comfort-blanket of tactics, ones they think they can manage via remote control. The operational version of nursery food. Okay, the job failed or the results were middling, but nobody’s facing a discipline board or negative media coverage. Yay!
And, because these seniors were promoted via a gilded carpet, nobody has ever told them they’re shit. That would be toxic bullying, right? I hate bullying and I hate being told I’m shit, but you know what? I can think of at least half a dozen pivotal moments in my service where being properly dug out - and told I was an Anglo-Saxon four-letter word - was genuinely beneficial for my process of what is nowadays called ‘self-reflection’.
This is another reason why too many senior officers think they can Xbox operations. They’ve never been squared-up or ‘had their fortunes read’. They shout commands into radios and think they’re the star of the Jed Mercurio series playing in their head, one where pressing Button ‘X’ produces tactical outcome ‘Y’.
Until, of course, it doesn’t.
So here’s a harsh truth - occasionally you just need a sweaty old DS to run things. Just like police stations operate best after 5pm and at weekends, when officers of a certain rank are off duty.
Except, of course, we’re running out of sweaty old DS’s.
When the shit hits the fan, ride the worm. Or get eaten.
I led the Financial Intelligence gathering on Overt from the NTFIU. In fact it was me that bought the matter to NSY from BSS. I was in the Thames House ops room on a daily basis, looking at a TF group associated AAA and his merry band of murderous bastards. Each day, more stuff came out from wiretap about it, but nowt was going to NSY. It took me 3 weeks to convince the management to appoint an SIO and start the ball rolling. Still waiting for my QPM/OBE/Knighthood!
Regarding RIPA, that came into force while I was at CIB2. Our team were looking at a group of young cops who were dealing and using MDMA at clubs in S.London. A surveillance op. was needed regarding these miscreants, so RIPA application forms were required. Nobody had done one, so Perry, my DI, told me to write one and he would sign it. I did a bit of mugging up, and produced a reasonable effort. Perry duly signed it, and passed it up the food chain to the Director of Professional Standards, DAC Andy Hayman, a loudmouth Essex wide boy, who Norman Stanley Fletcher would have called a "charmless nerk". He, of course, didn't know one end of a RIPA form from the other, so confidently presented it to the Surveillance Commissioner.
Now, what Perry, and at that time I, didn't know, was that there were 2 different application forms, very similar, but for different purposes. Someone who did know, unfortunately, was the Surveillance Commissioner, who proceeded to mightily embarrass our leader by pointing it out! He then descended on Perry like the wolf on the fold, and publicy ripped him a new arsehole. The poor bloke was left a gibbering wreck, but he had to take it as he had signed the form. I was left unscathed. Hayman was an unpleasant bully, and got his comeuppance when CC of Norfolk, but that's another story!
Another provocative article, Dom.
It’s interesting the amount of criticism directed in these blogs at the Superintending ranks and above plus the belief that the lower ranks could do a better job. Purely to balance the picture a little, and not as case specific as your blog, I ask for the right of reply as a former Super.
Yes, there are inadequate leaders at those levels, but so there are at PC/DC, Sergeant and inspecting ranks. Why this is tolerated is a question that probably needs a whole blog or ten to answer. Poor leadership is not unique to the police service either; since retiring I have had cause to intimately observe the leadership qualities and skills of a range of other organisations including the much-vaunted British military and the railways. I can confidently state that from where I sat in my worms-eye view there’s very little that recommends itself, to me at least! Incompetence, lack of interest, ego and ignorance thrive amongst managers everywhere. I was particularly disappointed at what I saw in the Commissioned ranks in the Army. There were some good leaders but they shone out of a fog of mediocrity and arrogance. Admittedly I only saw a part of the whole over five years but I doubt there’s much better. Likewise private industry.
Those who take promotion in ‘The Job’ are often accused of careerism and being “out for themselves”. Elements of that are true in some cases, but is there any difference in wanting promotion to wanting to be a Detective or a specialist? Unless one stays a Pc on a team for thirty plus years, there has to be an element of ambition? I spent ten years as a Pc on foot patrol doing shifts. Was I being careerist going eventually to SB and then climbing the ranks? The biggest motivator for the latter for me was to provide for my young and growing family, not because I wanted to Lord it over my colleagues.
A friend of mine who was an SME in the Bwanch genuinely told me recently in the context of another organisation that getting to the top of any service isn’t difficult. You merely say the right things, go along with stuff, don’t rock the boat, and the ranks will come. He absolutely believed that. Only someone who never tried to take promotion could say that. It’s hard. It’s boring at times. It’s frustrating. It takes a lot from you. And in the famous expression “the further up the pole a monkey goes, the more you see if it’s bum!” Nobody sees the hours senior management have to put in. There is a culture of working long days - 12 hours was a short one for me. There are meetings in the morning and meetings in the evening. If there’s an incident there are ‘Gold Groups’ to attend. ‘Crimefighters’ thought up by BHH and Burns created a whole industry to deal with it. It was meant to be an imitation of the NYPD’s famous ‘Compstat’ meeting but was nothing like it. On borough one needed to have to support of a whole team to address the issues in the paperwork that came out. It was a bureaucratic nightmare and gave rise to a bullying culture where superintending ranks were figuratively torn to pieces. Those able to perform in that arena and culture thrived. Others went under. It did nothing to actually deal with performance. It’s style percolated down to lower levels too as individuals found their inner management thug released. I remember being really torn apart by a Chief Super from some leafy suburb about not knowing the full details of a single crime that occurred in our local hospital, on a crime wracked large borough in SE London, and being dressed down afterwards in private by him. I actually did know the details but I didn’t function and never have been able to in that kind of environment. I had been on at 7am and I left NSY at 6pm (on a Friday). I felt awful all weekend. Really awful. During the 2011 Great Mutant Uprising I was sleeping in the office for a few days. I received a warning about breaching European Working Time Directives at one point. There were public order events to Bronze and Silver. As I didn’t earn overtime, I was probably on the lowest hourly rate in the whole station! No wonder my marriage suffered!
I do not say this for sympathy: I chose promotion and if you can’t take a joke don’t join the Job. However, it’s very easy to think the guy or girl upstairs does nothing except create barriers. EVERYTIME something happened in London, the UK or indeed the World, (and I doubt this has changed!) someone higher up the food chain wanted a ‘Community Response Report’. Often two or three ACPO/NPCC would want different reports, plus a conference call. And these were done by ME or my colleagues, not the paygrades beneath. Generally, others were unaware of the stuff we stopped filtering down to bother the troops.
Anyway, I am a big boy and got big-boy pay for this, I know, but when you talk of RIPA authorities etc, this was one small part of the whole. And you can delegate everything EXCEPT responsibility. Then there was the training -or lack of it! I was a Bwanch Detective, a Sergeant and an Inspector. That was from 1998 to 2003. How much training did I get for any of those times do you think? NONE. Absolutely zip, nada, rien, nothing. You were expected somehow to ‘just know’ and learn by osmosis. Hopefully that has changed now! After 20 years I became an overnight success and got myself into the High Potential Development Scheme(HPDS). That DID give high quality useful and insightful training at Bramshill. Although it’s common to decry the place, it made up with 8 week modular residential management training what the Met had failed to do. I am glad I did it. Naturally, it also got me labelled, perhaps not so much as some as I already was well on my way to getting my gong by then, but still labelled by line managers and peers. It seems everyone has somebody else they can look down their noses at!
Traditionally, of course, all leaders in the police had come up through the ranks. The same people who criticise direct entry officers will almost in the same breath then criticise those who made it the normal way as being ‘out-of-touch’. Police leaders need to develop a sense of strategy and remember they have a role to play directing the service, but the tone of the service is set by society, via its elected representatives. Individual Supers and above did not introduce the ECHR but have to obey it. And yes, showing one understood and implemented stuff was a means to impressing those above. NIM was a useful tool when planning and I don’t recognise the usages and abuses you report above, personally, but I was not in anything specialist after I get my pips so bow to your knowledge. A DS can be very good at running an operation -and often is - but someone above that rank will carry the can and be answerable for it, perhaps criminally.
I don’t necessarily dispute what you say and please don’t think that’s my argument here, but I did want to defend those of us who wore the crowns (for ill or good) and put a case for the defence here!
Thank you Dom, I shall get back in my box now!