Events | 2009.04.16
Martin Kettle on the urgent need to reform the police
The Tomlinson scandal and Quick affair highlight crucial controversies, and reinforce the demand for a royal commission
British policing is not in systemic crisis. But it is in a very serious and possibly worsening mess. The rapid-fire humbling of Scotland Yard\'s Bob Quick and the slow-burn smoking out of the officer who assaulted Ian Tomlinson may seem like unrelated, one-off unfortunate incidents. Yet each highlights a central controversy in policing over the last half century - governance in Quick\'s case and violence in that of Tomlinson - while together they pose a larger unanswered question: how can we best create the policing that we need?
Quick\'s resignation was extremely unusual. It is rare even for a "PC Clod", the Mirror\'s phrase yesterday, to resign, let alone an officer as senior as Quick. And his departure was certainly not inevitable. He made a lamentable operational error by allowing himself to be photographed carrying a highly sensitive anti-terrorist briefing note. But in practice there is little likelihood the details would ever have been broadcast or published, especially if MI5 had asked the media not to do so, as happens. The idea that Terrorist Central would have found out about the impending anti-al-Qaida operation in the north of England strikes me as a convenient justificatory fantasy.
Quick lost his job for 100% political reasons. He went partly because the Conservatives have fingered him as a hostile senior copper after the Damian Green affair - where Quick was in command - and because Quick alleged Tory dirty tricks against him in the Mail on Sunday, a charge he later withdrew. All of that made him vulnerable. But he went mostly because Labour\'s politically wounded home secretary, Jacqui Smith, could not afford to be anything other than ruthless with him once the story came out. The upshot is that the top cop the Tories loathe has been replaced by the one that Labour loathes, John Yates. The sacking was compelling proof of Smith\'s weakness.
Quick now joins the former Scotland Yard commissioner Sir Ian Blair as a senior police victim of a very recent political nutcracker. Both Blair and Quick certainly made errors - not least by allowing themselves to be seen as too close to ministers. But they were not sacked for that. They were sacked because the increasingly partisan nature of police accountability in London meant they could be sacked. Boris Johnson has turned Labour\'s decision to allow the London mayor to chair the police authority into a weapon in the hands of the Tories. He did it again yesterday with Quick. The old idea that the police are operationally independent is rapidly draining out of the system.
Quick\'s fate shows that police governance is becoming more politicised. Thirty years ago, Margaret Thatcher may have decreed that "what the police need is support and not criticism". Today, though, a Tory government would be committed to installing a Boris in each of the other 42 police authorities in England and Wales. There is simply no way a David Cameron government would be less hands-on than Tony Blair was over street crime or than Gordon Brown was, only this week, in driving 3,600 neighbourhood policing projects from Whitehall. We ain\'t seen nothing yet.
Ian Tomlinson\'s death, meanwhile, revives policing issues that governments of all stripes have struggled in vain to solve, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, over more than three decades. The case raises questions about four major themes - police violence, police training and culture, police powers, and police complaints - all of which have been recurrent leitmotivs of the slow politicisation of policing ever since Roy Jenkins put Robert Mark into the Met as deputy commissioner in 1967 with a mandate to clean up Scotland Yard.
More than 40 years later, much has been achieved, albeit disjointedly, on all four issues. Police violence towards suspects has been massively reduced by the safeguards introduced in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. Training and culture have been improved by a range of measures, of which the most important is the recruitment of women. Police powers have been codified, though now greatly expanded, especially in response to terrorism. Meanwhile there is fully independent oversight of the police complaints system, the issue that triggered Mark\'s 1977 resignation.
Yet the Tomlinson case also shows how little has changed. The violence and crowd control strategies against G20 protesters carry echoes not just from the police killing of Blair Peach in 1979 but from deep into the 19th century. As unemployment rises and if extreme-right politics start to prosper, such clashes could become as common as they were in the era of Grosvenor Square, Grunwick and the miners\' strike. If that era is any guide, the use of terrorism powers to deal with threatened disorder is likely to become an issue too.
Those with long memories will also have recognised aspects of police culture on display in the Tomlinson case. Tomlinson, like Peach, was attacked by tooled-up riot police who, initially at least, stayed quiet about their actions and could rely on the force press office to issue false versions of events on their behalf. It was only the public\'s cameras - which police would like to ban - that punctured the conspiracy. Meanwhile, the inadequacies of the much-reformed police complaints system, searingly exposed in the Guardian by John Crawley this week , remain as much an issue in the Tomlinson tragedy as the unreformed system was in that of Peach - where no officer was ever disciplined, much less prosecuted.
Is there any way that policing can be reformed in a balanced fashion amid today\'s contemptible partisan bidding war on police powers, and in the light of the increasing willingness of politicians to sack senior officers for party reasons? It is hard to be optimistic. If disorder increases, terrorist plots continue and the media carries on encouraging hard rather than soft policing, any changes could be for the worse not the better.
There can be no going back to the pre-Thatcher era when policing was "above" politics. Policing should not be a service apart, but its unique powers over the citizen mean it is a special service. So the best way to break the current destructive spiral would be to shape the political debate about policing in a different way. The most constructive way to do that would be a royal commission on the police and policing which, with a fair wind, might establish a new policing settlement. Labour dislikes commissions it cannot control, and it would need consensus between the parties to set such a body up. In an election year that seems more than usually improbable. But it would be the best way forward.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]0/ian-tomlinson-bob-quick-ipcc
