Letter: Reality of a national police force
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.Sir: Sir John Wheeler's article advocating a national police force ('How criminals cross the thin blue line', 9 February) contains almost as many fallacies as lines. He attributes our present rising crime and falling clear-up rates to the failure of politicians over 220 years to establish a national police system.
From the 1860s to the First World War, when police forces were first set up around the country, most of them small and locally controlled, Britain experienced a considerable decline in crime and increasing standards of public order. Crime remained more or less stable in the inter-war years, and only began its inexorable climb in the Fifties. The rate of increase accelerated sharply in the Eighties. The rise in crime coincides almost perfectly with a gathering momentum towards increasing size of police forces and much tighter central control.
As I showed in my book Chief Constables (Oxford University Press, 1991), we now have a national force in reality in most essentials, although because this is not recognised, there is no adequate accountability for national policies. The historical record suggests that force amalgamations into large units and central control have been associated with declining police effectiveness.
The causal relationship is complex, and I am not arguing that the rise in crime has resulted from the changes in police organisation. A vast volume of research evidence shows that police size, organisation or tactics have relatively little bearing on crime levels. These are primarily the product of a wider range of social, economic and cultural factors.
The changes in police organisation have partly resulted from a vain effort to reduce crime, as governments have pursued a technological fix of trying to reduce crime without tackling its social causes. The apparent decline in police efficiency indicated by falling clear-up rates is largely due to the enormous increase in crime levels, which have vastly overloaded the capacity of the police to respond.
What is really going on in the Government plans to reorganise the police is a process of scapegoating. They are trying to pass the buck for the record crime levels that have resulted from their own economic and social policies.
When the present reforms fail, as they will unless there is also a reversal of the policies that have generated increasing unemployment, inequality, poverty and greed, the Government will have run out of alibis. In the meantime it will have inflicted serious criminal damage on a police service that used to be a model of democratic policing to the world.
Yours sincerely,
ROBERT REINER
Professor of Criminology
London School of Economics
London, WC2
12 February
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments