Archive for the ‘Crime & Justice’ Category

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Us & Them

Saturday, February 28th, 2009

Us & Them
The Big Issue, February 2009
By Heather Brooke

Not one to believe hype, I was sceptical when I popped in the first series of the much-acclaimed TV series The Wire. For those who haven’t seen it, this is a series that breaks all the rules of TV drama and yet the hype is merited: it is the best thing on television.

Each episode is like a chapter in a book and the stories build across the season. The first deals with the police closing in on a drug dealer which is common enough in a cop show, but what makes The Wire different is that it focuses on the lives of the dealers and users as much as the police. There is none of the easy morality common to other police dramas. Instead there is reality. The writers know their subjects inside out. These are not champagne socialists writing about the lives of poor kids in Hackney, they are veteran newspaper hacks and homicide detectives who know the gritty scenes they describe.

I used to cover crime for a newspaper in South Carolina in a city with a large concentration of projects that were infested with drugs, and I often wondered why the people in these sink estates didn’t clean up, move out, get a better life. What did I know? A college girl from an English family? But at least I could talk to the vice squad who filled me in on what was happening. The stories the police told me didn’t always fit into the newspaper format, focused as it is on the end result: who got shot, when and why. The ‘why’ being the least explored part of the story. It wasn’t until I saw The Wire that I understood how these stories could be told. If you want to understand the cycle of poverty and addiction look no further.

The realism of The Wire is due in no small part due to the ability of the writers to get inside the institutions they cover. David Simon spent a year in Baltimore Maryland’s homicide division. Such inside knowledge informs the series and gives it the needed reality that makes it so powerful. Could such a show be written in the UK?

I’m not a crime reporter anymore but I am a freelance journalist and so I asked the Metropolitan Police if I could visit my local police station. In the US I went ‘round back’ all the time, even did shifts with various cops as a ‘ride-along’. Some forces in the UK offer this insight to members of the public, but not the Metropolitan Police. Even the full-time crime reporters in London aren’t allowed in. The only way I’m getting into my local police station is if I’m arrested.

Frankly that’s a cost I’m not willing to bear. It strikes me as counter-productive for the police to fortress themselves against the public whom they are meant to serve and protect. By refusing to let us in, they foster an attitude of ‘Us and Them’. Both for themselves and for us. The tie that might link us is broken.

I had another encounter with the ‘Us and Them’ attitude in Tottenham Court Road tube station. The escalators were shut but none of the guards were telling anyone why or when they might resume. When I went over to ask, the guard pointed to a gang of teenagers and said: “Your colleague there pressed the emergency stop.”

My colleague? What did he have to do with me?

In the mind of the TfL official it was clear all who were not TfL were some ‘other’: that great repulsive organism – the public.

Aren’t we the reason for TfL’s existence? If it wasn’t for us paying our extortionate fares this official wouldn’t have a job. And yet he views us all as one amorphous mass comparable to an enemy.

All institutions are susceptible to this type of thinking, but the danger is even greater when there is no competition. Where there is a monopoly on service the best solution is higher levels of transparency. We should be allowed into our local police stations, we should be able to see crime incident reports. It may not be easy, but an open door can bring many rewards, not least the best show on television.

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Posted in Articles, Crime & Justice | 6 Comments »

Investigation into Police Chief Bonuses

Friday, February 13th, 2009

I worked with the Times Crime Editor Sean O’Neill on an investigation into police chief constables’ bonus schemes. The first part of this investigation was published on 24 January 2009.

Police chiefs net thousands from secret bonus scheme

A secretive bonus scheme set up to reward the country’s top 300 police officers is paying out hundreds of thousands of pounds every year.

The police service refuses to disclose either amounts paid to individual officers or total payments from the Chief Officers’ Bonus Scheme.

But The Times has learnt that senior Metropolitan police officers shared more than £190,000 in one year, while the top ranks at Greater Manchester collected more than £53,000.

Scotland’s most senior officer, Stephen House, the Chief Constable of Strathclyde, was paid a bonus for his first six months in post.

In some cases the bonuses are awarded on the basis of “self-evaluation” by chief constables. Critics claim that the payments are further evidence of what has been called a “gravy beat” at the top of policing. There is also concern among the top ranks that the bonus culture damages the image and integrity of the police.

* COMMENT: what have they got to hide?

* Knife-crime czar’s £200,000 ‘gravy beat’ job

A few days later the president of ACPO wrote to the paper seemingly in favour of full transparency of police bonuses. However, I’ve yet to see any of these figures disclosed and the forces continue to refuse my requests for this information.

Posted in Crime & Justice, Freedom of Information | 2 Comments »

Article: Police Bonuses

Friday, February 13th, 2009

From The Times, 24 January 2009
What have they got to hide?
By Heather Brooke

Investigation is a little like psychiatry where the most telling details are often those kept hidden. When only one police force is willing to tell the public what it pays its Chief Constable in bonuses curiosity is piqued. What do they have to hide?

The police chiefs who accepted bonuses not only refused to reveal the amounts, but also declined to say what they were for. Some Chiefs told us they refused bonuses ‘on principle’ which makes one wonder what principles are at stake? We can’t know that until we know the details of the bonuses.

They cited the Data Protection Act, claiming that it would be an invasion of their privacy for the public to know the details of their salary and benefits. This may interest chief executives of public companies who must disclose this information in their annual reports.

It’s a topsy turvy world when the public have more rights to find out how the heads of corporations spend their shareholders’ money than the public do the heads of their public services.

The Data Protection Act is a badly written law. It is understandable that no one can understand it, but it is the implementation of a European Directive designed to protect the privacy of private individuals not to help public officials avoid public accountability.

The law hinges on a fairness principle and a balancing test is used to compare personal privacy interests to the public interest in knowing the information. Under this test, if the information is determined to be private, it can be released anyway if it is found that the public interest in release is more important than the privacy interest. There have been several cases now, including a High Court case on MPs’ expenses, where this balancing test has been done and the public interest found to outweigh the individual privacy interests.

In the case of Chief Constable pay there is clearly a valid public interest in this information. The public pay this money. They have a right to know how much and what it is for. Are the bonuses for cutting particular types of crime? Has this resulted in changes to the way crimes are recorded? Until the bonuses are published we just don’t know how they are affecting policing.

Another issue of concern is the massive non-compliance with the Freedom of Information Act. Of the 57 requests sent out at least 38 forces failed to answer legally. They simply let the deadline come and go failing to provide a legal reason for their continued delay. The police enforce the law, so what does it say when they don’t obey it themselves?

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Secret Policemen are having a ball at our expense

Sunday, January 18th, 2009

Secret Policemen are having a ball at our expense
The Big Issue, December 2008
By Heather Brooke

Once upon a time people complained of rarely seeing a bobby on the beat. Now they’re lucky to get a full glimpse of a policeman’s face.

Watching the video footage of police searching the office of MP Damian Green I noticed that practically the first words out of the investigator’s mouth were: “turn that camera off.’ This was in response to another MP daring to film the police in action as they searched and seized Green’s possessions without a warrant.

According to the Tory party, the posting of the video footage was delayed because the Metropolitan Police demanded that the officers’ faces be blanked out. Why?

Robert Peel created the principals of policing when the Metropolitan Police was first created in 1829. He ensured every police officer be issued a badge number, to assure individual accountability. His most famous principal:

Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public…

That’s worth keeping in mind as the police increasingly demand special rights which they deny the law-abiding citizen. Here’s an example: Go to any protest or an event held outside Parliament and you will see police officers filming people who have committed no crime yet if any Joe Public attempts to film the police he will quickly find himself harassed, threatened with arrest or have his camera seized or film deleted.

Go into any police station and you will find yourself under the gaze of CCTV, yet if you dare to get out your own camera you’ll be ordered to stop immediately; if you persist you’ll be threatened and likely ejected from the building.

Don’t be fooled. This is not about security. It is about power. We know it’s about power because if citizens wear masks, the police force their removal. Being able to identify someone is the primary way of holding that person to account.

It is well documented that people behave differently when granted anonymity, and not usually for the better. In a crowd or under the orders of a powerful leader, people will commit all sorts of outrageous behaviour, say all kinds of offensive things if they feel cloaked by the mantel of anonymity.

The police have a monopoly on force so it is right that in a democracy, police officers are individually accountable for how they exercise this force. Anonymity invites abuse. Yet police forces are increasingly demanding anonymity for their officers. The officers who shot Jean Charles de Menezes remain unidentified, as do the officers who killed Derek Bennett, 29, when they thought his cigarette lighter was a handgun.

I’ve worked as crime reporter in the US and the default position there is the opposite: police are identified by name and their photographs are published unpixilated. Anonymity is granted rarely and only if there is a quantifiable threat to the officer. Even FBI agents are named in court cases. Individual accountability is the cornerstone of public service effectiveness. Common to all totalitarian systems is that agents are hidden. Is this what we want from our police?

(more…)

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Posted in Articles, Crime & Justice, Freedom of Information | 2 Comments »

Family Court Secrecy

Monday, October 20th, 2008

Family courts are to be opened up to public scrutiny The Times announces today. The move is in response to mounting criticism from parents whose children are taken into care and complaints that they are victims of “secret justice”.

I wrote about the problem of secrecy in the Family Courts back in 2004 in the first edition of Your Right to Know. The situation has not improved since then despite government promises for reform and a consultation in 2006. The former Lord Chancellor, Charlie Falconer, made the cowardly decision to maintain the status quo which gave social workers and other so-called ‘experts’ a license to operate with almost total impunity.

The power to seize people’s children must surely be one of the most draconian state powers. Great power entails the greatest amount of accountability which can only come through openness. Yet that is precisely what’s been missing from the Family Courts. It is good to read that judges have finally begun to see the damaging costs of secrecy. But opposition is still strong from those organisations representing social workers. They claim secrecy is necessary to protect the privacy of the child, but more often it protects social workers from public scrutiny.

Judges already have the power to impose naming restrictions to protect children’s privacy so there is no need to close off an entire branch of the judicial system. Public confidence in the justice system can only be assured if the courts and the evidence used in those courts are open to the public.

Secrecy allows bad practice to carry on unchecked. It fuels mistrust in the judicial system. Stories abound of the courts removing children from their families on flimsy medical evidence or simply the opinion of a social worker who may have never even met the child.

I believe this current shift in opinion is mostly due to the writing of Camilla Cavendish who was able to put faces to the nameless victims of Family Court secrecy. It is often the case that while the costs of openness are exaggerated, if not blatantly made up, the costs of secrecy are discounted and ignored. Cavendish was able to show in terms of ruined families’ lives the cost of Family Court secrecy.

Social workers have been allowed to think they are above the law and their opinions not open to question. The reputation of the Family Courts depends on the ability of the public to see justice being done.

Posted in Crime & Justice, Freedom of Information | 7 Comments »

More backward than Mississippi?

Monday, September 29th, 2008

When I worked as a crime reporter in South Carolina, I was used to reading through ALL police incident reports. Some information was redacted (such as witness names in sensitive investigations) but not much. The default was always on openness as it was the public who paid for the police and in whose name they worked.

South Carolina is not renowned as a progressive state but residents could at least claim they were more enlightened than the residents of Mississippi – a real backwater! I read in the papers that the Mississippi Legislature earlier this year approved changes in the state’s Open Records Law to provide citizens with more access to crime reports. The idea is that citizens not only should have access to their government, but that opening law enforcement incident reports is a matter of public safety as well as being a crime-fighting tool.

Try telling that to ANY police force in the UK where all criminal incidents reports are strictly off limits to the public.

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Local Papers and crime data

Monday, September 29th, 2008

A fear of violent crime is a common enough headlines so it is understandable that the public should have questions about the effectiveness of British law enforcement.

Since the FOIA, it has been possible to request figures about crime and policing and many local newspapers are doing just that.  The Sunderland Echo made an FOI request to Northumbria Police asking for the number of sex assault reports.  On 27 September it reported:  “From January 2006 to July 2008, detectives in the city received 669 reports of sexually-motivated attacks” That is a sex assault every other day, although: “There is nothing to suggest Sunderland has a worse problem than other UK cities.”

Numbers released to the Worcester News under the FOIA show that: “The number of people in south Worcestershire given a police caution for violent crimes has risen from 306 in 2004/5 to 566 in 2007/8.   The sharpest increase is in the number of cautions for actual bodily harm”.

The 26 September edition also contains a comment on this story: “One solicitor we have spoken to makes it clear he believes the increase in the number of police cautions is a matter of finance, though the police deny this.  The cost of bringing a thug to justice should not be a factor.  Decent, law-abiding people want to see justice being done.”

These articles show why FOI is useful as it helps the public more accurately gauge crime in their area and what police are doing about it. Through public oversight, the police are able to earn the trust they deserve.  That is not simply because justice is done but because “decent, law-abiding people” see it done.

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Met keeps crime statistics under lock and key

Thursday, July 17th, 2008

From The Guardian, Thursday July 17, 2008
Met keeps crime statistics under lock and key
By Heather Brooke

The UK is one of the most watched societies in the world, yet the police are loath to release crime data

We may finally be let into the great secret of just how safe – or unsafe – we are as momentum builds to publish a breakdown of criminal incidents in London, though the battle is far from over. The Metropolitan Police plans to publish some data as early as next month. However, initial indications are that only property crimes (not violent crime) will be revealed, and that the data will be aggregated into large, artificial geographic regions called “super-output” areas.

I’ve long campaigned for the release of criminal incident data broken down by street, having lived in the US where it was easily available. I worked as a crime reporter, and not only were anonymised crime incidents published weekly in the local newspaper (and now online), but as a reporter I could go through individual incident reports down at the station.

Knowing what crimes happen and where is important for several reasons. First, people want to know how safe (or unsafe) they are. They need accurate and detailed data if they are to form an opinion of the safety of their neighbourhood. When they know what’s happening, they are in a better position to help or support the police. They are also better able to hold the police to account. This is perhaps what the police fear most, but it is a misplaced fear according to Richard Pope, the creator of civic website planningalerts.com (a site that mines planning applications to local authorities and provides alerts by postcode) and groupsnearyou.com.

“The police are coming at this the wrong way,” Pope says. “They’re scared that people are going to use it against them, but it could really help the police.” A few years ago he had the idea of building a civic website using crime data mapped out and accompanied by a discussion forum where neighbours could talk about problems in their area and liaise with their local police officer. “But we couldn’t get any raw data,” he says, so the project never got off the ground.

It seems ludicrous that, sitting in my flat in London, I can look online to see what’s happening on a street in Chicago and yet know nothing about what’s happening outside my front door. However Richard Thomas, the information commissioner, has said that releasing crime data from the grip of the police into the hands of the public would violate victims’ privacy.
(more…)

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Article: Let’s get crime mapping

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

From The Times, June 26, 2008
Crime mapping: we can’t afford to ignore it
By Heather Brooke

It works in America – and could help to improve crime clear-up rates dramatically

Most police forces in American cities provide the public with a list of all crimes, broken down by street or city block. You might read of a robbery on the 1600 block of 9th Avenue at 11pm for example, or three assaults in close proximity on Tuesday.

When I was a crime reporter in America, I was able to view all police incident reports, jail booking records and every warrant signed by the magistrate. I had some privileges as a reporter, but all this information was considered to belong to the public. The logs can be found in local newspapers or online and give the enterprising citizen the ability to build their own crime maps such as: www.spotcrime.com and http://chicago.everyblock.com/crime/. People use these maps to band together to pressure their police to tackle problems. As most police chiefs are directly elected, solutions are quickly found.

The police in Britain, however, feel they “own” crime data and the public have no right to know what is happening. Yet access to criminal incident data is vital, as it allows the public to judge the effectiveness of the police and crime policies. In a void of ignorance, a politician or police chief can claim anything he likes about crime: that binge drinking is endemic or under control, that muggings are increasing or falling, that policing is working or failing.

The police can also hide their failings. Northumbria police claimed that only three crimes of note had occurred one weekend in May, yet a freedom of information request revealed that, in fact, there were more than 1,000 incidents, 161 of them violent.

I asked the Metropolitan Police last summer if they could publish this data, if not by street then at least by postal code. No. The Met’s excuse was that it was technologically impossible (which I doubt), and in any event, “had it been possible to produce this data, it would have been likely rejected as a breach of the Data Protection Act”.

Shamefully, the Information Commissioner has objected to the plan of Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, to allow people to know what crime happens in their street, arguing that it would breach the privacy of the victims of crime. But the Data Protection Act does not prohibit personal information being disclosed. Its purpose is to ensure that such disclosure is for a legitimate purpose.

Yet again a policy that would be of great public benefit is being blocked by an unthinking, fetishistic attitude towards privacy. A balance can easily be struck between the privacy of those reporting crimes and the overall safety of citizens. The only people made safer by the current policy of wilfully enforced ignorance are poorly performing police chiefs.

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Posted in Articles, Crime & Justice, Freedom of Information | 3 Comments »

Police PR Spending

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

A three-month project by James Ball and I using the Freedom of Information Act to examine police spending on public relations, press offices and marketing concluded with two pieces in today’s Times:

Long arm of police spin-doctors costs almost £40m a year

Tough on crime – or on the image of crime?

We found that police forces across the UK are spending £39m each year on press and PR – enough to fund an extra 1,400 full time officers and more than enough to cover the annual police pay rise withheld by the Government. The force at the top of the league (Police Service Northern Ireland) spends eight times more per person on PR than the lowest (Derbyshire). Meanwhile, forces spend nearly ten times more on PR (what police want us to know) than on FOI (what we want to know).

Also while resources are pumped into PR, we found a distinct lack of interest in responding to our FOI requests. Only 19 of 53 forces responded to our requests on time. All the rest broke the law. They had a variety of explanations though some offered none at all. Police Service Northern Ireland had the most novel excuse – their FOI officer was on an advanced driver training course. It had no affect in speeding up their tardy reply which came more than a month late. If any of us were to break the law I doubt such excuses would carry much weight. Even those committing non-crimes such as parking get no leeway.

When we called the press offices for comment, however, it was remarkable how quickly forces found the time to re-examine their figures to decrease the amounts, often claiming the initial figures they’d given us were incorrect.

There is lot more detail than we could get in the newspaper so check out the summary or the full database for the full story on how your police force responded.

Summary of press and PR spend in the 52 police forces questioned

Full Database (Excel). Here you’ll find a sheet with the main findings, a summary sheet and finally the full detail of all our requests to 52 police forces.

Police PR Press Release

Link to Secret Squirrel page

PR/Press spend per 100,000 people, per year
Top 5
Police Service Northern Ireland £99,501.01
Metropolitan Police Force £85,629.10
Northamptonshire Police £80,138.57
Dorset Police £72,670.79
Merseyside Police £68,189.82
Bottom 5
Derbyshire £12,566
Dyfed-Powys £19,088
Durham £20,193
South Yorkshire £20,818 (ave 3 years)
Lincolnshire £20,934
Total PR spend increases
Top 5
Cumbria Constabulary 125%
Dyfed Powys Police 77%
Lincolnshire Police 72%
Northumbria Police 55%
Devon & Cornwall Police 43%
PR staff spend increases
Top 5
Thames Valley Police 146%
Cumbria 136%
Lincolnshire 72%
Dyfed-Powys 65%
Hampshire 61%

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Posted in Articles, Crime & Justice, Freedom of Information | 2 Comments »

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