Private Policing, No more ACPO, Problem solved

I haven't posted anything connected to my former life in the Met and the Bumstead Pleece Force for quite a while. Haven't felt the urge as it's all gone a bit quiet whilst the Martians hatch their plan to invade and take over the police service of the UK (not sure about Scotland yet). I've kept in touch via a blogpal called Lex over here at the Thinking Policeman's Blog.

There's much talk of the privatisation of police services across the UK in the rush to make it all more efficient and better and stuff cheap, not to mention `robbing pensions to pay G4S` . I have seen this sort of thing in other formats. In the early 90's I was looking closely at the Dutch criminal justice system. I actually quite liked it and still do when I think about it. I liked their liberal democracy, their justice system with no jury trials and I even spent some time in one of their remand prisons. High rates of reoffending, just like in the UK but there was a much greater air of calm inside.  Maybe the state of the art workshops, where the prisoners got a share of the profits from goods they produced for local shops and stores was a factor, or that the accommodation was better than the hotel I was staying in? There was even a waiting list of people patiently biding their time on `bail`, still going about their daily lives in order to serve a sentence that had been handed down when the prisons happened to be `full`.We sort of have this, only it doesn't involve getting locked up at all, nor the threat of being locked up, nor the means of reducing your pending sentence by good behaviour during your waiting time. I thinks it goes by many names, one of them being `the suspended sentence` the others having similarly misleading titles. Their system; `you are going to jail, but not just yet....` Our system, `you won't go to jail, providing...well, nothing really`.

I had an interesting conversation with a senior officer from Belgium - well any conversation with a Belgian is interesting, especially if they get excited and revert to their native tongue which transforms the sounds and syntax to something resembling those Aquarians from the tv show "Stingray" for those of you old enough. No one can get close to comprehending Belgian or Dutch, except the Belgians and Dutch. This senior Belgian officer told me that he was experiencing something of a crisis of staffing. The local Mayor of his district (also the administrative head of the local police perhaps similar to the proposed  `commissioners`?) had a budget problem but he also had a plan. He had ordered the deployment of his Municipal Police to do a close scrutiny of the local farmers, checking their licences, animal movement registers in fact all things rural. This took up an inordinate amount of police time and resources. Why do this, you may ask, when there are more pressing matters for the forces of law and order to attend to. It was explained to me thus;

By being able to show that his Municipal Police force was fully engaged in law enforcement (albeit agricultural and rural matters) and that he had all these other crime and disorder problems without sufficient resources to cope, the Mayor could apply for the support of the national police service, at national government expense, to sort out his crime and disorder problems. So you had the rather odd situation of the municipal police counting sheep whilst the national force policed his busy urban areas. Now that's policing on the cheap.

I'm not saying that's what our government has in mind...I'm just sayin`