In this video, I ask British police to be understanding toward us when enforcing the social distancing rules because, in spite of the fact that the lock-down resembles being imprisoned to some degree, we haven’t actually done anything wrong.
Police officers should also comply with the rules themselves.
One of the strangest things about the corona virus crisis is that police officers do not apply distancing, do not wear masks, do not use sanitising gel or gloves and behave as if police officers are 100% immune.
That is, if they are modifying their behaviours to take the infection risk into account with regard to themselves (and us), then I haven’t seen a shred of evidence of it yet.
(photo not related to corona virus situation)
Not only does it put them at risk, and us, it also creates inadvertent resentment, particularly if you combine it with some of the overzealous activity we saw until somebody told them to stop doing that. (Except, then they tackled Marie Dinou and locked her up for two days: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/coronavirus-fine-police-lockdown-travel-newcastle-marie-dinou-a9444186.html)
When I see photos of cops standing around as if nothing has changed, I automatically feel anger welling up in me.
It comes out of nowhere.
I think it’s because them standing around pretending they are immune while were stuck in our homes, often living in limited conditions as a result, feels thoroughly unfair.
Plus it somehow makes it feel as if they are our jailers.
We’ve done nothing wrong.
So that makes it feel doubly unfair and that can create resentment.
These are two strong arguments for changing this:
– For health reasons (to protect the officers too);
– To prevent resentment from citizens down the line.
Because if we end up being stuck in our homes for many more weeks or months down the line, many people may become increasingly frustrated.
Solidarity helps. We are all in this together. Police officers are NOT immune against the virus.
It may also shatter your illusions, however, if you still believe that police are the good ones, the ones (that you pay for through your council tax, in Britain) to help keep you safe and secure and protect your basic rights.
This morning, this caught my eye:
(Scottish) Police Pause Rollout Of Device That Hacks Into Phones After Fears ‘It Is Unlawful’
I suspect that police in England and Wales already are using these “kiosks” that hack into people’s phones and laptops, overriding passwords.
I am sure it can be great fun for some officers to play with these “kiosks”. You can almost hear them talk. “I knew it! She’s a lesbian!” and “Does he really think he stands a chance with that woman?” and “Oh my god! Trying to lose weight? Fat chance!”
Yep, very useful.</end of sarcasm>
We need an alternative to police. Because going to or contacting the police has become one of the worst things to do in almost any situation. (Unless your insurance company wants a copy of a report after a burglary or theft, but leave it at that and do not ask police to do anything else other than give you a copy of the report.) How it got to this point? It’s immaterial. It’s what we have in the here and the now.
As Michael Doherty (a former aircraft engineer who made the mistake of reporting something to police and expecting police to follow up on it) says in the video below, you do have the right to investigate on your own, to try to detect and stop crime on your own. If your investigation is successful, you can also prosecute on your own. (I am talking about England and Wales.)
But before you choose this path, as I have stated several times before, look into the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 because police and others can use this against you, assuming that you are unaware of 1(3)(a), which most people probably are. That means that, before you know it, you can already have confessed to a crime that you didn’t actually commit. To prevent this, you need to know what the law says.
I repeat and highlight:
(3) Subsection (1) [F4 or (1A)] does not apply to a course of conduct if the person who pursued it shows—
(a) that it was pursued for the purpose of preventing or detecting crime,
(b) that it was pursued under any enactment or rule of law or to comply with any condition or requirement imposed by any person under any enactment, or
(c) that in the particular circumstances the pursuit of the course of conduct was reasonable.
(Whether it says “and” or “or” makes a difference. It means that each of these conditions on its own applies, that they do not have to apply all at once.)
The video below dates back to 2015, is rather academic and particularly in the beginning lacks a logical thread, in my opinion, but does contain useful information.
You may want to read this as well:
The Human Rights Act Can Transform Lives Without Going To Court
(Also, if you want to protect yourself from police with a camera, you need to have one that does not have wifi or bluetooth.)
It is possible to resolve many situations or at least make them somewhat liveable without going to police, and much more successfully and/or peacefully. If you try this after you’ve been to police, however, police officers are likely to hold it against you. (This is mean because most people who contacted the police in the past decade will have been told that police wouldn’t investigate and would do nothing with what they told the police owing to a lack of resources and/or will have been referred to their GP and the local civic offices.)
Unfortunately, most of us learn these things the hard way – and you can’t undo having contacted the police.
Below, you will find a highly entertaining university lecture by a law professor (James Duane) and a police officer about why you should never talk to the police. Ever.
(James Duane won a national debating award when he was still in high school. You can tell.)
Most of us are raised on fairy tales about the police that have little to do with reality. So was I.
Much later in life, when I became more proficient in legal matters, I realized that not only should you never talk to police, you should never let police into your home either, even if you’ve already decided you aren’t going to say a thing.
I’ll tell you why.
(Besides that, as James Duane demonstrates in his lecture, saying nothing is very hard.)
When I was much younger, one of my sisters had a boyfriend who was with the police. When the two visited my home for the first time, I noticed how little reticence he displayed with regard to opening the door to my bedroom and walking straight into it. I realized that it probably came from his policing background.
Would I have been happy for him to have walked in on, say, a display of sex toys or my bloody underpants on the floor because I happened to have gotten my period unexpectedly that day, or even a collection of childhood teddy bears? Probably not!
We value our personal life. Our personal privacy.
Without you being aware of it, police may already have access to all your phone calls and other electronic communications. Everything is recorded and kept these days. So, do they really still need to be able to discover that childhood teddy bear collection in your bedroom too?
You usually are under no obligation whatsoever to open the door to police and if police officers think you have done something very serious, they’ll bust the door down anyway.
This is not about being dishonest or having no respect or about trying to make the lives of police officers as hard as possible. This is about the reality that “life ain’t fair” and that stuff happens. Even when no bad intentions are involved.
Everything that James Duane says is true, and for many reasons. The main reason for how we can get ourselves into a mess is probably that most of us are chatty, perhaps particularly when we’re under some kind of pressure.
So, as Duane explains, you may end up accidentally saying something that has nothing to do with why police wanted to talk with you but that happens to reveal a violation of some obscure law that should have been updated decades ago but wasn’t and that one of the two police officers you’re talking with just happens to know about.
But as Duane also explains, you could for example mention that you weren’t in town on a certain day, not knowing that someone else firmly believes to have seen you that day. That is likely to come across as a lie on your side, even if you aren’t lying at all.
Part of being chatty also seems to be that we sometimes say really dumb things.
I sometimes catch myself saying the stupidest stuff when I am making small talk, or letting stuff rest that other people say. Stuff that isn’t true. Stuff that makes me look bad, or look silly. Nothing serious, usually. Just silly stuff that makes me look dumber than I am.
Such as that when I bought an iPad, I splashed out without thinking. I had a very practical reason for purchasing an iPad and it had to do with my business. But that’s for me to know. I don’t feel inclined to correct another person about an assumption he or she makes when all I am doing is making small talk. I know why I bought that iPad, and that’s enough for me.
But sometimes, I leave stuff unchallenged that I really should have spoken up about and at other times, I find myself automatically saying things like “yeah, me too”. I guess I do it to be sympathetic or because I don’t want to come across as too overpowering or too much of a “smart ass”.
When James Duane did his little quiz, I thought “That’s funny, I didn’t know that they had been dot dot dot but he definitely said dot dot dot” and so I too thought I knew the answer. We say what we say in such instances because we are so eager to get it right, and we know that that answer is the right one. Only, it isn’t. It is the right answer, but to a different question.
The Supreme Court, in Robinson v Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police [2018] UKSC 4, has declared that if “a third party such as a pedestrian is injured as a result of a negligent arrest on the street by a police officer, the police are liable in negligence where that injury was a reasonably foreseeable consequence of the police’s actions.”
Read more, here:
http://www.ukpolicelawblog.com/index.php/9-blog/163-an-assault-on-hill-police-liability-in-negligence-narrowed
It’s always annoyed me immensely that British police could almost never be held accountable for anything they did. It’s a recipe for carelessness, almost literally, when duty of care does not apply.
So I am pleased to see that a little bit more liability is finally appearing.
(I used to have an interesting in policing and the law a few years ago but local police officers weren’t very fond of that, I was made to understand, and I decided to drop it.)
Dutch daily Trouw prominently featured anger about a human rights violation on its 6 September front page (online version; 8 January 2010: this has been updated since I read the article and wrote this post).
Not only had Dutch police tasered a patient in so-called drive-stun mode (“pain compliance“), the patient in question already was in solitary confinement.
I was shocked when I read this. It seems to signal a return to practices I thought we had left behind a long time ago, and it particularly worries me that this happened in the Netherlands of all places.
“This is torture,” say Amnesty International as well as organizations of patients and their relatives, and Amnesty has called for an immediate suspension of the use of this type of weapon by Dutch police, so I understand. According to Trouw, the taser’s manufacturer advises against use on psychiatric patients and Amnesty believes taser use may actually be life-threatening in such cases.
This is likely the first time a taser was used to subdue a hospitalized psychiatric patient in the Netherlands, where three-hundred police officers are currently testing tasers.
The following appears to have transpired.
On 17 July, police officers were called to a hospital in Cappelle aan de IJssel, in which a male patient in his twenties was having a psychotic episode. (When Dutch police are called to a hospital for a problem with a patient, police take over responsibility.)
The patient was having a bad day, apparently, and had refused to take his antipsychotic medicines. Rotterdam police were first called to force the patient into solitary confinement (to reduce sensory input and calm the patient down).
In the evening, police were called again, for unknown reasons. That’s when the tasering occurred.
The patient’s mother, Marijke Bos, found out about the incident a few days later during a visit on her son’s birthday. Her son had dark bruises under his eyes, several bruises on one of his hips and roughly thirty small taser-related lesions on his back. The patient had also been tasered on one of his feet.
The patient’s mother has filed several formal complaints.
The hospital staff reportedly is also extremely dismayed about the taser use.
Solitary confinement in itself can be damaging and can be seen as a human rights violation. Tasering a patient who already is in solitary confinement and clearly no danger to anyone else raises eyebrows, to put it mildly.
It seems to me that tasering in drive-stun mode is even worse than using a baseball bat to knock someone out as it deliberately causes pain, so it is more comparable to stabbing someone with a knife or throwing scalding water or oil.
The incident made me wonder about taser use on patients in other countries and I did a quick web search. It is not clear whether other reports of taser use on patients concern drive-stun mode or probe mode, but probe mode is the usual taser mode.
New Zealand police used a taser on a mentally ill man earlier this year as well and it was the country’s second case this year in which taser use against a mentally ill person was ruled (excessive and) unjustified:
“Police told the 21-year-old he would need to be strip searched, the man repeatedly refused to remove his clothes telling the officers he had a history of sexual abuse and didn’t feel comfortable being touched by males.”
In Britain, even taser use in general has turned out to concern mainly mentally ill persons, according to Home Office figures:
Taser use against patients in hospitals has already around in Britain for more than ten years:
The consensus appears to be that this is a big no-no:
I agree with Matilda MacAttram (director of Black Mental Health UK and writer of the above article in the Guardian) that there is no role for police in mental healthcare, just like police have no business in heart surgeries and appendectomies either.
See also this article:
Essentially, you don’t. You avoid them as much as you can because in Britain, you must consider police your enemy. They are not on your side. They are on their own side.
(Note: Anything I say on this page won’t stop me from, say, buying donuts for random police officers when they’ve all been called back from leave and are working very long days out on the streets. I do my best to see them as individual people.)
The only good reason for going to a police station in Britain is when you need to do that to be able to make an insurance claim.
Police in Britain stopped investigating crimes against individuals at least 10 years ago because they lack the resources to do so. The only crime against an individual that they are still bound to look into is when that individual has been murdered or if the individual is a supermarket owner or the like they like and someone has stolen a sandwich because he or she was hungry and was, say, caught red-handed or recorded on CCTV.
Other than that, forget it. That does not have to leave you stranded in all cases in which you’d normally expect to be able to get assistance from the police officers whose salaries you pay for through your council tax, after all.
Below are some tips, first for if you are a crime victim and second for if police are targeting you, for instance, because you are a crime victim.
Here is the GOLDEN RULE:
If police officers knock on your door, never ever open the door. Under no circumstances.
(You can still talk with them through the closed door, if you feel that it’s useful or required.)
1. Are you the victim of a crime?
Unless you need to do this for the sake of an insurance claim, do not go to the police. If you go to the police, the officers may tell you that they will use the information you give them as intelligence (though they won’t tell you that they are more likely to use it against you than against the perpetrator of the crime(s) you are reporting).
In almost all cases, they will also tell you to go to your council (civic offices) and to your GP. Don’t take it personally when they do this, even though it may sound like they are suggesting that you need mental health assistance. (After all, how on earth can a GP help solve a burglary, for instance?) They say this to just about everyone all over the country. It’s nothing personal; it‘s merely national policy.
You can investigate and try to stop crimes having been or being perpetrated against you but you have to proceed very carefully.
2. Are you being targeted by police?
British police officers these days seem to go after just about any person that they perceive as easy prey for their arrest (and prosecution) records and whose name and address they have. This could be someone who is probably poor or lower-class, someone who they suspect has a mental health problem and also someone who lives on his or her own or will likely only have kids in the house. So that there won’t be a partner who says “wait a minute!” and they only have to deal with one adult who police officers think will be intimated. Police officers know very well what effect they have on normal citizens and they exploit it when it serves them.
They also are more likely to go after people they don’t like, such as people who report serious crimes and are inexperienced enough to keep asking police officers what they are doing about it, particularly if the person lives on his or her own or will likely have only kids at home.
The problem with reporting a crime is that in the process, you give police officers a lot of information about yourself. They have your name and address now and know what you look like. By contrast, they very likely do not know the identity of the person who committed the crime or is committing the crimes you are reporting. They do now know also some of your personal circumstances, such as that you just broke off your relationship, got fired, just started a new job, whether you rent or own your home and things like that.
If you become the victim of a crime, no matter what cause of action you take (go to the police and/or investigate yourself), it raises the probability that police will start targeting you.
Under no circumstances report a crime and then keep calling to ask what the police officers are doing about it, even if a police officer has told you to do so. (Don’t investigate and report on your investigations either, not even if they have specifically asked you to do so.) All of this is bound to annoy them so much that you may well find them knocking on your door on Sunday morning at 7 am, when you innocently open the door and then find the door slammed into your face and yourself crushed onto the floor and arrested, your kids watching scared and helpless.
Unfortunately, that is the reality in Britain. It happened to Michael Doherty, for instance.
If you’re a woman, it may be more likely that police officers will call the local mental health hospital behind your back and suggest that you are mentally unwell. They may also pay your employer a visit and anyone else who suggesting to that you are not well in the head may disadvantage you.
That too is the reality of Britain today.
Do not open the door if police officers (are targeting you and) knock on your door. You do not have to open the door if police officers knock on your door, no matter what they tell you (with very few exceptions and in those cases, it makes no difference whether you open the door or not, so, don’t). That’s right.
Police officers can sound very convincing when they tell you all sorts of bullshit. Some of them are genuinely convinced that they know the law because they have this law book specifically for police in which they can look things up. If it says anything that does not suit them but would be to your advantage, they won’t tell you that. It will almost never come back to bite them anyway. In practice, police officers in Britain rarely have to adhere to the law, let alone administer it appropriately.
If you ever get arrested, don’t trust whoever shows up as duty solicitor either. He or she will not be interested in your rights. He or she will either want to get out of the police station as soon as possible or milk the circumstances for whatever reason. Of course, there are exceptions – GOOD and HONEST lawyers do exist; in fact, a few of your personal heroes may be lawyers – but under no circumstances assume that a duty solicitor will look out for you.
If you are investigating crime committed or being committed, someone may still call the police and say that you are harassing him or her. This is more likely if that person is the person who committed or has committed the crimes you are investigating, of course, because he or she knows that your powers are nowhere near those of police officers and may have more experience with police than you. He or she will want to make you go away and complaining about you is a possible approach to that.
That is particularly why you need to know what the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, Section 1, subsection 3, sub a says so that you can say that and maybe even show the printout of that law. Do not count on a duty solicitor to do that for you!
The fact that you are investigating crime on your own already indicates that you are not a person in power, after all. It makes you easily dismissible in the eyes of the police and in the eyes of the duty solicitor. Stand your ground. Don’t let them walk all over you. (You were doing what police officers should be doing. It is not your fault that, as a rule, they no longer deal with crimes committed against individuals these days.)
Also, you have informed several persons such as for example your MP about what you were going to do and you have witnesses.
Last but not least, a bit of a warning. Shana Grice, a young woman who reported being stalked to police was accused by police of wasting police time police (and fined, I believe) before her stalker killed her. There are other women in Britain who were killed by their stalkers, and they too were often not taken seriously by police.
I know a woman who was in similar circumstances, in the Netherlands. Her ex-boyfriend started stalking her and strangled her almost to death one day. In stark contrast to British police, Dutch police did not dismiss her but were very helpful. They advised her to relocate to a town in which she did not know anyone so that her ex was least likely to look for her there.
She took the advice, even though it meant breaking off her Master’s. She moved to a town at quite a distance from where she used to be and also from where her family was, enrolled in a lower-level educational program, then enrolled in another Master’s and after that started a PhD track. She got that PhD and she’s also a mother now.
(He eventually tracked her down in her new town too, but it took him a long time, and by then, he was less angry. One of her house mates or neighbors found him on the doorstep one day, and convinced him to go back and leave the woman alone.)
If you are being stalked in a way that seriously worries you, do not investigate or try to stop it by yourself (and certainly don’t bother reporting it to British police, also because they are likely to inform your stalker of everything you told police, whether on purpose of accidentally). Do what Dutch police advised this young Dutchwoman.
Hopefully, you’ll never need to know any of the above.
If you do use any of the above, and you end up killed, stabbed, bullied, hacked, arrested or anything else that you would have preferred to avoid, then note that you cannot hold me liable for any of that. I am not a lawyer, certainly not within this context, and I am not in a position to shield you from all risk.
Like the woman I mentioned above – no, it wasn’t me; it concerns a much younger woman whose acquaintance I made when she was working on her PhD – I too have only very positive experiences with Dutch police, even in sensitive circumstances that could have easily created friction and for which the officers in question had no training. Hats off!
I have worked with Dutch police in a neighbourhood crime prevention initiative. I also have positive experiences with American police, but race riots broke out in the US city where I used to live only shortly after I left. As we all know, American police has its troubles too because there had been too many incidents in which innocent black persons were killed by police officers in that city.
I think such incidents are often the result of irrational fears on the side of the police officers who often work under a lot of tension. I have personally witnessed in the US that when I had to call police in highly suspicious circumstances, they seemed much more scared and nervous than I was (presumably because I was living in a Florida neighbourhood that didn’t have a good reputation at the time). They were also looking out for my safety extremely well and I noticed that with gratitude.
I wish I could be more positive about British police.
I post the following from the work of Dr Lorraine Sheridan, as this can be vital information to have.
Typology 4: Sadistic stalking (12.9%)
Characteristics
· victim is an obsessive target of the offender, and who’s life is seen as quarry and prey (incremental orientation)
· victim selection criteria is primarily rooted in the victim being:(i) someone worthy of spoiling, i.e. someone who is perceived by the stalker at the commencement as being: – happy – ‘good’ – stable – content and
(ii) lacking in the victim’s perception any just rationale as to why she was targeted· initial low level acquaintance
· apparently benign initially but unlike infatuation harassment the means of intervention tend to have negative orientation designed to disconcert, unnerve, and ergo take power away from the victim
– notes left in victim’s locked car in order to unsettle target (cf. billet-doux of infatuated harassment)
– subtle evidence being left of having been in contact with the victim’s personal items e.g. rifled underwear drawer, re-ordering/removal of private papers, cigarette ends left in ash trays, toilet having been used etc.
– ‘helping’ mend victims car that stalker had previously disabled · thereafter progressive escalation of control over all aspects (i.e. social, historical, professional, financial, physical) of the victim’s life· offender gratification is rooted in the desire to extract evidence of the victim’s powerlessness with inverse implications for his power => sadism
· additional implication => self-perpetuating in desire to hone down relentlessly on individual victim(s)
· emotional coldness, deliberateness and psychopathy (cf. the heated nature of ex-partner harassment)
· tended to have a history of stalking behaviour and the controlling of others · stalker tended to broaden out targets to family and friends in a bid to isolate the victim and further enhance his control
· communications tended to be a blend of loving and threatening (not hate) designed to de-stabilise and confuse the victim
· threats were either overt (“We’re going to die together”) or subtle (delivery of dead roses)
· stalker could be highly dangerous– in particular with psychological violence geared to the controlling of the victim with fear, loss of privacy and the curtailment of her social world
· physical violence was also entirely possible
– especially by means which undermine the victim’s confidence in matters normally taken for granted e.g. disabling brake cables, disarming safety equipment, cutting power off
· sexual content of communications was aimed primarily to intimidate through the victim’s humiliation, disgust and general undermining of self-esteem
· the older the offender, the more likely he would have enacted sadistic stalking before and would not be likely to offend after 40 years of age if not engaged in such stalking before
· victim was likely to be re-visited after a seeming hiatusCase management implications
· should be taken very seriously
· acknowledge from outset that the stalker activity will be very difficult to eradicate
· acknowledge that there is no point whatsoever in appealing to the offender – indeed will exacerbate the problem
· never believe any assurances, alternative versions of events etc. which are given by the offender
· however, record them for use in legal action later
· the victim should be given as much understanding and support as can be made available
· the victim should not be given false or unrealistic assurance or guarantees that s/he will be protected
· the victim should carefully consider relocation. Geographical emphasis being less on distance per se, and more on where the offender is least able to find the victim
· the police should have in mind that the sadistic stalker will be likely to:(i) carefully construct and calculate their activity to simultaneously minimise the risk of intervention by authorities while retaining maximum impact on victim,
(ii) be almost impervious to intervention since the overcoming of obstacles provides
(iii) new and potent means of demonstrating the victim’s powerlessness (ergo self-perpetuating) and,
(iiii) if jailed will continue both personally and vicariously with the use of a network.
http://www.le.ac.uk/press/ebulletin/archive/speaker_sheridan.html
http://www.le.ac.uk/ebulletin-archive/ebulletin/features/2000-2009/2007/07/nparticle.2007-07-17.html
Yesterday, I found this note under my door. Is this a prank, evidence of boredom (komkommertijd bij de Engelse politie?) or does this inquiry relate to when I was attacked in July 2007?
Hint: I added two letters to the note.
I think it is a prank. First of all, the police forces here are stretched thin in many ways and the officers don’t have the time to go around inquiring randomly whether persons are fine. That makes no sense. They stopped investigating crimes against individuals ten years ago because they don’t have the resources. Their standard response when you report a crime – all over the country, not just in your own town – is that they will treat any information you give them as “intelligence” and then they refer you to the city council and your GP. (In practice, they tend to serve mostly as “citizen oppression officers”, unfortunately.)
Also, it just so happens that I stopped by at the police station only a few days ago, with my passport, to inquire about something in relation to an e-mail I’d had from my home country (someone had reported me missing after my e-mails stopped getting through to him) and the officer at the desk said that everything was fine.
Yes, I was attacked by five lads in July 2007, in an incident similar to two others that had just cost the lives of two Britons. (Thankfully, I didn’t know that at the time of the attack; a Briton in my home country later e-mailed me about it.) Local police (Hampshire Police) showed zero interest in what had transpired at the time, which is rather odd in view of the fact that they must have been aware of the other incidents. Or…?
It is hard to imagine them showing up 10 years later!
A while after the attack back then, via the Old Bailey, I got in touch with the widow of one of the other victims, which was probably good for both of us. After all, I merely had a mild concussion – two stones hit my head – and never lost consciousness so I was relatively fine. (I sustained a serious concussion in my teens as a result of two blows to my head during a traffic accident and those knocked me out good. I was carted off by ambulance then, so I knew it wasn’t as bad as that.)
When I found the lads sitting on a wall in front of my home a few days later, I called police in a bit of a panic, but then too, police, well, I guess were completely unaware of the other two incidents that had happened and cost lives? It is the only explanation that makes sense.
So, no, Hampshire Police officers don’t go around inquiring whether people are well, not even after a serious attack, and I am not on a first-name basis with anyone called William either.
So it must be another prank, from anonymous neighborhood folks. I get pranked a lot. Also by police.
(The latter isn’t something I can explain to people in my home country as it appears to be part of the quintessentially British makeup.)
On 30 December 2009, the home office published Home Office Research Report 28: Improving public confidence in the police: a review of the evidence.
On 4 September 2014, a review of police functioning in England and Wales revealed that victims of crimes are being encouraged to investigate themselves, when they report offences to the police, according to the BBC. Other media, including The Guardian and the Huffington Post, also paid attention to the findings of this review.
Although the Association of Chief Police Officers appear to be explaining them as a consequence of austerity, these practices of telling victims to investigate crimes committed against them are not new.
When I reported an incident that according to the police constituted identity theft and harassment, the officer I spoke with informed me that I had to do the legwork myself if I wanted anything done because the police didn’t have the manpower to investigate these high-volume crimes. He also explained that what had happened to me could be very unsettling. He asked me whether I wanted counselling as it was available if I needed it. I appreciated that, but I declined.
That was in October 2008, when austerity measures did not play any role.
According to the BBC, the reviewers (led by Roger Baker) made similar observations, namely that this trend of telling citizens to solve crimes started before the budget cuts.
What may be related to the budget cuts, is that (in my own experience) police officers appear much less likely to offer any assistance with the psychological consequences of crimes people have been subjected to, even in more serious cases (other than standard phrases about victim support in automated recordings and printed information materials).
I think that I can safely assume that confidence in the police is currently worse than it was in 2009.
A September 2014 poll conducted by my local newspaper, the Portsmouth News, showed that only 8% of the respondents believed that police would properly investigate if they’d reported anything other than very serious crimes to the police. This number remained fairly constant during the increase of the number of respondents; the only brief deviation I saw was a percentage of 9.
But what does this low number mean?
In January 20913, the University of Twente in the Netherlands published a Bachelor thesis on the topic (confidence in the police). Notably researchers in the US and other non-EU countries have already conducted a great deal of work in this area.
When the public has a great deal of confidence in its police force, this can lead to increased feelings of safety and a decrease in fearfulness among citizens. Confidence in the police is also a good indicator for the quality of policing and of how well the public accepts the authority of the police as well as its actions.
Four factors play a role in the theoretical model to predict confidence in the police:
These factors also influence people’s fearfulness.
Confidence in the police consist of the following six components:
How does the above relate to crime figures?
In October 2014, Portsmouth City Council’s publication Flagship reported that “crime recorded by police is down by 33% since 2007/8 and 8% since last year.” I wonder how these numbers relate to the numbers of actual occurring crimes. Does citizens still report as many crimes to the police as they used to when they have experienced over the years that the police won’t investigate anyway? About 90% of all rapes go unreported, I read the other day.
The Flagship also gave numbers based on a March 2014 survey with 849 respondents. Of those respondents, 2% had experienced burglary, 1% mugging or robbing and 3% was assaulted such as beaten up. It did not mention the percentage of these crimes had actually been reported to the police. It did mention that 40% of the respondents fear burglary, 17% fear mugging/robbery and 14% fear being assaulted or beaten up.
How fearful citizens are of crime and of becoming crime victims is generally related to how much confidence they have in the police.
In essence, the fearfulness among the public does not represent citizens’ “degree of silliness” but reflects police performance and the degree of confidence people have in the police.
How much confidence people have in the police is also related to how much confidence people have in other organisations, in general.
In the Netherlands, how much confidence people have in the police is positively correlated to the quality of the contact they had with the police in the preceding twelve months, but negatively correlated if they were a victim of crime.
The Dutch study at the University of Twente was based on survey data for 125 respondents in the Netherlands.
In the same year, the Erasmus University published an extensive study of trends in the public’s confidence in the police and what they mean.
Thanks for reading. Do you still report crime to the police?
The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) has reported that in 2014, nearly 70% of UK law firms reported a cyber security incident.
Read more: here.
The first half of the article focuses on bogus law firms. The second paragraph under the ad is about how cyber crime affects law firms.
Uber Technologies – not a law firm – has billions at its disposal; that allowed it to do some investigating that enabled it to file a John Doe lawsuit after its recently reported hacking incident. Which it discovered about half a year after the fact and then kept silent about for another six months. Give or take a few days.
