This article is from the November issue of Total Politics

There can be few areas of social policy where the dictum about lies, damned lies, and statistics is as apposite as when applied to crime.  
The annual British Crime Survey (BCS) suggests that the number of criminal offences in England and Wales nearly halved between the mid-1990s and 2010-11, from around 19 million to ‘just’ 9.6 million. While police-recorded crime is much lower, long-term comparisons are rendered impossible by changes to the way statistics are calculated.  

Thus, during the 15 years to 2010, while BCS figures were showing a steady decrease in offences, police-recorded crime rose and then fell back to a level similar to that of 1995. One reason for these different statistics is simply that the BCS picks up on unreported crime – although even it does not take account of crimes such as business crime or homicides.

It is little wonder, then, that public perception of crime is heavily dependent on how the numbers are spun. Describing Britain as ‘the violent crime capital of Europe’, or claiming that there is more than one burglary a minute (both genuine recent headlines), may be true, but it is open to wide interpretation.

The political challenge – or opportunity – created by this vacillation in numbers is that the public is easily spooked. As graph A (above) shows, the proportion of people acknowledging that they are ‘more worried’ about crime than they were three months earlier fluctuated from 30 per cent to over 50 per cent in a two-month period in 2011. This was due to the ubiquitous media riot coverage and its impact on the national psyche, as also indicated in graph B.


This fluidity of public concern helps explain the yawning chasm between public and political reactions to events that ignite fears. The 2011 summer riots demonstrated this: ComRes, polling for the Sunday Mirror/ Independent on Sunday on 14 August, found 90 per cent of respondents wanted the police to use water cannon to quell rioters, while 82 per cent favoured tear gas. Around 75 per cent said the police should be able to use rubber bullets, while in a YouGov/Sun poll 33 per cent said live bullets should be used.

Focus groups tell us that the public is not necessarily as bloodthirsty as the bare poll headlines suggest. Albert Einstein once wrote: “Every kind of peaceful cooperation among men is primarily based on mutual trust and only secondarily on institutions such as courts of justice and police.” Therefore, when mutual trust breaks down, the public expects the ‘secondary’ institutions to step in and restore peace. They get extremely unhappy if those secondary institutions fail to achieve that aim.

Unfortunately for the police, the riots came hot on the heels of the hacking scandal, after which fully 77 per cent of people acknowledged concerns that the episode revealed wider corruption in the police force. A worrying 63 per cent said they trusted the police less as a result, which is hardly surprising when Sir Paul Stephenson, the man described as ‘Britain’s top cop’, ended his hitherto glittering career under a cloud.

Against this background of distrust, and the public spat between senior government ministers and the police over the handling of the riots, what is the scope for elected police and crime commissioners to align more closely the public mood with the performance of the criminal justice system?
The poll evidence about public expectations is mixed. In the wake of hackgate, ComRes found that 40 per cent felt that directly-elected police chiefs would be more likely to ensure that corrupt officers were brought to justice, against 25 per cent who disagreed. However, an earlier and much-vaunted poll found that 65 per cent of the public would trust a chief constable under the current arrangements to protect their family from crime more than they would trust a chief constable who was ‘reporting to an individual politician elected as a police and crime commissioner’. That question, I should point out, comprised a whopping 73 preambles before respondents were offered options with which to agree…

What is clear is that the public doesn’t really mind how the police force is constituted, or to whom the chief constable is directly responsible, as long as it ensures that criminal activity is met with a sufficiently robust response when mutual trust breaks down.

If elected commissioners are introduced, little – if anything – will visibly change in the way policing is conducted. But it is the exceptional and not the routine that arouses public disquiet. It is axiomatic that the British public is more gung-ho than the police, and the restraint of the latter is widely regarded as a good thing. But what happens when the public’s expectations of practical policing are radically different from the current political consensus, and the person in charge of policing is directly accountable to electors?

It is very unlikely that the 75 per cent who thought the riot police should use rubber bullets would be prepared to pull the trigger themselves – although many could be – yet it would be difficult make the police more accountable without in some way closing the structural disjunction between public and current political views about what is an acceptable police response to criminal situations.

This may simply be what we have to put up with if elected commissioners are introduced. We may just have to wait for a future incident before we know how much an elected commissioner would wish to align with the public’s views.

There is considerable sympathy for frontline police officers, but too often they are regarded as lions led by donkeys. Having elected commissioners may be the answer, but it is unclear whether the wider political stance is prepared to be challenged by the public’s views on law and order.

Andrew Hawkins is chairman of ComRes

Tags: Issue 41, Police commissioners, Theresa May