San
08-15-2008, 01:57 AM
BBC Today (http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7559000/7559395.stm)
The government has promised that it will liberate police officers from chasing meaningless targets.
A policing green paper, From the Neighbourhood to the National, published a month ago, promised to cut red tape and give the police more time to get on with their jobs catching criminals.
In a series of interviews, reporter Andy Hosken spoke to some of the serving police officers who have seen the effect of Home Office targets on their daily workload.
They describe how ordinary law abiding citizens are being criminalised, and how the culture of targets and statistics is destroying police morale, meaning criminals are getting away.
Police officer 1 " We feel utterly demoralised. If it's not government imposing things on us - telling us we should do this, we should do that - then it's the force. I've lost count of the number of re-organisations we've had.
In my force we took our eye off the ball several years ago. I felt we had our priorities completely wrong. The number crunching and the chasing of sanctioned detections was part of it and I just felt that I don't think that's what we're there for.
The theft of a milk bottle by a juvenile counts the same as a multi-million pound fraud. Certainly we are trying to look after the easy detections.
I am aware that officers in a town just north of where I live have been told to go out on patrol deliberately to try and search for cannabis just so they can do a street warning for cannabis which is a sanctioned detection. They are literally told to go out and search a few people and try and find some cannabis so they can give a street warning and get a detection out of it.
Police officer 2 " We are hitting Mr and Mrs Joe Average on the road and hitting them hard, so we can get a little tick in the box to say that we've issued a fixed penalty, when the people who we should be targeting are the people we know are causing the offences, who are causing the burglaries, criminal damages and theft.
The whole idea is to go out and get as much process and as many arrests as you can. That is to the detriment to the public because at the end of the day the vast majority of the public in the UK are law abiding citizens and we really don't need to hit them with a sledgehammer to attain these so called performance figures."
Police officer 3 " We've got to have a means of recording how well we do, but there is a problem with that if you have a particularly good year.
I remember dealing with a burglar who admitted in excess of 100 burglaries, which is great - that made our results look good at the end of the year. But the following year, the results dropped down so somebody was caning the senior officers for their poorer performance.
When someone's arrested it takes up to two hours to process and put them into custody. The computer demands that level of activity. In my day, you put somebody into custody and you were allowed to get on and interview them and do the necessary things"
Police Inspector " Approximately 40 police officers work for me on my team. We could come into work on one day and spend the entire tour of duty looking for a missing person. We get no recognition for that effort.
The following day, as a middle ranking police officer, I'll be held to task over why my team didn't get any sanctioned detections the day before, why we didn't get any arrests, we didn't do any stop searched.
Detecting crimes is everything, stop and search is everything. Arrests, everything. The way that we have our customer focus, everything.
The number of key performance indicators at any one time ranges between 20 and 30, which is a farce. You're running around like a headless chicken worrying about them all.
The job could be done a whole lot better, if we could add something back into the equation which was there when I first joined, which was discretion. We don't have that luxury anymore.
I wonder whether or not the people across our city actually appreciate it when the boss stands up there and says we've increased sanctioned detections by 0.1% in the last six months. I'm not actually sure that they care about that. What they want to know is that they feel safe and that they get a good quality service.
Do we spend a lot of our time worrying about what people think about how we do things, than we do actually doing them? Yes we do. Proportionately we spend more of our time doing that than we do going out policing, which is a real crime in itself.
We don't have the respect of the majority of the people we have to deal with on a day to day basis. Young people are not afraid to speak to us.
It's far easier to be able to tell you about what we're doing pro-actively, to go into all these minor criminal offences, than to actually deal with the reality of what is actually out there. There is a huge problem with drugs, a huge problem with knives which we are simply having no impact on, and a huge problem with violent crime which I believe is increasing not decreasing. "
So, bearing police priority in mind, the number of cannabis arrests in the news compared to hard drugs which we hardly ever hear about, I thought this piece was very telling as it happened to be published on the same day the police are highlighting target driven policing is clearly failing.
Cocaine use trebles in a decade (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/cocaine-use-trebles-in-a-decade-897538.html)
2m Britons take illegal drugs each month; 1 in 3 adults has tried banned substances; 1 in 4 school-aged children has used drugs.
Almost two million people take illegal drugs at least once a month, with cocaine growing in popularity among teenagers and young adults, the widest-ranging official investigation into Britain's drugs habit has discovered.
Research published by the Department of Health shows that more than one-third of the population has experimented with a banned substance at least once.
One in four secondary age schoolchildren has admitted trying drugs and 10 per cent said they had taken a drug in the previous month. The number of under-16s admitted to hospital after taking illegal drugs has risen by almost half in a decade. The statistics also confirm how commonplace drug use has become in modern Britain, which has some of the highest levels of abuse in Western Europe.
But while recreational users who take cocaine or ecstasy at the weekend are growing, the number of hardened addicts has remained stable and the number of people taking cannabis has fallen.
Harry Shapiro, the director of communications at Drugscope, said: "The heavy heroin and crack-using population is stable and appears to be ageing. We haven't seen an influx of young people at the bottom end."
The explanation may lie with the booming economy of the past decade which has kept unemployment rates low, he added. Heroin use soared in the 1980s as a result of the arrival of a cheap, smokable form of the drug from Iran at the same time as rise in unemployment among young people.
The use of cannabis has declined since it was downgraded from class B to C in 2004. Critics predicted use would rise off the scale but it hadn't happened, Mr Shapiro said.
"There has been a shift in the cannabis market, with home-grown pushing out the imported stuff. But, because it is stronger, people are smoking less of it," he said.
Three million people aged between 16 and 59 – or almost one in 10 of that age group – took drugs in 2007-08, including 960,000 who had used a class A substance such as heroin, crack or cocaine. Some 1.9 million people were classed regular users, having taken an illicit substance in the previous month.
Drug use is at its highest among 16- to 24-year-olds, of whom 1.6 million (21.3 per cent) have taken banned substances in the previous year. Their use of cocaine has more than trebled over the past decade. An estimated 375,000 young adults – 6.1 per cent of people aged 16 to 24 – have taken cocaine in the past year.
There were 10,047 hospital admissions in England for drugs poisoning last year, a rise of 43 per cent in 10 years. There were 38,170 admissions for mental health and behavioural problems caused by drug abuse, more than double the figure of 10 years ago.
The number of people aged 25 to 34 treated for these problems almost doubled to 15,330, while the number aged 16 to 24 went up by 17 per cent to 6,983 and the number of under-16s rose by 48 per cent to 402.
Danny Kushlik, the head of policy at the drugs think-tank Transform, said the Government was burying its head in the sand by refusing to acknowledge that millions of people used drugs safely. "In order to maintain its position on prohibition, the Government has to show that all drug use is dangerous. Politicians find it very difficult to admit that 90 per cent of those who use drugs either have a boring or a fun time. Drug policy is overwhelmingly focused in a very skewed way on problem drug users. We should focus our attention more on managing use rather than mismanaging misuse.
"We need legal control and regulation of drug use. That is how we manage use of alcohol and we need the same for drugs."
A spokeswoman for the Department of Health said: "More people than ever before are getting into and staying in treatment, drug-related deaths are down and the level of drug-fuelled crime has fallen substantially."
San:smokin:
The government has promised that it will liberate police officers from chasing meaningless targets.
A policing green paper, From the Neighbourhood to the National, published a month ago, promised to cut red tape and give the police more time to get on with their jobs catching criminals.
In a series of interviews, reporter Andy Hosken spoke to some of the serving police officers who have seen the effect of Home Office targets on their daily workload.
They describe how ordinary law abiding citizens are being criminalised, and how the culture of targets and statistics is destroying police morale, meaning criminals are getting away.
Police officer 1 " We feel utterly demoralised. If it's not government imposing things on us - telling us we should do this, we should do that - then it's the force. I've lost count of the number of re-organisations we've had.
In my force we took our eye off the ball several years ago. I felt we had our priorities completely wrong. The number crunching and the chasing of sanctioned detections was part of it and I just felt that I don't think that's what we're there for.
The theft of a milk bottle by a juvenile counts the same as a multi-million pound fraud. Certainly we are trying to look after the easy detections.
I am aware that officers in a town just north of where I live have been told to go out on patrol deliberately to try and search for cannabis just so they can do a street warning for cannabis which is a sanctioned detection. They are literally told to go out and search a few people and try and find some cannabis so they can give a street warning and get a detection out of it.
Police officer 2 " We are hitting Mr and Mrs Joe Average on the road and hitting them hard, so we can get a little tick in the box to say that we've issued a fixed penalty, when the people who we should be targeting are the people we know are causing the offences, who are causing the burglaries, criminal damages and theft.
The whole idea is to go out and get as much process and as many arrests as you can. That is to the detriment to the public because at the end of the day the vast majority of the public in the UK are law abiding citizens and we really don't need to hit them with a sledgehammer to attain these so called performance figures."
Police officer 3 " We've got to have a means of recording how well we do, but there is a problem with that if you have a particularly good year.
I remember dealing with a burglar who admitted in excess of 100 burglaries, which is great - that made our results look good at the end of the year. But the following year, the results dropped down so somebody was caning the senior officers for their poorer performance.
When someone's arrested it takes up to two hours to process and put them into custody. The computer demands that level of activity. In my day, you put somebody into custody and you were allowed to get on and interview them and do the necessary things"
Police Inspector " Approximately 40 police officers work for me on my team. We could come into work on one day and spend the entire tour of duty looking for a missing person. We get no recognition for that effort.
The following day, as a middle ranking police officer, I'll be held to task over why my team didn't get any sanctioned detections the day before, why we didn't get any arrests, we didn't do any stop searched.
Detecting crimes is everything, stop and search is everything. Arrests, everything. The way that we have our customer focus, everything.
The number of key performance indicators at any one time ranges between 20 and 30, which is a farce. You're running around like a headless chicken worrying about them all.
The job could be done a whole lot better, if we could add something back into the equation which was there when I first joined, which was discretion. We don't have that luxury anymore.
I wonder whether or not the people across our city actually appreciate it when the boss stands up there and says we've increased sanctioned detections by 0.1% in the last six months. I'm not actually sure that they care about that. What they want to know is that they feel safe and that they get a good quality service.
Do we spend a lot of our time worrying about what people think about how we do things, than we do actually doing them? Yes we do. Proportionately we spend more of our time doing that than we do going out policing, which is a real crime in itself.
We don't have the respect of the majority of the people we have to deal with on a day to day basis. Young people are not afraid to speak to us.
It's far easier to be able to tell you about what we're doing pro-actively, to go into all these minor criminal offences, than to actually deal with the reality of what is actually out there. There is a huge problem with drugs, a huge problem with knives which we are simply having no impact on, and a huge problem with violent crime which I believe is increasing not decreasing. "
So, bearing police priority in mind, the number of cannabis arrests in the news compared to hard drugs which we hardly ever hear about, I thought this piece was very telling as it happened to be published on the same day the police are highlighting target driven policing is clearly failing.
Cocaine use trebles in a decade (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/cocaine-use-trebles-in-a-decade-897538.html)
2m Britons take illegal drugs each month; 1 in 3 adults has tried banned substances; 1 in 4 school-aged children has used drugs.
Almost two million people take illegal drugs at least once a month, with cocaine growing in popularity among teenagers and young adults, the widest-ranging official investigation into Britain's drugs habit has discovered.
Research published by the Department of Health shows that more than one-third of the population has experimented with a banned substance at least once.
One in four secondary age schoolchildren has admitted trying drugs and 10 per cent said they had taken a drug in the previous month. The number of under-16s admitted to hospital after taking illegal drugs has risen by almost half in a decade. The statistics also confirm how commonplace drug use has become in modern Britain, which has some of the highest levels of abuse in Western Europe.
But while recreational users who take cocaine or ecstasy at the weekend are growing, the number of hardened addicts has remained stable and the number of people taking cannabis has fallen.
Harry Shapiro, the director of communications at Drugscope, said: "The heavy heroin and crack-using population is stable and appears to be ageing. We haven't seen an influx of young people at the bottom end."
The explanation may lie with the booming economy of the past decade which has kept unemployment rates low, he added. Heroin use soared in the 1980s as a result of the arrival of a cheap, smokable form of the drug from Iran at the same time as rise in unemployment among young people.
The use of cannabis has declined since it was downgraded from class B to C in 2004. Critics predicted use would rise off the scale but it hadn't happened, Mr Shapiro said.
"There has been a shift in the cannabis market, with home-grown pushing out the imported stuff. But, because it is stronger, people are smoking less of it," he said.
Three million people aged between 16 and 59 – or almost one in 10 of that age group – took drugs in 2007-08, including 960,000 who had used a class A substance such as heroin, crack or cocaine. Some 1.9 million people were classed regular users, having taken an illicit substance in the previous month.
Drug use is at its highest among 16- to 24-year-olds, of whom 1.6 million (21.3 per cent) have taken banned substances in the previous year. Their use of cocaine has more than trebled over the past decade. An estimated 375,000 young adults – 6.1 per cent of people aged 16 to 24 – have taken cocaine in the past year.
There were 10,047 hospital admissions in England for drugs poisoning last year, a rise of 43 per cent in 10 years. There were 38,170 admissions for mental health and behavioural problems caused by drug abuse, more than double the figure of 10 years ago.
The number of people aged 25 to 34 treated for these problems almost doubled to 15,330, while the number aged 16 to 24 went up by 17 per cent to 6,983 and the number of under-16s rose by 48 per cent to 402.
Danny Kushlik, the head of policy at the drugs think-tank Transform, said the Government was burying its head in the sand by refusing to acknowledge that millions of people used drugs safely. "In order to maintain its position on prohibition, the Government has to show that all drug use is dangerous. Politicians find it very difficult to admit that 90 per cent of those who use drugs either have a boring or a fun time. Drug policy is overwhelmingly focused in a very skewed way on problem drug users. We should focus our attention more on managing use rather than mismanaging misuse.
"We need legal control and regulation of drug use. That is how we manage use of alcohol and we need the same for drugs."
A spokeswoman for the Department of Health said: "More people than ever before are getting into and staying in treatment, drug-related deaths are down and the level of drug-fuelled crime has fallen substantially."
San:smokin: