Hyper-fund the Police
Why we should be raising up our Police forces rather than tearing them down
“Defund the Police” became an all-too-common chant in ongoing protests against police brutality in the USA after the murder of George Floyd. I always thought it was strange to demand that an underperforming institution, especially one as important as law enforcement, be de-funded. Surely this would just make the situation worse? Indeed, it seems to me that many of the issues of modern policing are as a direct result of budget cuts or, at the very least, contingent on spending restrictions. I propose a large-scale overhaul of not just police practice and funding, but of how we think about the profession as a society, and how we choose the right people for the job.
Of course, defund the police may be implicitly suggesting that no police force at all would be preferable to a functional police force. Thankfully, proponents of this view gave us the opportunity to see such a flawed argument in all its fire and glory in the much reported on Capital Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in Seattle, USA. Needless to say, it didn’t go well. If you want details of this anarchistic disaster look elsewhere. For now, I’m going to assume that having a well-funded, well-trained police force is a societal good and one that we should strive towards achieving.
I was born in the UK and have lived here ever since. In my twenties I volunteered as a Special Constable in three UK police forces and have some insight into the realities of policing. Of course, this leaves me far from an expert, but I believe I have insight enough to propose an idea, one that I hope you might resonate with. Here goes.
Defunding the police is a stupid idea. But not only do we need to avoid that dumpster fire, we need to fund the police properly, not just to pre-austerity levels but we need to dramatically increase funding. We need to Hyper-fund the Police.
Before I joined the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), took the oath and earned my warrant card, I had no real understanding of the Office of Constable and how important and, crucially, powerful the role is. And I mean literally, powerful. The legal powers that the Office of Constable bestows are extreme. Absolutely necessary, in my opinion, but there’s no word for it but extreme.
This isn’t about speeding fines or drunk-and-disorderlies, it isn’t about confiscating alcohol in no-drink zones or breaking up domestics. It isn’t even really about stop-and-search powers. The powers I had, conferred upon me by the Crown and validated by the little leather warrant card that I carried in my pocket, were ripe for misuse and misunderstanding. Indeed, in appointing me, and people like me, we were undervaluing an institution that deserved ultimate respect.
These men and women walk the streets- I walked the streets- with powers that should make you uncomfortable, especially if you knew how easy it was to get them, how low the bar for entry was, and how little training I needed.
I make no case that any of the below listed powers should be removed or curtailed, only that we should take heed of their importance and severity, that we might properly account for how unique the Office of Constable is. I hope that we might therefore give real consideration to my proposal.
Police Powers
The Power of Arrest
Section 24 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984 confers the power of arrest upon police constables. This act provides that they can restrict your liberty, a right conferred upon you by Article 5 of the European Convention of Human Rights via the Human Rights Act of 1988. Let’s not forget, these are supposed to be basic rights, the lowest expectation of what all humans should expect.
Of course, there are many scenarios in which the restriction of such a right is absolutely necessary. But this is not a trivial power. We might be naïve enough to think that this power is only used on criminals so it’s ok, we don’t need to worry. If that’s where you’re at, I point you towards The Secret Barrister, an excellent book by an anonymous criminal barrister. You won’t find spoilers here, but suffice it to say, you should absolutely be cognizant of this most core of police powers, especially if you haven’t committed an offence.
The Power to Section
You’ve probably heard about people being sectioned. People with severe mental health issues who again have their right to liberty curtailed, even for their own benefit. Section 136 of the Mental Health Act 1983 allows police officers to take you to a place of safety without a warrant. This power is enacted when a person “appears to a constable to be suffering from mental disorder and to be in immediate need of care or control”. They are required to consult with a medical professional, but to what extent is the medical professional involved here? How much of the judgement relies upon the officer making a sound assessment of the person’s condition?
In cases where harm to the self or others is feared, it makes sense for officers to be able to err on the side of caution. Ok, so maybe from time to time someone is “sectioned” who probably shouldn’t have been. “That’s all good, the harm to the individual, though not insignificant, is outweighed by the good of the many” I hear the utilitarians say. And in this case, I’d say I agree. Still, it’s a frightening power to put in the hands of people that 20% of people consider incompetent, and 24% consider dishonest. I’ll discuss this particular issue in more detail later.
Indeed, as a Special Constable I had a very uncomfortable experience that is relevant here. A man, convinced he was about to have a psychotic break and attempt suicide, had decided to travel to the Police Station to get help. None the wiser, I was sat four floors up in the breakroom eating a cold kebab on my 30-minute break before we were due to head back out on patrol. Radios buzzed, the man’s mental health crisis had peaked just as he approached officers outside of the station. He had run out into the road, ostensibly attempting suicide.
Thankfully he remained unharmed, but the decision was quickly made that he was to be taken to a mental health crisis centre about thirty minutes’ drive away. An ambulance had been called and was set to ferry him to this safe haven for the night. It was my job, along with one other Officer, to join him in the back of the ambulance and keep him safe on the journey. Except, by now, his actions were seriously betraying his own safety and he fought and struggled for the entire bumpy, seatbelt-free journey. In those moments, restraining a man, albeit for his own good, and forcing him to attend a crisis centre that he was pleading not to be forced to go to, I wondered at the power I had been given.
I don’t regret my actions that day. Back to his lucid self, I believe he would agree that we did the right thing by him. We might have even saved his life. Still, exercising such a power, physically forcing a man to do something he did not want to do…it was difficult. It made these powers real, it highlighted how important the role of the police officer is. This is not a job to be taken lightly, nor one to be disparaged and sneered at. In fact, I’d say it’s more than a job, it is a pillar of society. Not just a vocation or a career, but a key structure within our civilisation like the judiciary or the executive. It is a damn serious role with damn serious consequences, both in the positive and the negative. It’s a shame we only ever hear about the negative. Where are all the people celebrating the lives saved by police? Where are the counter-marches celebrating all of their amazing work? Why do we only respond when a life is taken?
Use of force/lethal force
A power for which has unfortunately been at the heart of much discussion and unrest these past years is that of the lawful use of force. These powers are derived from Common Law, the Criminal Law Act 1967 and the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. Essentially, police officers can use necessary, proportionate and reasonable force to make an arrest, prevent crime or in self-defense/defense of another person.
Of course, under question is the legality of some recent instances. However, it would seem that public opinion is currently incredibly unsympathetic to the enormously difficult job that, particularly, armed police officers in the UK face every day. Indeed, I hope readers will agree, being stuck between doing your job “properly”, which could mean using lethal force, and “improperly”, which could mean using what you thought was legal force but was retrospectively deemed illegal, must be extremely stressful.
You do your job well? Take down a gunman or knife-wielding terrorist before they can hurt someone? Don’t expect to be called a hero. You make a mistake? You could face national condemnation, protests- riots?-, dismissal and even jail time. The margin for error is absolutely minuscule, but the consequences are dire. Even when you perform well you might have to bear the weight of taking a person’s life. I couldn’t handle this level of stress. I hope you’ll agree, we need a pretty special individual to make these kinds of decisions every single day.
From this extreme to the other, use of force powers cover instances as minor as the simple drawing of a baton, the application of handcuffs, or even the simple contact made to guide a suspect into a police car. These powers are in use all the time. In our day-to-day lives we’re privileged to experience uses of force extremely infrequently. We consider our personal autonomy nearly sacred, and woe-betide someone decides to lay a hand on us. Not ok! And yet, police officers amongst us have at their fingertips the power to physically and forcefully detain, arrest, constrain and transport to a place of, hopefully, temporary imprisonment, often entirely based on reasonable suspicion. This withdrawal of our rights is often based on the officer’s good judgement, on whether circumstances and evidence have made their conclusion reasonable. They can and will sometimes be completely wrong here, but nevertheless, they won’t be faulted if their actions can retrospectively be justified given what they knew at the time.
I commend the efforts our police forces make to get these judgments right, and I believe that in the vast majority of cases they do, exercising good judgment for the protection and improvement of society as a whole. However, this does not change the fact that this power is a significant one.
Removal of a child
Section 46 of The Children Act 1989 provides that where a Constable has reasonable suspicion that causes them to believe that a child would otherwise be likely to suffer significant harm, he may remove them to a “suitable accommodation”. I couldn’t believe that the little badge in my pocket gave me the power to judge a child’s situation and personally decide to remove them from the custody of their own parents. There are extreme situations in which I would have used this power without worry or hesitation, but nevertheless, the weight of such a power on my shoulders was great. Would I one day be faced with a situation in which the judgement was not an easy one to make? Would I have to walk the “grey area” and decide whether it’s white or black?
I think many people correctly feel that their right to raise their own child according to their own will and judgement is sacrosanct. It’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which a mild to moderate criticism is met with a vitriolic, “Don’t you tell me how to raise my own children!” The operative parts of this being the possessives, “my” and “own”.
Even our language betrays the way we view our children. They are ours, not yours, and not the state’s. That is, until a police officer is faced with a difficult judgement and errs on the side of caution, taking your child out of their home to a suitable accommodation until a more thorough assessment can be carried out as to how “suitable” your “accommodation” is.
I imagine the use of this power is fairly rare, and in many situations, children would be returned home pretty quickly. Nevertheless, the potential for trauma for both the child and their parents in cases where these difficult judgments are made erroneously is massive. The weight of such a power upon all of our shoulders should be equally massive.
I have listed but a few powers afforded to the Office of Constable. Ones that I’m sure we all agree are completely necessary. However, the question stands bold in my mind, “But who should have them?”
We, as a society, should not be sleeping through the bestowal of such powers upon our countrymen. We need to be cognizant of their importance, of actually how powerful these individuals are. We need to demand that the crucial task of deciding what calibre of individual should hold the Office of Constable be carried out with serious rigor and with appropriately high standards of entry. I fear, as my personal experience bears out, the standards are far too low and access to such immense legal powers far too easy.
Training and recruitment
Joining the police
*Disclaimer* These are my recollections of the processes I went through over a decade ago. There are things I may have forgotten, but as it stands, these are honest descriptions of my experience.
When I joined the MPS as a Special Constable in 2012, the application process was fairly involved. As expected, there was an initial application form with all of the kinds of annoying questions graduate scheme applications are full of. Some months later, I was invited to attend an assessment day which comprised an interview and a written task. The written task was very simple and seemed essentially aimed at checking whether someone can read and write English in a vaguely acceptable way.
Once I passed this, I moved on to the physical assessment. Again, very low bar. We had to demonstrate our cardiovascular fitness and endurance by completing a bleep test. I’m sure you all did this in primary school. I was in Year 6 when I did it, and I would have passed the entrance criteria then. A 5.4 was the minimum standard, at which we immediately stopped. It seemed there was no need to see how fit we actually were, just that we could manage a fast walk/very slow jog pace for about 10 minutes. For those who don’t know what the Bleep test is, participants are asked to run between two parallel lines, spaced 10 metres apart. Over and over again. A bleep indicates when they must start running and a second bleep indicates a cut off time for when they must have reached the other side. These bleeps get faster and faster, and with each successful run, the participants score goes up. I’m sure I recall 10-year-old children in my Year 6 class scoring above 12. Needless to say, it’s a pitiful standard for entry in to a role that has a high likelihood of involving foot chases wearing heavy leather boots and the weight of a stab-vest jostling with every step.
After this exhausting trial, we headed up to the gym to demonstrate our impressive physical strength. After all, we could be facing violent offenders, riots or brutal armed attacks from crazed terrorists. So, we sat down on machines that were a kind of blend of a rowing machine and a upright bike. Handles around chest level could be pushed or pulled and the machine would calculate how much force (in kg equivalents) we could generate. We had to hit the lofty heights of 35 kg push and 34 kg pull on average over 5 repetitions. Needless to say, we didn’t lose anyone at this stage of the assessment.
After a health assessment which included hearing and vision tests, we were moved on to the final stage of the assessment which was, of course, vetting.
Despite the fact that we still had to be trained, and successfully complete the training course, it felt all-too easy to find myself on the cusp of being awarded such extreme legal powers as those detailed above.
Training
I loved training. Four weeks intensive training at the Peel Centre in Hendon. We studied relevant law; powers of arrest and detention, stop and search, theft, assault, public order offences. We discussed all sorts of interesting legal dilemmas and really got engaged with the powers that we were soon to wield and the manner in which we were expected to use them. At the same time, we studied handcuff and restraint techniques, how to properly use a radio, safe cell exits, we even had to be exposed to CS spray to give us a proper understanding of what people would experience if we judged it necessary to deploy it.
This part of the process was rigorous, and difficult to pass. It took real effort to study and learn the law to pass the regular exams we were given. Each section of the exam had to be passed. If you failed one section you failed the exam and were given one opportunity to pass the sections you failed or you were off the course. We lost a handful of trainees at these hurdles. Finally, there was a standard that was at least reaching at the heights that would do this role justice.
As intensive and difficult as this course was, a four-week training period in which a civilian becomes a warranted officer with all the powers of a regular police officer is a little scary. On and off duty, I could search, detain or arrest people using the legal powers of the Office of Constable.
What a hyper-funded police service might look like
If I haven’t been clear. I have massive respect for the institution. The men and women that make up the many thousands of officers to my mind are as close to modern day heroes as we’ll get. To put it simply, we have people at our beck and call, people whose job it is to stand between us and any danger we face, people that run towards danger while everyone else flees to safety. They are underpaid and under-respected. Their sacrifices are overlooked, their mistakes magnified, their successes ignored or taken for granted. We, as citizens, owe them far more than the general disdain that has become common in recent years.
Funding cuts to social services have seen police become de facto social workers, responding to situations that they are not meant for, nor are they fully trained to deal with. They have become a cure-all for general societal woes rather than what they should be, paragons of strength and judgement, men and women of learning and knowledge, capable of making difficult decisions in split-second time frames. They should be experts in the application of their legal powers, philosopher knights with dominating physical capabilities but the temperament and control of a stoic. It’s clear I have a rather lofty ideal of what an ideal police officer should be. It might sound unattainable, but surely we can all agree it would be great if it was?
Here’s a few things we could do to move ourselves on towards this goal.
The Future
Doctor, Barrister, Police Officer
Status is a key driver for ambitious and capable young people. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, becoming a police officer confers very little status. Indeed, it may even confer negative status in that many people consider the institution corrupt, useless, and institutionally racist and sexist.
Only the other day a student commented after I told him a story of my time in the MPS, “Yeah, but in joining the police you’d have to accept that you’re joining and supporting an inherently corrupt organisation, and I don’t want to do that.”
“Fair enough”, I thought, “but how the bloody hell are you going to change things if you don’t join? How will institutions change if those of good judgement and morals opt out because of its current state?”
I fear this kind of attitude pervades the minds of the younger generations.
Even if they aren’t of this mindset, status-driven people (and that’s everyone!) aren’t motivated by low-status jobs. The number of young people desperate for a job in medicine for entirely the wrong reasons must be massive. I have only anecdotal evidence here, but in my experience there are far more grossly unsuitable applicants than suitable ones. Thankfully, the standards of entry into Medicine, and indeed Law, are high enough that those unsuitable applicants inevitably fail to enter the profession. Those that do make it through that initial sift still have to complete medical school, still have to complete their F1 and F2 years and the grueling challenge of being a junior doctor.
Becoming a barrister may arguably be even more difficult. Getting a place on a Law degree course is probably somewhat easier than getting into Medicine, but the barriers to progression into actual paid work as a barrister are intense. After completing an undergraduate degree in Law, students must then pay to complete the BPTC.
If they pass this course, they then enter the dishearteningly brutal world of pupillage applications. According to the Bar Council, 3301 applicants battled for only 246 pupillage positions in 2021. The fun doesn’t stop here though, after a year (sometimes 18 months), pupils are either taken on as a Tenant and after all their striving can congratulate themselves on becoming a Barrister. If they don’t make it, which approximately 25% of pupils don’t, they have the opportunity to apply for a second pupillage and the chance to try again. If they are unsuccessful a second time… well, that’s pretty much it. Thirteen years of schooling, three years undergrad, two years BPTC, two unsuccessful pupillages, two years on a pitifully low salary for someone living in London and an eye-watering amount of student debt will have led to a dead end. They’d need to find another career, for the institution has deemed them unworthy of its lofty heights. That’s it, move on.
This kind of high-status, extremely competitive and ultimately lucrative career inspires and drives young minds. Aspirational young people, even those wholly unsuitable, delude themselves in their dreams of these careers. These brutally high standards of entry mean that those successful must truly be excellent.
We have a great police force, but we need to turn the career into something aspirational and exciting, something that will satisfy the material and status demands of our best and brightest. It would be great if such base drives didn’t determine who chooses what career, but for now, while we’re still human, that’s how it’s going to be (read The Status Game by Will Storr if you’re interested). We need to use our understanding of these drivers to bring the police service alongside legal and medical professions.
To achieve this, we’ll need to match the massive investment in both time and money that goes into training Doctors and Lawyers. We demonstrate the innate status in this important role by insisting on very high standards and by investing heavily in their training and retention.
Further, how much we value a role is indicated by how much we are willing to pay people to do it. That police officers are paid so poorly inevitably leaves the career in the realms of the unambitious or those lacking in ability and qualification. The lack of police funding, both for the costs of the everyday and of recruitment and retention indicate where our national priorities lie in terms of crime reduction and prevention. We all want crime reduction, but are we willing to put our money where our mouth is?
What should we do then?
We should hyper-fund the police. With extra funds we could:
Increase salaries to bring them alongside careers of commensurate importance and responsibility, certainly no lower than the £70K per year that MPs are paid.
Fund a rigorous and competitive police training programme that is as difficult to get onto as complete. Training should be at least as long as a medical degree. Prior to being awarded the Office of Constable, people should have to become experts of practical criminal law, reach physical fitness comparable to elite military units, learn humility and judgement.
Ensure social mobility by providing funding such that financial situation should never be a barrier to entry.
I want police officers to be people to look up to, paragons of judgment and restraint, capable of complex assessments of even more complex situations, a career for the greatest amongst us to truly strive toward. Their respect and pay should reflect the great powers we give the Office of Constable.
I do not want to see any more videos of police officers who don’t know the law they claim to uphold, humiliating themselves and the institution in their ignorance. I’m done with such a noble institution falling to base criticisms of racism and sexism, as low standards allow the dregs of society into their ranks.
They are our police. We should take pride in them and what they stand for, because they stand for us. Our legal system, our country, our culture.
Hyper-fund the police. It’s the only option.
Thanks for reading! As ever, I’d love to hear your thoughts, be they in agreement or abject disagreement.
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