How to fight crime: adopt-a-criminal
Had a thought today heading down the M40 back to London after another Michelin-starred client lunch: there's a much easier way to solve Britain's crime problem.
As noted below, there's a list of about 100,000 people in Britain collectively responsible for practically all crime. These 100,000 are all known to the police; many are regular offenders. Current police strength (2002 government report) is 126,000.
So how about this: when a young policeman qualifies, give him one person on that list, and his job for the next year is to stick closer to him than his own shadow.
If he's successful - i.e. his person commits no crimes during that year - give the young policeman a promotion and pay rise, and assign him a criminal a few places up the list. This gives every young policeman some well-defined and easily quantifiable criteria with which to plan his career path, and frees up the lowest criminals to be reassigned to that year's crop of newly-qualified cops.
This makes the job of policing completely matched to ability and ambition. If you're happy being a constable, just learn about shoplifters and pickpockets; they're all you'll ever have to deal with. But if you have designs on being an Inspector, you need to get to know all the local drug lords and car theft kingpins, so you'll be ready to adopt your given criminal when the promo arrives.
The advantages of this 'discriminatory' approach are huge. First, it concentrates on convicted criminals only; citizen-hassling measures like the random search I was subjected to on Saturday just don't happen. The mass of paperwork, detailing ethnic profiles etc, becomes unnecessary, since the police can honestly say they're concentrating on people known to have committed a crime. And the top criminals get the best, most ambitious cops assigned to them as a matter of course. Less equal treatment of rights - but only to people who've demonstrated they deserve it.
Best of all, it leaves 26,000 cops free to do 'normal' police work, striding up and down safe city streets and entirely crime-free neighbourhoods bobbing up and down saying 'Evenin' all.'
So let's bring in some real accountability to British policing. Instead of all this pretense of equality and impartiality, let the cops concentrate on the real criminals. By taking away some rights from the criminal few, perhaps the 599 in every 600 citizens who don't have a record can start reclaiming theirs.
As noted below, there's a list of about 100,000 people in Britain collectively responsible for practically all crime. These 100,000 are all known to the police; many are regular offenders. Current police strength (2002 government report) is 126,000.
So how about this: when a young policeman qualifies, give him one person on that list, and his job for the next year is to stick closer to him than his own shadow.
If he's successful - i.e. his person commits no crimes during that year - give the young policeman a promotion and pay rise, and assign him a criminal a few places up the list. This gives every young policeman some well-defined and easily quantifiable criteria with which to plan his career path, and frees up the lowest criminals to be reassigned to that year's crop of newly-qualified cops.
This makes the job of policing completely matched to ability and ambition. If you're happy being a constable, just learn about shoplifters and pickpockets; they're all you'll ever have to deal with. But if you have designs on being an Inspector, you need to get to know all the local drug lords and car theft kingpins, so you'll be ready to adopt your given criminal when the promo arrives.
The advantages of this 'discriminatory' approach are huge. First, it concentrates on convicted criminals only; citizen-hassling measures like the random search I was subjected to on Saturday just don't happen. The mass of paperwork, detailing ethnic profiles etc, becomes unnecessary, since the police can honestly say they're concentrating on people known to have committed a crime. And the top criminals get the best, most ambitious cops assigned to them as a matter of course. Less equal treatment of rights - but only to people who've demonstrated they deserve it.
Best of all, it leaves 26,000 cops free to do 'normal' police work, striding up and down safe city streets and entirely crime-free neighbourhoods bobbing up and down saying 'Evenin' all.'
So let's bring in some real accountability to British policing. Instead of all this pretense of equality and impartiality, let the cops concentrate on the real criminals. By taking away some rights from the criminal few, perhaps the 599 in every 600 citizens who don't have a record can start reclaiming theirs.
posted by chrisworth at 9:33 PM
1 Comments:
Have Nottinghamshire Police been reading your blog? They've just announced "Adopt A Criminal"!!!
I'm pretty certain we used to have this sort of thing 30 years ago. What was it called? Oh yes, good old-fashioned policing aka "The Beat Bobby".
You really couldn't make it up could you?
Great blog, btw!
Cheers, Nick
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