Zero tolerence law enforcement in the UK (discussion)
WISS | 25.06.2004 20:18
Why Britain needs hard policing and zero tolerence programmes
prepared by: Western Institute for Security Studies: Project for the New White Century.
Britain has been policed since immemorable by a largely unarmed police force policing "by consent". This concept derives from the first organised forces, in London, who patrolled on foot and deterred crime by their presence, and when crime happened brought the wrongdoers to justice. They wore top hats and carried truncheons and were called the "Bow Street runners".
Over the years since this point the concept morphed into the "bobby", working more or less along the same lines albeit now with more equipment, and vehicles. However, the idea of policing by consent remains to this day, and should now be brought into question.
Firstly, does the concept work universally? I would argue it does not. Crime in Britain in the 21st century is skyrocketting, on the back of waves of immigrants flooding through our pourous borders, new people are arriving by the bucket load, with different values and a different culture. Policing by consent is a very anglo-saxon concept, part of our culture and traditions, the white British culture and tradition. Many of the immigrants living in inner city Britain simply don't register this concept and have no understanding of it whatsoever. One simply has to look at areas such as Brixton and Hackney in London, and Handsworth in Birmingham, to get an idea of how bad crime can get when this concept isn't working. For policing by consent to work, it requires the consent and co-operation of the community, and in an unstable multiracial community, then often there is no consent, and is no co-operation.
In the vast majority of areas of in the UK, this policing does work, and tends to work well. This should not be changed. However the changes I am discussing here should be looked at as being applicable to the areas where this policing method does not work.
Since the early 80's the liberal intelligentsia have long held that this lack of consent and co-operation is due to poor community relations. This is rubbish. The police have tried extremely hard to foment good relations with minority communities and spent millions of pounds of taxpayers money on training in "community and race relations" and "diversity training". The police are doing their bit but the community won't do theirs. This is not to say that the majority of the people in the multiracial communities are anti-police, the vast majority are on our side, however a substantial minority which has a tendancy to punch above its weight is steadfast in its determination to prevent policing, scupper our efforts and ensure criminals remain free to roam the streets while simultaneously criticising the police for innaction or over-action, depending on what is politically expedient for them.
Under this climate, how can policing by consent work? It simply cannot. The only solution asside from allowing the criminals and their sympathisers to control the streets is to police by force. This may sound inflammatory to some, but it is far more preferable to allowing innocent members of the community to live their lives under seige. The poorest people in society, and the most vulnerable, are disproportionately the victims of crime.
Zero tolerence was pioneered in New York and in Cleveland. In New York the murder rate halved and the city is now far safer than London, which was long known to be one of the safest capitals in the world. On the contrary, London is now one of the most dangerous capital cities in the western world in terms of the chances of becoming a victim of crime. A lot of this is down to mugging, largely done by young black males. This criminals know that they can get away with it most of the time due to lack of front line policing, and the government insisting on tying the police's hands behind their backs, with political correctness, mountains of paperwork, etc, all justified by "human rights" and "policing by consent".
It is time we re-thought the idea of policing in the 21st century and took into account some examples of good practice. In the early 80s the police in London were using hard-policing (or rather, a better term would be proactive policing) tactics in Brixton and other trouble areas. One such operation was Swamp 81, where the area was flooded with plainclothes officers who conducted stops and searches in response to a horrendous rate of robberies in the area. As a result, robberies declined significantly and so did the rate for many other crimes. However, a riot then occurred, which was blamed largely on the police for being too zealous. The politicians then bowed to minority pressure, the "vocal minority" in the black communities and the emphasis, over the decade, gradually moved away from aggressive proactive policing (hard policing) in areas such as Brixton. Many other disturbances occurred throughout the 80s in areas where hard policing was being practiced. Police powers to stop and search were curtailed and the priority shifted towards avoiding riots rather than grasping the nettle.
It is a direct result of this that street crime has skyrocketted and people feel more at risk today then they ever have been. Politicians talk of "fear of crime" and needing to reduce this. Essentially the reason why people are in fear of crime is a combination of the fact that crime has dramatically increased since the 1960s, even though in the last decade most crimes (statistically anyway) declined, largely as a result of lower unemployment and a higher rate of incarceration; and the fact that they feel that the police do not control the streets, that criminals or potential troublemakers are the ones in charge. This has been translated over into David Blunkett's "anti social behaviour" crusade. This is well meaning and may yet have some benefits, however a more serious approach needs to be used in the long run for it to succeed.
The solution
We need to start making some radical changes to the entire culture, structure and methods for combatting crime. It is totally unacceptable that crime in 2004 is massively higher than in 1964, for instance. We should be aiming for a zero crime society, any crime should be considered a failure of the policing regimen. We need to start talking the language of battle, in terms of a war on crime. Only when we are treating criminals as the enemy and not as pseudo-victims can we really start making progress. We need to start talking about combatting, about fighting, about eliminating, rather than about simply lowering or making piecemeal cuts in the statistics, or even bribing criminals to stop. They aren't our friends, they are our enemies and it should be our job to drive them off the streets like a bulldozer clearing jungle to make way for civilisations return. It has been shown time and again that when the criminals know they will be caught, when they fear the police, that crime declines. An example of this was the Los Angeles Police Department, who for decades kept a lid on one of the most challenging areas to police in the western world, with only 9000 officers for a huge city; to put it in perspective Valley Division had only 1000 officers, when it was the size of Chicago which had 13,000 officers! With such a lack of manpower how the LAPD kept a lid on crime successfully until the mid 80s can be attributed to the fact, according to former Chief from 1978 until 1992, Darryl F Gates:
"I will admit, we were a very aggressive police department. We went after crime before it occurred. . . . Our people went out every single night trying to stop crime before it happened, trying to take people off the street that they believed were involved in crime. That made us a very aggressive, proactive police department."
However, the LAPD was also brought into turmoil after a riot was sparked following unfortunate footage of police officers using force on a black male. The police officers were aquitted of assault but the criminals and criminal sympathisers, as well as others who were simply being misled, riotted, resulting in the worst rioting ever seen in the US in recent history. This again fuelled the misconception that proactive hard policing leads to riots and community uproar. In actual fact these riots, in Brixton, Tottenham, and Los Angeles, were simply blips, and once they had been crushed, had the police re-established dominance, then the policing tactics that were used could and should have continued. Instead, politicians bowed to this, and insisted on changes. If only the police had refused and grasped the nettle even after the rioting, maybe things would be better in these areas today rather than far worse. No community has a right to refuse the rule of law, no matter how many cars they burn down or police they assault, the police should have made a point of keeping to the programme to send out this message, the message that the police are in charge not the criminals or their sympathisers. If higher force was needed then so be it, in the long run this would have ensured crime continued to decline rather than increase.
Another example of good practice from the LAPD. CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hooligans) units were set-up to combat the rising problem of gang violence and drug dealing. These units were highly specialised and involved tough officers taking a hard line against the gangs, going out and bringing in gang members, proactively stopping and searching suspicious groups of youths, and generally making life very difficult for the gangsters. They were fearless and dedicated and for a few years the gang problem began to decline, however, after a scandal involving a corrupt officer attempting to avoid jail by implicating others and throwing mud, the CRASH units were disbanded for political reasons and many of their members disciplined on jumped-up charges. Whether this was yet more politics at work is obviously another debate, but the net result of this ratchetting down of the war on the gangs was felt almost immediately after the CRASH units were disbanded in 2000:
"After falling steadily from 1996 to '99, gang murders in the city increased 143% last year; 331 people died because of gang violence, in contrast to 136 in 1999. The violence got worse during the first half of this year, with a 23% increase in murders."
Time Magazine, 2000
and the main reason, asside from gang members getting out of prison (another reason to keep them there) is quite clear:
"The second reason for the increase in gang violence is just as basic. As gang members like Chino are coming back to their old neighborhoods, the police — demoralized by scandal — are backing out of them. In the mid-'90s, the L.A.P.D. curtailed gang violence with some hard-nosed policing, spearheaded by tough crash (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) units."
Time Magazine, 2000
"Under pressure, the LAPD shut down the CRASH anti-gang unit. The result? In the last week alone, Los Angeles experienced five gang-related shootings. Some LAPD officers say that gang-related crime has increased over 50 percent since the beginning of the scandal. Gangbangers see a defanged, demoralized, and increasingly passive police department."
Larry Elder, Creators Syndicate, 2000
Clearly this demonstrates that when the police are on the retreat then crime goes up because criminals become confident and it becomes safe to commit crime. The only answer to this is to ensure that the police are on the offensive, always, and have the resources and back-up both physical and political to fight the war. Only then will the streets become safe for everyone. That is why we must adopt this tough approach in every area where the existing approaches are failing.
We need to start recruiting a new breed of police officer, tough, dedicated, aggressive and multi skilled. Over the years the requirements have been lowered in order to get more women and ethnic minorities in, it is time to increase standards and hold quality above equality, when the paperwork mess has been sorted out then fewer officers will be able to do more work. Forms will be made shorter, paperwork will be done increasingly by civilians and the latest technology used to cut the burden and increase efficiency to free-up more officers. New specialist units should be introduced specifically for the new methods of policing, using the distinguished CRASH name (Community Resources Against Street Hooligans) they would be the creme de la creme of the ordinary patrol shifts, close to the pulse, and be formed of the toughest, most intelligent and dedicated officers that can be found. The CRASH units would undertake plainclothes and uniformed work, be armed, and highly visible, and patrol the crime ridden areas with special additional powers to stop and search without "reasonable grounds" at any time. Their funding could come from the disbanding of special units to deal with racist crime, for instance, which should not be treated in a better way than any other crime.
The time has come to set-up a national police force, to work in concert with local forces, and take in all the national units "under one roof". Another component of this force would be a National Paramilitary Policing Unit (NPPU) which would act in a similar way to the Metropolitan Police TSG (Territorial Support Group). The NPPU would have sufficient officers to flood any area of the UK with armed police and conduct anti crime operations using a raft of new legislation that would follow in the wake of setting up the new force. Every local force should have a paramilitary police unit within 10 years so as to ensure a local, and regional/national capability to handle new challenges. We owe it to the law abiding taxpayers of Britain to ensure that we have the capabilities to deal with gun threats, gang threats, and threats from terrorism and immigrant based crime. At present only inner city areas and deprived areas are suffering from the effects of the failure of conventional policing, but it can't be ruled out that one day affluent areas (especially if they are in an area with existing problems) may fall victim to this. As a result we need to start developing a doctrine to deal with this now and for the future.
prepared by: Western Institute for Security Studies: Project for the New White Century.
Britain has been policed since immemorable by a largely unarmed police force policing "by consent". This concept derives from the first organised forces, in London, who patrolled on foot and deterred crime by their presence, and when crime happened brought the wrongdoers to justice. They wore top hats and carried truncheons and were called the "Bow Street runners".
Over the years since this point the concept morphed into the "bobby", working more or less along the same lines albeit now with more equipment, and vehicles. However, the idea of policing by consent remains to this day, and should now be brought into question.
Firstly, does the concept work universally? I would argue it does not. Crime in Britain in the 21st century is skyrocketting, on the back of waves of immigrants flooding through our pourous borders, new people are arriving by the bucket load, with different values and a different culture. Policing by consent is a very anglo-saxon concept, part of our culture and traditions, the white British culture and tradition. Many of the immigrants living in inner city Britain simply don't register this concept and have no understanding of it whatsoever. One simply has to look at areas such as Brixton and Hackney in London, and Handsworth in Birmingham, to get an idea of how bad crime can get when this concept isn't working. For policing by consent to work, it requires the consent and co-operation of the community, and in an unstable multiracial community, then often there is no consent, and is no co-operation.
In the vast majority of areas of in the UK, this policing does work, and tends to work well. This should not be changed. However the changes I am discussing here should be looked at as being applicable to the areas where this policing method does not work.
Since the early 80's the liberal intelligentsia have long held that this lack of consent and co-operation is due to poor community relations. This is rubbish. The police have tried extremely hard to foment good relations with minority communities and spent millions of pounds of taxpayers money on training in "community and race relations" and "diversity training". The police are doing their bit but the community won't do theirs. This is not to say that the majority of the people in the multiracial communities are anti-police, the vast majority are on our side, however a substantial minority which has a tendancy to punch above its weight is steadfast in its determination to prevent policing, scupper our efforts and ensure criminals remain free to roam the streets while simultaneously criticising the police for innaction or over-action, depending on what is politically expedient for them.
Under this climate, how can policing by consent work? It simply cannot. The only solution asside from allowing the criminals and their sympathisers to control the streets is to police by force. This may sound inflammatory to some, but it is far more preferable to allowing innocent members of the community to live their lives under seige. The poorest people in society, and the most vulnerable, are disproportionately the victims of crime.
Zero tolerence was pioneered in New York and in Cleveland. In New York the murder rate halved and the city is now far safer than London, which was long known to be one of the safest capitals in the world. On the contrary, London is now one of the most dangerous capital cities in the western world in terms of the chances of becoming a victim of crime. A lot of this is down to mugging, largely done by young black males. This criminals know that they can get away with it most of the time due to lack of front line policing, and the government insisting on tying the police's hands behind their backs, with political correctness, mountains of paperwork, etc, all justified by "human rights" and "policing by consent".
It is time we re-thought the idea of policing in the 21st century and took into account some examples of good practice. In the early 80s the police in London were using hard-policing (or rather, a better term would be proactive policing) tactics in Brixton and other trouble areas. One such operation was Swamp 81, where the area was flooded with plainclothes officers who conducted stops and searches in response to a horrendous rate of robberies in the area. As a result, robberies declined significantly and so did the rate for many other crimes. However, a riot then occurred, which was blamed largely on the police for being too zealous. The politicians then bowed to minority pressure, the "vocal minority" in the black communities and the emphasis, over the decade, gradually moved away from aggressive proactive policing (hard policing) in areas such as Brixton. Many other disturbances occurred throughout the 80s in areas where hard policing was being practiced. Police powers to stop and search were curtailed and the priority shifted towards avoiding riots rather than grasping the nettle.
It is a direct result of this that street crime has skyrocketted and people feel more at risk today then they ever have been. Politicians talk of "fear of crime" and needing to reduce this. Essentially the reason why people are in fear of crime is a combination of the fact that crime has dramatically increased since the 1960s, even though in the last decade most crimes (statistically anyway) declined, largely as a result of lower unemployment and a higher rate of incarceration; and the fact that they feel that the police do not control the streets, that criminals or potential troublemakers are the ones in charge. This has been translated over into David Blunkett's "anti social behaviour" crusade. This is well meaning and may yet have some benefits, however a more serious approach needs to be used in the long run for it to succeed.
The solution
We need to start making some radical changes to the entire culture, structure and methods for combatting crime. It is totally unacceptable that crime in 2004 is massively higher than in 1964, for instance. We should be aiming for a zero crime society, any crime should be considered a failure of the policing regimen. We need to start talking the language of battle, in terms of a war on crime. Only when we are treating criminals as the enemy and not as pseudo-victims can we really start making progress. We need to start talking about combatting, about fighting, about eliminating, rather than about simply lowering or making piecemeal cuts in the statistics, or even bribing criminals to stop. They aren't our friends, they are our enemies and it should be our job to drive them off the streets like a bulldozer clearing jungle to make way for civilisations return. It has been shown time and again that when the criminals know they will be caught, when they fear the police, that crime declines. An example of this was the Los Angeles Police Department, who for decades kept a lid on one of the most challenging areas to police in the western world, with only 9000 officers for a huge city; to put it in perspective Valley Division had only 1000 officers, when it was the size of Chicago which had 13,000 officers! With such a lack of manpower how the LAPD kept a lid on crime successfully until the mid 80s can be attributed to the fact, according to former Chief from 1978 until 1992, Darryl F Gates:
"I will admit, we were a very aggressive police department. We went after crime before it occurred. . . . Our people went out every single night trying to stop crime before it happened, trying to take people off the street that they believed were involved in crime. That made us a very aggressive, proactive police department."
However, the LAPD was also brought into turmoil after a riot was sparked following unfortunate footage of police officers using force on a black male. The police officers were aquitted of assault but the criminals and criminal sympathisers, as well as others who were simply being misled, riotted, resulting in the worst rioting ever seen in the US in recent history. This again fuelled the misconception that proactive hard policing leads to riots and community uproar. In actual fact these riots, in Brixton, Tottenham, and Los Angeles, were simply blips, and once they had been crushed, had the police re-established dominance, then the policing tactics that were used could and should have continued. Instead, politicians bowed to this, and insisted on changes. If only the police had refused and grasped the nettle even after the rioting, maybe things would be better in these areas today rather than far worse. No community has a right to refuse the rule of law, no matter how many cars they burn down or police they assault, the police should have made a point of keeping to the programme to send out this message, the message that the police are in charge not the criminals or their sympathisers. If higher force was needed then so be it, in the long run this would have ensured crime continued to decline rather than increase.
Another example of good practice from the LAPD. CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hooligans) units were set-up to combat the rising problem of gang violence and drug dealing. These units were highly specialised and involved tough officers taking a hard line against the gangs, going out and bringing in gang members, proactively stopping and searching suspicious groups of youths, and generally making life very difficult for the gangsters. They were fearless and dedicated and for a few years the gang problem began to decline, however, after a scandal involving a corrupt officer attempting to avoid jail by implicating others and throwing mud, the CRASH units were disbanded for political reasons and many of their members disciplined on jumped-up charges. Whether this was yet more politics at work is obviously another debate, but the net result of this ratchetting down of the war on the gangs was felt almost immediately after the CRASH units were disbanded in 2000:
"After falling steadily from 1996 to '99, gang murders in the city increased 143% last year; 331 people died because of gang violence, in contrast to 136 in 1999. The violence got worse during the first half of this year, with a 23% increase in murders."
Time Magazine, 2000
and the main reason, asside from gang members getting out of prison (another reason to keep them there) is quite clear:
"The second reason for the increase in gang violence is just as basic. As gang members like Chino are coming back to their old neighborhoods, the police — demoralized by scandal — are backing out of them. In the mid-'90s, the L.A.P.D. curtailed gang violence with some hard-nosed policing, spearheaded by tough crash (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) units."
Time Magazine, 2000
"Under pressure, the LAPD shut down the CRASH anti-gang unit. The result? In the last week alone, Los Angeles experienced five gang-related shootings. Some LAPD officers say that gang-related crime has increased over 50 percent since the beginning of the scandal. Gangbangers see a defanged, demoralized, and increasingly passive police department."
Larry Elder, Creators Syndicate, 2000
Clearly this demonstrates that when the police are on the retreat then crime goes up because criminals become confident and it becomes safe to commit crime. The only answer to this is to ensure that the police are on the offensive, always, and have the resources and back-up both physical and political to fight the war. Only then will the streets become safe for everyone. That is why we must adopt this tough approach in every area where the existing approaches are failing.
We need to start recruiting a new breed of police officer, tough, dedicated, aggressive and multi skilled. Over the years the requirements have been lowered in order to get more women and ethnic minorities in, it is time to increase standards and hold quality above equality, when the paperwork mess has been sorted out then fewer officers will be able to do more work. Forms will be made shorter, paperwork will be done increasingly by civilians and the latest technology used to cut the burden and increase efficiency to free-up more officers. New specialist units should be introduced specifically for the new methods of policing, using the distinguished CRASH name (Community Resources Against Street Hooligans) they would be the creme de la creme of the ordinary patrol shifts, close to the pulse, and be formed of the toughest, most intelligent and dedicated officers that can be found. The CRASH units would undertake plainclothes and uniformed work, be armed, and highly visible, and patrol the crime ridden areas with special additional powers to stop and search without "reasonable grounds" at any time. Their funding could come from the disbanding of special units to deal with racist crime, for instance, which should not be treated in a better way than any other crime.
The time has come to set-up a national police force, to work in concert with local forces, and take in all the national units "under one roof". Another component of this force would be a National Paramilitary Policing Unit (NPPU) which would act in a similar way to the Metropolitan Police TSG (Territorial Support Group). The NPPU would have sufficient officers to flood any area of the UK with armed police and conduct anti crime operations using a raft of new legislation that would follow in the wake of setting up the new force. Every local force should have a paramilitary police unit within 10 years so as to ensure a local, and regional/national capability to handle new challenges. We owe it to the law abiding taxpayers of Britain to ensure that we have the capabilities to deal with gun threats, gang threats, and threats from terrorism and immigrant based crime. At present only inner city areas and deprived areas are suffering from the effects of the failure of conventional policing, but it can't be ruled out that one day affluent areas (especially if they are in an area with existing problems) may fall victim to this. As a result we need to start developing a doctrine to deal with this now and for the future.
WISS
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