Complete and Utter Zebu

If ever there is a body that should be straight with the public, surely it is the police? Sadly, it appears that honesty is in short supply even in the police force. As well as the fibs told about the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in Stockwell tube station in 2005, there were all the porkies uttered immediately after the death of newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson at the London G20 meeting this year.

This even included the chairman of the Independent Police Complaints Commission, who said that the investigation was hampered by there being no CCTV cameras in the area. When it turned out that there were, his statement was excused on the grounds that he “believed he was speaking the truth” when he said it.

Former Detective Chief Inspector Rodger Patrick was so horrified by the recording of crime figures by the police that he has studied them for a PhD. He has revealed several methods the police use to fiddle the numbers and make themselves look more impressive. This is so widespread that the techniques have their own names.

• “Stitching” involves offenders being charged even when the case is so tenuous the police know it will never come to court. As far as the figures are concerned, however, the case has been “solved”.
• “Nodding” involves getting offenders to admit to other crimes they haven’t committed, thus boosting crime clear-up rates.
• “Skewing” involves the police skewing their efforts towards investigating crimes that are easier to solve to massage the detection rate figures.
• “Cuffing” involves crimes having their seriousness downplayed or recorded as “false reports”, so they vanish from the figures entirely.

These and other methods are known collectively as “gaming” and Mr. Patrick believes that the police, and the bodies that supervise them, have “a general tendency to underplay the scale and nature” of the fiddling that goes on.

In the West Midlands Police, where he worked, giving an informal warning over a common assault apparently counted as a crime being “detected”, as far as the figures were concerned. When, in 2002, officers were told this would no longer be the case the number of common assaults fell from 22,000 to 3,000 while there were suddenly thousands more recorded instances of “other woundings”. According to Mr. Patrick: “Such a rapid adjustment indicates…some form of co-ordination and direction by management.

“Senior officers were either directly orchestrating the behaviour or turning a blind eye to it.” – Ex-Dective Chief Inspector Rodger Patrick

With tourists and members of the public being questioned, cautioned and even arrested under Section 44 of the 2000 Terrorism Act for taking pictures of such highly sensitive things as fish and chip shops, St. Paul’s Cathedral or even the switching on of christmas lights, something has gone seriously wrong with policing in Britain.

In Complete and Utter Zebu, we recount the little-known tale of Operation Ore, which Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University called “one of the worst police scandals in history”. It makes deeply disquieting reading.

At a press conference earlier in the year, a foreign journalist asked the Prime Minister about the impression Britain gave to the rest of the world when tourists could be arrested for innocently taking photos of an ordinary building. “I don’t accept that is the true picture of Britain at all,” was Mr. Brown’s response. When the government is so out of touch with the reality of daily life, what hope is there that things will improve?