Police

The name ‘Ken Clarke’ and the word ‘sacking’ are inseparable to the chattering classes at the moment, but so was it ever thus. There are signs though that the normally insouciant Clarke has been shaken on this occasion. He has given an interview in defence of his contentious prison reforms to the Times this morning (£). In a clear message to concerned voters, Tory backbenchers and sceptical government colleagues, he denies that he is ‘soft on crime’. For example, he will tighten community sentences: “I want them to be more punitive, effective and organised. Unpaid work should require offenders to work at a proper pace in a disciplined manner rather

Labour’s cartography department has been hard at work all weekend to produce this. It is, lest you haven’t heard Yvette Cooper today, an “interactive web-map” of the job losses announced by police forces so far, all across the country. You can interact with it in ways that include clicking to view a larger version. So far as web campaigning goes, this is probably fertile ground for the Opposition. No one likes the idea of more crime — and “more crime” is often conflated with “fewer bobbies” in the public debate. Yet Labour’s point is diluted, somewhat, by one simple fact: that their former Home Secretary refused to guarantee that police

Today’s Commons ding-dong on the riots that followed Saturday’s march was real, politics of the viscera stuff. The Labour benches were furious about Boris’s comments in today’s Telegraph that ‘Balls and Miliband will feel quietly satisfied by the disorder’ and that they ‘will be content to see the police being unfairly attacked on all sides’. Yvette Cooper was so angry that when she tried to read out this section from Boris’s column that she couldn’t get the words out. Boris and Yvette, both Balliol graduates, have previous. But it was still striking quite how angrily Cooper heckled May as she refused to condemn Boris’ comments. It was all further evidence of

What’s it to be? Take a pay cut, or lose your job? That, as David suggested earlier, is the question being posed by Theresa May to police forces – and it’s a question that they cannot shirk. With the police budget being cut by 4 per cent a year, there have to be reductions of one sort or another. And if they don’t come from pay restraint – along the broad outlines of Tom Winsor’s review today – then there will no doubt have to be extra job losses. This is the argument that George Osborne set out in his 2009 conference speech, only now it’s being deployed from government.

The Home Office has an ambitious police reform agenda and is overseeing challenging budget reductions, but they are also forging ahead with plans to introduce real workforce modernisation.  The serious and credible reviewer, Tom Winsor, will publish his independent report next Tuesday.   Winsor’s review will cover pay, conditions and other aspects of employment that will set the framework for a new settlement when the current 3-year pay deal expires. Expect police overtime and shift patterns to be another major focus of the review.   David Cameron himself, who once boldly described the police as “the last great unreformed public service” is firmly committed to this agenda. As a special

We shouldn’t have believed the hype. For all of Tony Blair’s earnest focus on Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, this flagship policy was barely in effect at all. By the latest figures, only 18,670 ASBOs were issued between April 1999 and the start of 2010. According to this Policy Exchange report – the best on the subject that I’ve come across – that accounts for around 0.009 per cent of all incidences of anti-social behaviour. So let’s not pretend that the coalition is upending the criminal justice system by shifting away from ASBOs today. Neither, on the evidence at hand, is it doing away with an effective policy. Here’s a graph that

Crime maps have formally reached England and Wales. The Home Office has unveiled www.police.uk and citizens can examine incidences and trends of crime in their local area. Naturally, the website is broken at the moment. Nick Herbert, the Policing Minister, told the Today programme that the site crashed under the weight of 4 million users in an hour. The government hopes that this interest will be sustained, inaugurating a revolution in transparency and accountability. People power will trump the unelected authorities of the past. Crime maps merely record the facts of crime, but extensive trials suggested that they improve peoples’ knowledge of their neighbourhood and encourage locals to influence police strategy