Police

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

Directly-elected Police & Crime Commissioners (PCCs) are the boldest reform of policing since the 1960s. In May 2012 there will be 41 new political beasts in England and Wales with large, direct mandates. They look set to transform policing and public debate about crime. The new Commissioners will replace weak and invisible police authorities who, despite costing £65m a year and spending £25m in the last 3 years alone on expenses and allowances, have failed to hold chief constables to account. As a result, police chiefs have become too powerful, too detached and too risk-averse – with failure to tackle crime often just excused. Commissioners will be elected to oversee

The student protests are an important short-term development, which will undoubtedly worry the coalition. But are they also, as the Met Commissioner noted, a harbinger of something else: namely, a return to a late 1960s, Continental-style protest, which will encourage other groups – from Tube drivers to Tamils – to use sit-ins, strikes and ultimately street-based violence as a political tool. The NUS rejects that their tactics are associated with violence, knowing it will turn the majority of English people against them. Blame is heaped on small groups of agitators. Anthony Barnett argues that unlike in the 1960s, “the relationship to violence is also much better, as shown by the

The police are more Thin Blue Line than The Sweeney. Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary has found that 15 of 22 police authorities perform ‘adequately’, which is defined as meeting ‘most of the minimum requirements of the specified role…they were most effective at dealing with local short-term policing priorities’. More worrying, with forces facing 20 percent cuts: only 4 authorities were judged to have set clear strategic direction and ensured value of money. Worse still, the report found that: ‘In just over half of the police authorities inspected, there is little or no account made of the delivery of efficiencies or workforce modernisation’. These administrative shortcomings are adversely affecting operations,

The Comprehensive Spending Review was a step in the right direction, but I agree with Philip Booth and others when they say that there should be far more cuts down the line. But the biggest mistake was the announcement that the Department for International Development’s (DfID) budget will be increased by 37 percent by 2015. It undermines the narrative that the country will be suffering the cuts together and shows a tone-deafness in cutting spending at home while increasing it abroad. But worse, it exacerbates the problem that development aid does an immense amount of harm to the developing world, and this spending increase will only make things worse. Over

George Osborne’s statement is, I hear, about 40 minutes long. I also hear that there is no obfuscation in it about what is being cut. The coalition is determined that no one can accuse them of trying to disguise what they are up to. Given what we have learned from pre-briefing, the cuts must be just massive in the departments we haven’t heard anything about yet. There is word this morning that the legal aid budget is going to be being reduced by far more than was expected even at the weekend. It appears that legal aid is one of the things that took the hit as the Treasury tried

I hear that the Department of Transport’s settlement is another one that is not as bad as expected. The capital statement is, apparently, positively reasonable. George Osborne’s commitment to infrastructure spending has meant that a good number of transport projects have been saved. On rail fares, I hear they will indeed go up significantly. But not by as much as the doomsday 30 to 40 percent scenario reported in the Sunday papers. Nearly all the settlements we have heard about so far have been less bad than expected. There must be, given that Osborne is sticking to the cuts schedule set out in the budget, some departments that are going

This is the latest in our series of posts on the Spending Review with Reform. A list of previous posts can be found here. What is the budget? The UK has one of the most expensive criminal justice systems in the world, spending a higher proportion of GDP than any other country in the OECD. Total spending on crime amounted to £23 billion for 2009-10. However, recent research suggests that total government spending on public order and safety amounts to more than £31 billion overall. Aside from central government funding, police authorities receive funding from the police, raised locally through council tax. In 2009-10 this amounted to just under a