This post, though still relevant, was written in 2014.
Three separate pieces of relatively new news over the past week suggest there may be serious cultural problems within the UK's policing, intelligence and justice systems. There was to have been a pause in new posts as efforts to develop this site focused on presentation, but this demands attention. The biggest story related to how police gathered intelligence on grieving families who were seeking justice in relation to their loved ones. An internal report into the Metropolitan Police’s now disbanded, undercover Special Demonstration Squad said it gathered and ‘wrongly retained’ information on targeted families. It also states that the information gathered 'served no purpose in preventing crime or disorder'.
Mick Creedon, the Derbyshire chief constable who is running the internal investigation into the undercover unit that operated between 1968 and 2008, will criticise Scotland Yard for disregarding "rules and legislation that clearly set out what they should, and should not have, collected and retained". The Guardian
Another story was headlined in the Daily Mirror:
According
to this piece, the plane apparently has the ability to intercept telephone
calls. Adding to the sense of mystery it stated the plane was registered to a
firm with no other official records. ITV.com's piece on this
suggests that two planes, costing £3m per year, are used to monitor mobile
phone calls.
 |
| Tracking the mystery plane, courtesy Flightradar24.com |
The existence of the fleet of planes - each costing at least £3 million to purchase and hundreds of thousands more to operate - has never been publicly disclosed.
Whilst refusing to confirm or deny
knowledge of the aircraft spokespeople are reported as stating that that any
such activities would be conducted legally.
Might this news have made more of a splash this time than it did in 2011 because of how the Snowden revelations sensitised us to potential state snooping? In searching for an answer to this Google led to an earlier story about how police had sought to infiltrate various groups, boasted of hundreds of ‘informers’ and
warned a potential recruit that her activities could harm her career.
As outrageous as the story seems it even provides transcripts and
access to the audio tapes.
There are TOO MANY incidences of the police going either too far in what the reasonable man or woman would consider the wrong direction or not far enough in the right direction . Why?
The law is not a straight, fine line. Instead it is a big,
fat, squiggly smudge.
On one side of where ‘reasonable people’ would expect a straight
fine line to be are grey areas clearly beyond the legal wording of the law,
where it remains easy to commit crime and get away with it, because of
knowledge of how the legal process works. Here, over the last decade you will
have found many bankers enriching themselves by peddling junk assets misrepresented
as investment grade and by rigging markets. Many people still operate in these grey areas today.
On the other side of where ‘reasonable people’ would expect
the straight fine line to be is the rest of the big grey squiggly area. To the ‘experts’
this includes areas they feel either within the technical bounds of
the law (even though it may be completely against their awareness of the
intended spirit of the law) or where there are likely to be sufficient ‘returns’
justifying the risks of possibly falling
foul of an alternative interpretation. Recently there was news of celebrities who thought they were 'avoiding tax' found to have 'evaded tax'. That was in this grey area. So too are probably too many covert police operations.
One should not however come down too hard on the police. Whilst there may be serious issues that need resolving, the vast majority of what the police
do is both legal and worthy of our gratitude. The problem is with that little
bit that is not: there seems too much of it. Think back to the dark days of the British motor industry. Back then it was deemed reasonable to churn out cars that had a far higher probability of breaking down than Japanese alternatives. Whilst the Japanese had an almost unique 'zero defect culture', with 'continuous improvement' leading to ever greater reliability, the Brits had a 'that'll do culture', allowing anything that passed basic inspection to go to market. This outmoded 1970's approach may still be pervasive across the police and numerous other public services.
Before looking at the cultural issues and what might be done
about them, there was a third news item leading to this piece that came out a few days ago.It was the announcement by the Mayor of London of a new Business Crime Strategy 2014-16 (Clicking this link opens the PDF file in a new window)
and the opening statement by the Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime, which included:
Across the capital crime is falling like a stone – down 17% under this Mayor – and our streets are getting safer. But crime against businesses remains significantly under-reported and the police response when reports are made is too often inadequate. Unless and until reporting increases and the response improves we won’t be able to deal with all the forms this threat takes.This blogger is probably one of many who knew businesses which they feel were failed in the past by the police. Many, many small businesses have suffered as a result of some kind of criminal fraud, theft or attack against them. If this blogger's experience is anything to go by, even when there is concrete evidence detailing both the fraud and the perpetrators, the police have not wanted to know. Just like how moped smash and grab gangs have cottoned on to the fact that the police avoid chasing them due to safety fears, fraudsters have probably been aware of and enriching themselves on the back of this knowledge for years. The net result is that, across Britain, we are a lot poorer, because many otherwise fine small businesses have been defrauded, often into oblivion.
This is an important part of the flip-side: where the police do not seem to be doing enough of the right kind of thing. The police will argue, no doubt in part justifiably, that they struggle with resourcing and finance issues, but this is not a sufficient excuse. Various aspects of the national policing and justice system still seem woefully inept, leading to a massive squandering of whatever resources there are. Two recent personal experiences give weight to this.
The first was when attempting to offer the police an itemised bill showing hundreds of pounds worth of illicit phone calls made from a stolen phone and being met with not just disinterest at the counter, but a 'hostile-defensive' disinterest. An appropriate intelligence gathering exercise would have used the bill to harvest the electronic source, prior to feeding the data into a process to map how the thousands of phones stolen each day across the UK were being used. The second was when being interviewed as a potential witness in a major fraud investigation (as opposed to the minor frauds that blight British businesses). Having been interviewed by two people and this being taped, I was then sent a typed, paraphrased account of the interview to check and sign as a 'true and fair' account, which it was not. If they were going to do such a thing, why not just send a verbatim script, rather than cycle through potentially endless iterations, consuming massive manpower, until paraphrasing was correct? Better still, why not just stick with the audio (Digital audio can be forensically watermarked to prevent manipulation and timestamped for referencing)? Save for important sensitivities there is much more that this author could refer to.
Add the above accounts to those of many others in the public domain (and far more stories that are not shared) about how ineffectively UK policing and justice resources often seem to be deployed and one ends up with a pretty damning picture. Whilst some of this observed ineptitude may be down to 'procedural restraints' etc., many such excuses are just more 'smoke and mirrors' from organisations that culturally, in spite of whatever words come out from the Home Office, the Latest Commissioners, or anyone else associated with 'The Establishment', are stuck woefully in the past.
So what about culture?
This is probably the same kind of question that British car makers were asking back in the 1970s: 'So how do we make our cars as good as the Japanese?' Back then, it was not all about the unions. Today it is not all about resources. Today, albeit now owned mainly by foreigners UK factories churn out some of the best cars in the world. They got to this stage by realising you cannot tackle everything at once and by applying lessons leaned from the best. Incremental improvements, one step at a time, Japanese style, made the industry better and better (Before various people start railing about Deming and so on, remember that Japan really embraced this). A desire to pursue ever better execution of one's role needs to be part of the organisation's DNA. This does not come about from on-high pronouncements, but from a regular drum-beat of stories about how desired behaviours can trump bad behaviours within an organsiation to improve it. And this is where (Ishikawa style) we start getting to what may be the root cause of all these cultural issues.
Possibly far too much of the management of our policing and justice systems is driven by hard 'metrics', or 'key performance indicators', or, to be more realistic, stuff managers often mistakenly think can be measured so as to be managed. Possibly too many senior managers in our criminal and justice systems have done MBAs, executive MBAs or short courses covering issues such as 'The Balanced Scorecard', without appreciating such a discipline fully in the round: that these techniques can just as easily be badly applied. Whilst, with new technologies there is a rapidly growing mass of data that can be harvested to inform useful metrics, such inputs need to be balanced with a constant stream of 'soft' stories, that illustrate what good and bad policing is in different situations. There needs to be that hard and soft mix. Strategies should not be directed by just a cascade of hard (Objective measures such as crime counts) and 'semi-hard' (Subjective measures coming from telephone polls etc.) metrics, down through the management pyramid. Instead collections of metrics need to be disseminated along with collections of 'guiding stories' recounting aspirational and inappropriate behavior, and there should then be a stream of such stories gathered and disseminated on a regular basis to empower everyone to deliver to their best potential.
Like it or not, performance and motivation needs to be measured and rewarded, not relative to hard benchmarks (because just as with the law, the real world cannot be depicted by straight, fine lines) but openly and subjectively relative to mixed pools of metrics, guided by stories. Maybe at all levels, management has become too cowardly, preferring to hide behind metrics than taking responsibility for personal judgements which then go down on record. This has to change.
Through sharing stories and working on incremental improvements often catalysed by them, these days both Japanese and British car workers take pride in what they contribute toward. Whilst members of our policing and justice systems have a right to take pride in much of what they do already, by both allowing and requiring them to be slightly less hampered by pure metrics and more empowered by 'liberating and guiding stories', there could be far more pride and reward (from the sense of having been part of something really good) to come in the future.
This however, is not a voice from on high, but just a blog post, and sensible comments are welcome.
