Met Police Commissioner: “Non-Crime Hate Incidents Are Poor Policy”
Officers are being bogged down by bureaucracy and distractions – like non-crime hate incidents, says Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley in the Sunday Times. Here’s an excerpt:
Trust in the Met is… much higher than some would have you believe: 73% of Londoners agree that the Met is an organisation they can trust. Only 13% disagree. And all this when the Met is being shrunk by 3,300 officers and staff over three years despite the Mayor and Home Secretary’s welcome support to close our budget gap.
However, the disappointing settlement for policing in the spending review will be compounded by more criminals being in communities rather than in prison. No budget has been allocated to support this increase in workload, initially estimated to cost £300 million nationally.
Government spending on public safety held steady between the 1980s and mid-2000s but has since fallen by more than a fifth. The Met’s budget would need to increase by 50% to match per capita spending in New York or Sydney. Yet public demand, the complexity of crime and wider threats are all increasing. …
We must be focused and shed the distractions and bureaucracy that divert us away from crime-fighting. Recruits join the police to protect the public, but too often officers in effect take on the role of social workers. Police chiefs are trying to correct this, but we need the Government and public sector to help us.
Non-crime hate incidents generate irritating headlines and are poor policy but, across the Met, they account for only 0.05% of the calls we respond to.
There are bigger issues. It is particularly astounding that the Met is still being asked to pick up 80% of the £24 million annual cost of policing football matches in London, including the Premier League. …
The 43-force model was designed in the 1960s and hasn’t been fit for purpose for at least two decades. It hinders the effective confrontation of today’s threats and fully reaping the benefits of technology. …
We need to reduce the number of forces by two thirds, with the new bigger and fully capable regional forces supported by the best of modern technology and making better use of the limited funding available. We also need a national policing body with responsibility for key capabilities, such as helicopters and intelligence functions. …
We must fix our broken criminal justice system, which lets down victims and is too often a barrier to the efficient use of police time and resources. That a London crown court already has 65 cases listed for 2029 tells you all you need to know about the growing dysfunction. …
To get anywhere near the Government’s ambitions of stronger neighbourhood policing, and halving knife crime and violence against women and girls, our extraordinary officers must be freed from unnecessary demands and bureaucracy. It is time for the first serious reform of our policing model in over 60 years.
Worth reading in full.
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Hear, hear, Sir Mark Rowley!
He makes the crucial point that the Police Force are burdened with non-police work shunted onto them by others who should be doing it themselves.
Modern police officers are forced to be understanding social workers, psychiatrists, preparing legal cases in minute detail for lawyers, who collude with bent judges to throw it all out and refuse to prosecute, or then sentence the criminal to a pathetic slap on the wrist.
Police officers are also required to have military-type physical training in subduing violent criminals, while at daily risk of life and limb in protecting the public. They must also have cast-iron stomachs to deal with horrific crime scenes, just like ambulance and medical staff do, as well as dealing with drug dealers, human traffickers, domestic violence and swarms of illegal Third World criminals.
Politicians sipping champagne in their exclusive clubs don’t have to deal with any of this, and yet are happy to join the public in blaming the police for absolutely everything, as if the police were The National Scapegoat! It’s monstrously unfair.
I’m sorry Heretic but, you lost me at this paragraph, “Police officers are also required to have military-type physical training in subduing violent criminals, while at daily risk of life and limb in protecting the public, etc.”
From time to time and depending on their job roles, some, or relatively few, police officers are required to do the tough and the ugly bits of the job but, none of them have to do all of the onerous things you list, and none of them do only these tasks all of the time. Of course, nobody is required to join nor forced to stay in the Police – or any of the UK’s uniformed services. And finally, personally, I don’t blame the Police for absolutely anything.
I didn’t say every police officer has to do every one of those things, but the point is that politicians who make the laws have allowed other professions to offload their own tasks onto the police, especially the legal and social work professions.
Your comment also shows that you are missing another point entirely: the Globalists want to drive all Ethnic Europeans OUT OF THE POLICE and ARMED FORCES, as part of The Great Replacement, so they pile as much pressure upon them as possible to make them leave. This includes forcing military families to live in substandard housing, and allowing the relentless legal harassment of veterans and police.
You also know perfectly well that the majority of the population blame The National Scapegoat for everything.
The heads of police should not engage in public policy campaigns. They should keep their advice for confidential internal meetings. Only if something like the break down of policing or public order was at stake should they feel aboe to speak out and then after using every internal means possible. This article seems to be a call for more cash in which he cannot be seen as unbiassed. His job will be easier and his income will be much higher in work and retirement if a great deal of additional cash is made available. His excuse that a small proportion of calls are about non crime hate does not address the many criticisms of the Met and other forces. How much does he spend on WOKE. How much on gender stuff. How much on officers who retuire early to avoid accountability., How much on pensions those of us who pay the bills can’t have ourselves. His campaign for fewer police forces goes against the public wish to have local forces. It is bare faced political campaigning. Perhaps Starmer will give him a peerage for helping him consolidate police forces and thereby control policing from the centre. The DT is, of… Read more »
In all fairness, it is not the police who make the “woke” laws.
And he already has a peerage.
But I do agree with you about the fact that the public want LOCAL police forces, and local cottage hospitals, local farmers, local everything, instead of more Stalinist Five-Year Plans and Central Soviet Control.
One way to save money would be to abolish the Useless Police & Crime Commissioners nobody asked for, whose function seems to be issuing press statements, posing for photos, and hectoring the police over minutiae, though they themselves often have no experience at all of policing.
The public want smaller local police stations rather than 1 or 2 large one miles away from where they live to serve a population of 100,000s and the same small number of offices on a beat on foot not driving round in cars, I can’t remember the last time I saw police officers patrolling on foot. I don’t see why this can’t be delivered by fewer larger forces if doing so reduces costs by reducing duplication of admin tasks.
They could use bicycles like they used to. My old village had a bobby on a bike, and everyone knew him.
Indeed they could, people want a bobby they know who knows their patch.
Who defines what is and what is not “a non-crime hate incident”?
‘Non-Crime Hate Incidents
5.4 A non-crime hate incident is defined as;
“any incident where a crime has not been committed, but where it is
perceived by the reporting person or any other person that the incident
was motivated by hostility or prejudice based on a protected
characteristic.”‘
https://www.suffolk.police.uk/SysSiteAssets/foi-media/suffolk/policies/hate-crime-policy.pdf
This is such an obviously flawed definition, you wonder how any intelligent person could not see how flawed it is.
(And the semicolon instead of a colon doesn’t indicate a high level of intelligence either!)
It is quite simple – the police deal with crime fullstop. If it is not a crime then it does not involve them.
I don’t believe that as few as 1 in 2000 calls relates to non-crime hate incidents. I’d have believed it a decade ago, but not now.
And Governor, where were you ten years ago when we needed someone with authority to speak up about the abomination that is NCHIs?
I don’t applaud Rowley for stating the obvious after the poison on NCHIs has already spread.
So is this classed as a NCHI? Montgomery getting arrested by 11 police officers, all because he wore a sandwich board with some words on it? It’s what happens when you go full ‘anti-agenda’; ”Yesterday Montgomery Toms was arrested by eleven police in London for wearing a placard saying Trans = mental illness. Free speech is dead in this country.” https://x.com/DaveAtherton20/status/1941752592335315092 His statement afterwards; ”Context: On Saturday, I attended the Pride march to offer a counter perspective. The trans flag, in my view, represents child mutilation, indoctrination, mental illness and a mass psychological operation that has convinced people there are multiple genders and that it is okay to attack young minds. Someone has to challenge these lies at a grassroots level, and that’s exactly what I went there to do. In return, I was arrested, detained for 10 hours, released on pre-charge bail, and have now been *BANNED* from Westminster City. This is the United Kingdom. Freedom of speech is rapidly vanishing, and the police no longer act under their oath to uphold the law impartially. We, the people, must push back harder than ever. If we don’t, things will only continue to spiral towards dystopian madness. Truth is now… Read more »
Monty is my son 💪
Legend 😇👍
You must be so proud! What a fine young man you’ve turned out there.😊
73% trust the Met and 13% don’t? I am sceptical.
I suspect a considerable number of police officers quite like non-crime hate incidents.
Chasing violent criminals is so tiring! Much less stressful to visit an ordinary citizen accused of a hate incident (maybe he said something like “this country is overrun by migrants”, or “oh, I’m sick of this enforced adoration of the rainbow flag” or “I don’t think the British empire was all bad”). Talk to him, gently reminding him of the importance of correct thinking, depicting the possibility of a criminal record. If he becomes troublesome, he can always be asked to accompany them to a police station – the process is part of the punishment.
If the Establishment want a politically aware minion in charge of the police then they have no complaints if he uses his skills against them.
I still think it is part of a budgetary battle rather than any real expectation of radical overhaul though.
London must see far more demonstrations/marches etc. per head of population than anywhere else. Does the Met get extra money to cover the cost of policing them? probably not. Maybe an organisation should be allowed to hold 2 or 3 marches then get charged for the cost of policing them. The pro Palestinian protesters made their point, whatever it was other than “I’ve jumped on the latest woke bandwagon”, a long time ago. Make them pay if they want to keep on making the same pointless point.
Come on Sir Mark, really? Oranges vs big apples? Opening your thesis with irrelevant comparisons is never a good strategy. Exactly, how relevant is it to compare the costs of policing Sydney, Australia or New York (City), America with policing Mayor Khant’s Londonistan? I mean, let’s compare per capita policing costs in other capital cities; Berlin, Paris, Stockholm, Buenos Aires, Brasilia, Kabul, Nassau…
And, what should UK tax payers make of this assertion? “We must be focused and shed the distractions and bureaucracy that divert us away from crime-fighting.” To which, I’m asking myself, if you’re the organisation’s senior leader and these things aren’t happening, seriously Sir Mark?
Says the Microphone slap out of Journos hand Merchant !
I forgot about that.
I’ve got some Brexity books on my bookshelf. In fact I even wrote one of them. I expect Sir Mark will send at least six plods to break down my door and haul me off for a punishment beating
You don’t say Sherlock!
“Non crime hate incidents are poor policy”—-But that depends on who you are. If you are an ordinary law abiding citizens just trying to get on with your life it is not only a poor policy, it is tyrannical. But if you are a Davos Club World Government person like Starmer and most of our Political Class then it is a fantastic idea to control every aspect of our lives and impose Cultural Marxism on us
Rowley just exhibits top down thinking when considering how best to improve policing. I’ve seen it so many times before whether in the public or private sector. If you have bottom up thinking then you are much more likely to have respect and support from your customers/public.
An example is to start on the premise that all resources should be at the bottom of the business. Any diversion up the business has to be justified on the basis of making the bottom better. Police and crime commisioners was top down thinking. Money taken away from the bottom for no apparent benefit.