Theresa may

The reputation of the police may be as black as mud at the moment, but the Met has a chance to atone during the Olympics. Security forces have been making their preparations as the Olympic construction site nears completion.  In May, police officers, counter-intelligence officials and the emergency services conducted their first major security exercise. Further stress tests are being undertaken on local transport routes and waterways. And permanent surveillance of Olympic venues is being established; in future, visitors to these sites will be subject to airport-style security and a number of armed officers will patrol the area. Nothing, it seems, is being left to chance. These operations are being

If the counter-terrorism strategy the government is announcing today is to succeed, it will have to overcome bureaucratic opposition and institutional inertia. As Dean Godson writes in The Times today (£), senior civil servants in the Office of Security and Counter-Terrorism are highly reluctant to accept the government’s new, more muscular approach to this issue and will go back to the old, failed way of doing things if given the chance. If the Prime Minister’s writ is going to run across government on this issue, he is going to need someone working from the centre with Cameron’s explicit backing whose sole role is to supervise the implementation of the policy

The coalition’s counter-terrorism strategy will be published tomorrow. This rather delayed review has been the subject of some semi-public wrangling, Cameron and Clegg have given speeches setting out very different visions for it. But one thing to remember is that the test of the review’s robustness isn’t just whether it stops government money going to extremists groups. It also has to lead to government, at all levels, stopping dealings with these groups, denying them the oxygen of recognition. Today’s Telegraph notes that 20 groups will lose their funding because the views they espouse are antithetical to British values. This is to be welcomed. But it won’t have much of an

Target culture. It’s a pejorative phrase, and understandably so. As we discovered during the New Labour years, targets designed to encourage good public services can frequently do the opposite — replacing genuine care with box-ticking, and action with bureaucracy. I mention this now because of an article in this week’s Spectator (do subscribe, etc.) by an anonymous Metropolitan Police officer. He describes how a target culture has skewed the work of the force and, in some cases, even the law itself. Here’s one anecdote, which rather sums it all up: “I know of one instance in which a uniformed sergeant stole (or neglected to hand in) some confiscated cannabis. Instead

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