Sir Ronnie Flanagan made some excellent points about officers not being allowed to use their discretion. Due to the target driven nature of police forces these days, officers are being told to make arrests with absolutely no discretion so their force can make their targets in particular crimes so to guarantee their budgets for next year.
I just wish that someone had told my force about Sir Ronnie Flanagan's findings!
Due to some administrative cock up by person(s) who shall remain anonymous, we all received an email regarding the number of low level disorder detections that had been calculated at our particular nick. We are a very successful police station if I do say so myself but in many ways probably too successful. When the predicted detection rate for the year we are in now was sent, somebody over-estimated it by nearly 400 detections!
So what, you may say but the problem that faces us now is that each officer has now been instructed to detect an extra two low level disorders a week to be able to make that target.
Meeting that target isn't really a problem but what the problem is, is that once again discretion has been chipped away so that there is hardly any left.
In a normal situation regarding low level disorder you could have used your discretion to decide on the outcome. The person committing the disorder could have been moved on or ejected from a location in order to stop that disorder from occurring. That person after being spoken to goes home with a flea in their ear and a little bit wiser and the chances are they will not come to police notice ever again.
But, if we are now being instructed to detect these extra disorders then people who would have not normally come to notice are being put through the criminal justice system and could end up with a criminal record for something extremely minor! We are therefore making criminals out of people who are not criminals just to make targets!
The problem doesn't stop there.
Who's going to deal with all this extra paper work that goes with these extra detections? Us that's who! Sir Ronnie Flanagan has already stated that there is too much bureaucracy and unnecessary paperwork that the police officers have to do and this is just adding to it. It takes at least 2-3 hours to put together a comprehensive file for court and that's not including the time it takes to book the detained person into custody assuming they have been arrested for the offence rather than reporting them for it.
So for those extra two detections they are instructing, you can expect to find the officer spending at least a shift off the streets to deal with the paperwork and procedures. A shift which will no doubt be short of an officer to detect, what is in my opinion, more serious crime which if the officer would have been allowed to use their discretion in the first instance, that more serious crime would have been dealt with.
The Federation have already spotted the potential flaw with constabularies following the recommendations of Sir Ron with their response to his review of policing:
"The Police Federation would agree with many of Sir Ronnie’s recommendations, but you could be forgiven for thinking we have been here before. In 2002 a predecessor of Sir Ronnie’s chaired a Bureaucracy Task Force that made many similar proposals. Regrettably, without the cash and political will needed many of these recommendations will fail to become a reality."
It looks as if Sir Ronnie's words are already being ignored!
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