Increased Police Numbers Will Not Reduce Crime

Minister of Police Paula Bennett open acknowledgement on Q and A this morning that she saw her role as ‘a support person for the police’, is worrying, says Dr Kim Workman, Adjunct Research Associate at Victoria University’s Institute of Criminology. “It suggests that the political pattern which has been followed for the last thirty years, is going to dominate once again.”:

Sir Geoffrey Palmer, writing about the 1987 ‘Law and Order’ General Election campaign, when the Police Association successfully demanded 900 additional police, explained the relationship between politicians and the police.
“The Police Association, he wrote, conducted an aggressive, politically planned campaign to bargain for an increase in police personnel. Public engagement was high, with very often simplistic views being expressed in extreme language, prompting politicians to make an immediate political response.(1)

He then turned his attention to the behaviour of politicians;
Politicians tend to reflect such sentiments. They defend the values implicit in the concept of law and order. They have a habit of asking for more public and community support for the police. Most political discussions on policing, accordingly, tend to end up as a sort of auction about who support the police most. In such an atmosphere, critical comment s about police behaviour tend to meet powerful reaction, and accusations that particular politicians are “anti-police”, are a powerful tool in the political game of discrediting one’s opponents.”
Thirty years later, the Minister is setting the same scene, to justify an increase of 800 Police personnel. We need the extra numbers, she explained, to reduce crime, and reduce Police response times to attending crime scenes. Research studies since the 1980’s on the effectiveness of rapid response, based on the premise that criminals will be caught and punished, found that there was no evidence that it would increase the chances of an arrest – unless the police could get to the scene within one minute of the commission of an offence. (2) The research showed that an officer on foot patrol could expect to catch a burglar once in every eight years. Evaluations of key strategies in policing at that time, uniformed street patrol, rapid response to emergencies and expert criminal investigation, came up with similar results. Increased police numbers did nothing to improve performance. That was not to say that these activities should be totally abandoned; but more is not necessarily better. Saturation policing of high crime areas inevitably led to police harassment of marginalised communities. Most of the time, increases in the number of police has closely paralleled increases in crime rates. (3)

The critical ingredient in reducing crime is whether the public – victims and witnesses - provide information to the police that helps identify the suspect. At present, 80% of family violence incidents and around 90% of child sexual abuse go unreported; extra police will not improve that.

Nor should the police take up the role of truancy officers, as Minister Bennett proposes; or for that matter, community mental health workers, and social workers. They are not trained for those roles. Instead, government needs to acknowledge that preventing crime requires a great deal more than pouring money into law enforcement. Social conditions outside the control of the police and the criminal justice system, determine crime levels in communities.

References:
(1) Palmer, Geoffrey, (1986). The Legislative Process and the Police. In Neil Cameron and Warren Young, eds. Policing at the Crossrowards. Wellington: Allen and Unwin. 1984. P.70
(2) William Spelman, and Dale K. Brown, Calling the Police; Citizen Reporting of Serious Crime. Police Executive Research Forum, Washington DC.
(3) D.H. Bayley, (1994). Police for the future, Oxford University Press, New York: Oxford University Press.1994.

© Scoop Media