Police must tackle antisocial behaviour

12 April 2012

Antisocial behaviour really matters to most people but it has been put on the back burner in terms of police priorities, according to HM Chief Inspector of Constabulary, Sir Denis O'Connor.

In a review published today, he says keeping order has been relegated to a "second-order consideration" because policing is determined by a targets culture which sets less store by bad behaviour than other crimes. Sir Denis says Londoners are even less convinced than others that police take their complaints seriously.

Low-level bad behaviour — anything from noisy neighbours to dogs fouling the pavements — may not rank high in the police scheme of things but it can make all the difference to ordinary people's lives. The problem can usually be reduced to a core of a few families in any one area. Yet it is not difficult to identify solutions to the malaise, at least in terms of policing.

The targets culture skews police priorities away from people's real concerns; that culture must change. Police are obliged to spend inordinate amounts of time form-filling to document their every action; that has to be reduced. Officers are, says Sir Denis, prevented from using their common sense to react normally to antisocial behaviour; those restrictions need to be relaxed.

And most people are reassured by visible policing, by police officers on the streets rather than in cars.

In fairness to the Metropolitan Police, it has long promoted neighbourhood policing: its locally based Safer Neighbourhoods teams have been operating for more than four years now. But the Met's attention to antisocial behaviour could be improved by tackling bureaucracy and the target culture on these lines.

The debate about police priorities has taken on a new urgency because of public spending cuts. It matters now, more than ever, that police should respond to the public's real needs when it comes to allocating scarce resources. And tackling antisocial behaviour is one of them.

Afghan quagmire

The prospects for a swift withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan in July next year, as President Obama envisages, seem less likely in the light of comments by General David Petraeus, US commander there. He say any withdrawal depends on the conditions on the ground. His remarks coincide with the publication of a book about the White House by Bob Woodward which suggests, damagingly, that the President decided on the deadline for withdrawal for political reasons.

General Petraeus's remarks apply to Britain as well as to the US, given the extent to which this country is bound to the US effort in Afghanistan.

A firm timetable for withdrawal, which the Prime Minister has talked about, will in all probability yield to facts on the ground, however much people want the troops home. Premature withdrawal would forfeit whatever gains British troops have made — which is not to say our presence there could not be reduced from next year. But for all the popular scepticism about the war, we are in this for the long haul.

A woman's shoes

Women's relationship with shoes ranges from the dysfunctional to the obsessive, while men can happily wear the same model for their entire lives. There is no solution to this conundrum; we can simply applaud Selfridges for catering to reality with the world's biggest shoe department. It may become a fetish in its own right.

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