Amidst the images of burning vehicles and riots in Ferguson, Missouri, the US President, Barack Obama, has responded to growing concerns about policing by pledging to spend $75 million to equip his nation’s police with 50,000 Body Worn Videos. His initiative will give added impetus to an international movement to make street policing more transparent and accountable. But is this just another example of a political and technical quick fix or a sign of a different relationship between the police and science?
At the heart of the shift to Body Worn Video is a remarkable story of a Police Chief who undertook an experiment as part of his Cambridge University Masters programme. Rialto Police Department, California serves a city of 100,000 and has just over one hundred sworn officers. Like many other departments, it had faced allegations that its officers used excessive force. Its Chief, Tony Farrar, decided to test whether issuing his officers with Body Worn Video would reduce use of force and complaints against his officers. Instead of the normal police approach to issuing equipment like this, Farrar, working with his Cambridge academic supervisor, Dr Barak Ariel, designed a randomised field trial, dividing his staff’s tours of duty into control – no video – and treatment – with video. The results showed a significant reduction in both use of force and citizen complaints.
Why is this story so different? A former Victoria Police Commissioner described the relationship between the police and research as a “dialogue of the deaf”. The Police did not value research and researchers frequently did not value policing. Police Chiefs often saw research as yet another form of criticism of the organisation. Yet, despite this, research has had a major effect on modern policing. There are very few police departments in the developed world that don’t claim to target “hot-spots” of crime, an approach developed by a series of randomised trials.
However, even with the relative success of “hot-spot policing”, police have not owned the science of their own profession. This is why Chief Farrar’s story is so important. Not only was Farrar the sponsor of the research, but he was also part of the research team. His approach has allowed his department to learn by testing. Moreover, because the Rialto trial has been published to both the professional and academic field, its lessons have spread and it is now being replicated not just in the United States but also in the United Kingdom. The UK College of Policing has completed randomised trials of Body Worn Video in Essex Police to test whether the equipment is effective at gathering evidence in domestic violence investigations. The National Institute of Justice in the United States is funding trials in several US cities.
This is the type of approach we have come to expect in medicine to test promising medical treatments. We have not, up to now, seen such a focus on science in policing. Yet there are signs of real transformation, which are being driven by an urgent need to respond to a perfect storm created by a crisis of legitimacy and acute financial pressures. Not only are Chiefs trying to deal with the “Ferguson” factor, but they also have to do so against a backdrop of severe constraint.
“Science can provide a means to transform policing as long as police are prepared to own and adopt the science”
As the case of Body Worn Video has shown, science can provide a means to transform policing as long as police are prepared to own and adopt the science. But for Body Worn Video not to be an isolated case, policing will need to adopt many of the lessons from medicine about how it was transformed from eighteenth century barber surgeons to a modern science-based profession. This means policing needs an education and training system that does not just teach new recruits law and procedure, but also the most effective ways to apply them and why they work. It means that police leaders will need to target their resources using the best available science, test new practices, and track their impact. It will require emerging professional bodies like the College of Policing to work towards a new profession in policing, in which practice is accredited and expertise is valued and rewarded.
Obama’s commitment to Body Worn Video will not, of itself, solve the problems that Ferguson has so dramatically illustrated. The Rialto study suggests it may help – a bit. However, the White House announcement also included money for police education. If that is used wisely and police leaders grasp the opportunity to invest in a new science-based profession, then the future may be brighter.
Headline image credit: ‘Day 126 – West Midlands Police – CCTV Operator’ by West Midlands Police. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr
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“Never waste a good crisis,” or so Rahm Emanuel (President Obama’s former Chief of Staff and now Mayor of Chicago) is reputed to have said. Well, whether Prince Andrew allegedly had sex with an underage girl at some time in the distant past looks like a crisis for the Royal Household. May be it’s an opportunity not to be wasted.
How might it be put to use? It could facilitate a debate into the supposed ‘rights of victims’. Such a debate has been a long time coming. There has been no shortage of inept police investigations that failed to recognise malign intentions even when staring officers in the face. The ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ (Sutcliffe) was interviewed nine times without the West Yorkshire Police appreciating that they were talking to the murderer. A succession of child abuse cases have revealed failures on the part of officers to become sufficiently suspicious of parents. Dr Harold Shipman murdered an unknown — but undoubtedly huge — number of his elderly patients without stirring police suspicions even after a fellow doctor expressed her concerns.
Over the past thirty years, victims have become a more visible and voluble beast in the criminal justice undergrowth. Feminists were in the vanguard of this movement, protesting about crimes against women, especially domestic violence and sex crimes. They were joined by those concerned with the welfare of children. Meanwhile, the Savile Affair and prosecution of a cast list of celebrities on charges of ‘historical child sexual abuse’, plus the shenanigans over the choice of who should chair the inevitable official inquiry, have kept the issue of child abuse at the top of the news agenda.
Enter Prince Andrew who has been accused (along with others) of having a sexual relationship with a young American woman who was under the age of consent. This has prompted Establishment figures, including his ex-wife, to step forward and insist that such allegations are ridiculous. I have no reason to doubt his supporters are genuine, but neither can I shake off the echoes of my own sense of incredulity when Rolf Harris (of all people) was convicted of sex crimes against young women. How do we know that a seemingly inoffensive person — whether a celebrity or a neighbour — has a vile secret?
I don’t claim to know the answer, but I do maintain that it is a legitimate question to ask. What I fear is a moral panic in which the police will be encouraged to look more suspiciously on those accused of heinous crimes. This, it seems to me, is the emphasis contained in two recent and authoritative reports. In March last year Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary issued a report on the policing of domestic violence . When asked, victims said that the main cause of their dissatisfaction with the police handling of their allegations, was that they felt they were not believed. In response the HMIC recommended that the police should be more willing to accept allegations of domestic violence and abuse. Likewise, in the autumn Alexis Jay published her report into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, revealing an unprecedented criminal conspiracy to abuse vulnerable young girls whilst agencies charged with their protection disregarded evidence that should have prompted action. Again, recommendations appeared to emphasise that officers should treat allegations made by young women in care much more seriously than they have in the past.
Should the police accept at face value accusations made by anyone? Or should they weigh the credibility of the accuser as well as the nature of the accusation? The ultimate arbiters of such allegations are juries, but when juries have deliberated on such allegations, they have not endorsed them all. There have been celebrities aplenty acquitted as well as those who have not and are now serving terms of imprisonment. Rape is a criminal charge that is notoriously difficult to prosecute.
This is not just a question that afflicts ageing celebrities and dilapidated northern cities, but is faced everyday by police officers who respond to contested allegations of wrongdoing. One party to a dispute alleges that the other has done wrong, but the other denies it and probably counter-claims that wrong has been done by their accuser. It happens most commonly in episodes of domestic conflict, as anyone who has been on the margins of a ‘messy’ divorce will attest. When viewed in this context, accusations tend to lack credibility because the parties have vested interests in making and denying such allegations.
The issue of the credibility of putative victims arose in the course of research that I and others are hoping to publish with Oxford University Press later this year. We asked focus groups throughout the Black Country region of the West Midlands to evaluate and discuss video clips of encounters between police and members of the public broadcast by the BBC (of the kind I’m sure you will be familiar with). One of the clips focused on the police response to an alleged knife-point robbery of an elderly man and his young female companion in the man’s home. Spontaneously, almost every focus group concluded that the elderly man’s companion was complicit in the robbery. What had ignited their suspicions? Well, wasn’t it odd that such a young woman would spend an occasional evening watching television with an elderly ‘friend of the family’? Wasn’t it suspicious that she became confused, even about whether the robber addressed her by name? How could she insist that the robber was ‘about 20’ years old, if she did not see his face? Why didn’t she scream when the man forced his way into the property? There was almost unanimous agreement that there was ‘more to this than met the eye’! Most focus groups were content with how the officers dealt with the investigation, but if they were critical then it was because the police had not arrested the young woman who was so ‘obviously’ guilty. What they were not to know was that in programme from which this episode was extracted, it was revealed that the young woman’s boyfriend was convicted of the robbery, but no charges were brought against her. On the other hand, when an officer could see on CCTV three youths breaking into a car, many of our focus groups felt that the officer too hastily assumed that they were attempting to steal it, rather than rescuing one of the lad’s girlfriend who had locked herself out of the car (which turned out to be the truth)!
Being ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is a legal principle that receives overwhelming endorsement. If so, the unpalatable corollary must surely be that those who allege guilt must overcome a formidable barrier before conviction can be secured. Crown Prosecutors must be convinced that there is a better than evens chance of overcoming that barrier before prosecuting someone alleged to have done wrong. This undoubtedly works to the disadvantage of those who regard themselves as genuine victims of wrongdoing. It is equally undoubtedly the case that offenders will do all in their power to exploit the ‘presumption of innocence’ to their malign advantage. Yet, it also protects the innocent victims of malign false allegations made for whatever reason. To be wrongfully accused is also an acutely painful experience from which a system of justice should surely also safeguard the innocent. Amid all this uncertainty, what is surely obvious is that prescriptions for the police to believe accusations at face value is no remedy.
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