or crime, but something more fundamental. It is about our changed relationship with our neighbours and our neighbourhood.
The original ‘peelers’ or ‘bobbies’ marched out of the station in 1829, shortly after Sir Robert Peel had created the first police force in London. Eight constables were dispatched to independent positions within the local area and ordered to walk around a small network of streets in a regular pattern. According to the instructions written by the capital’s first police commissioner, Sir Charles Rowan, the constable ‘should be able to see every part of his beat at least once in ten minutes or a quarter of an hour’.
However, it quickly became clear that this system of policing was, frankly, rubbish as a crime-fighting tool. Having constables trudging up to twenty miles a night in ill-fitting boots in all weathers cost a fortune and left officers exhausted. If the perception was that it prevented vandalism, prostitution and drunkenness, the reality was that a great many PC Plods were forced to retire early with the entry ‘worn out’ on their pension papers. Home Office research in 1984 revealed how inefficient the foot patrol was at catching criminals: ‘A patrolling police officer could expect to pass within 100 yards of a burglary taking place roughly once every eight years. Even then they may not even realise that the crime is taking place.’
Nevertheless, the bobby on the beat remained the cornerstone of British policing for well over a century because, it was believed, he discouraged potential villains and made the law-abiding feel safer. The uniformed foot patrol was a comforting presence within what was busy public space, pounding the pavement and keeping a trained eye on all that was going on.
Reading George Dixon’s police notebooks from the 1950s to the 1970s, however, would have revealed evidence of a transformation. In his early years patrolling Dock Green, nine out of ten households didn’t own a car. People walked. Within twenty-five years, it was the other way around. Almost everybody drove. They left their front door and were quickly cocooned in their vehicles. On their return home, the risk of having to negotiate an encounter with a neighbour was reduced to a few seconds as they locked the car and briskly headed indoors to be reunited with another piece of technology that was changing the social dynamic — television. In 1951, virtually no one had a TV on Dixon’s beat. By 1971, virtually no one was without access to the telly. Where previously crowds of people would walk to the pictures or the pub in the evening, now they stayed at home to stare at a flickering screen in the comfort of their own front room. It wasn’t the bobby that was changing, it was the beat.
The arrival of the motorcar and the television depopulated the pavement and changed the status of the pedestrian. Towns and cities were redesigned around the needs of the driver, those on foot often forced underground into poorly lit tunnels and intimidating underpasses. The character of urban public space changed from common resource to the habitat of the excluded and the dangerous. ‘Good evenin’ all’ would often have echoed along subterranean walkways without response, save the uncomfortable shuffling of a tramp trying to sleep in a corner. It was the mid-1960s when police chiefs ordered that Plod, too, should get behind the wheel. The retreat of the constable into his radio-equipped rapid response patrol car further changed society’s relationship with the street.
The boundary between private and public might once have been described as the threshold between ‘mine’ and ‘ours’. What Dixon witnessed was the shared tenure of his beat being transferred to a single faceless other. Once, residents would have proudly swept the pavement beyond their front gate. Now, people sweep their front path onto the pavement for someone else to clean up. The amount of litter dropped on our roads has increased five-fold since the 1960s, a simple measure of how respect for our public spaces has been lost.
The British are said to be uncomfortable with continental piazza culture: the ritual occupation of public space by all generations. It is all right for Italian, French or Spanish families to promenade around the town square on a sunny evening, but it would never work in Dock Green. Except that when people talk about the days when they could leave their front doors open, confident that trusted neighbours would be around to keep an eye, or take their evening constitutional without fear of being mugged, they are nostalgic for the days when we also routinely occupied our public spaces.
Britain may complain that the bobby abandoned the beat, but it was the beat that abandoned the bobby. In our search for security we fled the street, and in retreating we ended up feeling less safe. We have tried to restore our confidence with barbed wire, anti-climb paint and a million security cameras but the effect has been to make us even more fearful. I remember filming on an estate in Yorkshire where the central shopping area was dominated by a breezeblock structure prickling with razor wire and CCTV cameras, the entrance reached via a security turnstile. It turned out this was the community library. The more we emphasise the boundary between public and private space, the more vulnerable we feel.
Shared urban environments are a social safety valve, a place for people of all backgrounds to mingle on equal ground. London Mayor Boris Johnson once described public space as ‘the glue that holds a city together’. It is the territory where trust and confidence are forged. When people call for the return of the bobby on the beat, it is both they mean. They want the reassurance they think a greater police presence will bring, but what they really crave is their streets back.
To some extent they have been given the first: the focus on neighbourhood policing, the re-introduction of foot patrols and the creation of community support officers. But the second is not something that the police alone can do. Indeed, research suggests they may make very little difference.
In the 1970s, police chiefs in Kansas tested the widely held theory that having more officers on the streets would cut crime and make people feel safer. They split up the city patrol squads: some areas had two or three times as many uniformed cops on the streets; in others officers only went out onto the beat if they were responding to calls; the rest carried on as normal. The results came as something of a shock. There was no difference in the crime rates between the three areas and local people felt no less fearful whichever kind of patrol they had.
Kansas is not Dock Green. The American officers were in cars, not on foot. But the research was seen as evidence of the limits to what beat officers could actually achieve. They rarely catch criminals, they may not deter much crime and they don’t necessarily make people feel more relaxed. Indeed, the sight of uniforms can sometimes reinforce apprehension, a reminder of the threat from criminality.
In 2000, the Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust responded to the demands of their tenants for a bobby to patrol the North Yorkshire village of New Earswick. The trustees agreed to pay North Yorkshire Police ?25,000 a year for a uniformed constable, who was contracted to contribute a visible presence in the streets and provide reassurance and a sense of security to the public. The scheme achieved the opposite. Both crime and the fear of crime increased, and residents’ satisfaction with the local police declined. Evaluation of the project concluded that ‘seeking solutions to problems of local order through a policing and security lens alone may serve to exacerbate residents’ fears’.
This paradox has inspired some profound questions as to what the police are actually for and how we might measure success. Robert Peel famously said that the test of police efficiency was the absence of crime and disorder. On that basis, and taking account of the evidence from both recorded police crime figures and the British Crime survey, they have generally been getting ever more efficient since 1995. But, of course, that’s not how we measure police efficiency because, if we are honest, we don’t actually believe that crime, or the absence of it, is entirely or even mainly down to the police.
Crime has fallen in pretty much every Western nation over the same period, irrespective of criminal justice or policing policies. Criminologists are still scratching their heads as to why that is but some suspect it may have something to do with the global economy or stable democracy. Perhaps it is linked to improved education systems or human rights legislation. It could be a consequence of the collapse in the price of second-hand TVs and better locks. And it may, in part at least, be down to intelligent policing — new technology and more sophisticated approaches to crime prevention and investigation.
But the idea that we can draw a line between crime levels and police efficiency is far too simplistic. When crime was rising throughout the 1960s, 70s and 80s, people didn’t say it was the police’s fault for not being cleverer. They blamed delinquent youth, or unemployment, or the collapse of traditional values. Equally during the last two decades, when crime has generally been falling, people haven’t said it is down to brilliant detective work or the efforts of patrolling constables. In truth, they haven’t even been convinced that crime is falling and still talk about social breakdown being to blame for rising lawlessness.
Tony Blair’s government originally tried to measure police performance against a whole panoply of targets: response times, arrests and convictions, how quickly they wrote to victims, clear-up rates, time spent on the beat rather than filling forms. Then, persuaded by the argument that actually all these targets were getting in the way, and certainly not translating into people feeling safer, they scrapped that idea and went for the one simple measure
