Amid the general dissatisfaction with the state of our public services, which is the most dangerous element in this national malaise? It is the precipitous loss of confidence in our police forces.
Less than half of those questioned last year in the Office for National Statistics Crime Survey said their local police were doing a good job; ten years ago almost two-thirds gave a positive response.
This matters so much because, while the Government burbles about ‘defence of the realm’ being the first responsibility of the state, our sense of security derives principally from how it is manifested in our daily lives. That comes from policing.
I have never heard the risks to this fundamental element in the pact between government and the governed put with such urgency as by the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, Sir Stephen Watson, addressing the country’s pre-eminent political think tank, Policy Exchange, last week.
The 56-year-old Watson lamented that ‘our natural constituency’ – by which he meant the law-abiding – ‘are now asking, what the Hell is going on with policing?’
He then set out how destructive this is: ‘The policing mission is essential to our country, it is essential to our life-blood, it is essential to our economy, it is essential to the fabric of family and community life, it is essential to a country that prides itself on abiding by the rules.’
To listen to some within law enforcement, the impression is given that, without a vast increase in funding, they are defenceless to stem the decline.
Not so this particular police chief, who describes such an attitude as ‘abhorrent defeatism, telling the public we can’t do x or y, that it’s all too difficult’.
Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police , Sir Stephen Watson
Watson is entitled to such an implicit criticism of others in the crime prevention business, because of the transformation he has wrought within the Greater Manchester Police (recognised with a knighthood in this month’s King’s Birthday Honours).
When he took over GMP in 2021, having made the previously lamentable South Yorkshire Police the ‘most improved force’ for three successive years, it was in special measures.
The GMP had failed even to record 80,000 crimes and its 999 response times were the worst in England.
That was turned around within a year, with a quadrupling of ‘stop and searches’ and, in 2024, progress was stepped up, increasing arrests, answering emergency calls in an average time of two seconds, and attending serious incidents, also on average, in under eight minutes.
All this has had a marked effect on offending rates – downwards. Last year, GMP recorded a reduction of eight per cent in total crime: residential burglaries down 11 per cent, theft down 28 per cent and vehicle offences down over 18 per cent.
It must be deeply frustrating for Watson and his officers that the Government, concerned about jail overcrowding, and arguing that short sentences don’t help prisoners to reform, is pursuing a policy of replacing so-called ‘short prison sentences’ with electronic tagging.
As Sir Stephen remarked to those of us at the Policy Exchange meeting: ‘Short sentences may not work for offenders, but they do work for victims, and I’m on the victims’ side.’
Many blame the requirement to investigate so-called ‘non-crime hate incidents’ as a reason for police forces’ distraction from dealing with what used to be the bread and butter of crime-fighting.
These were introduced in the wake of the Macpherson Report, following the racially motivated murder of Stephen Lawrence, and designed to log acts of prejudice or hostility towards people with a ‘protected characteristic’.
Watson didn’t raise this, but, asked by a member of the audience if the policy of collecting ‘non-crime hate incident data’ should be scrapped, he responded that it should: ‘What it morphed into was pretty much anyone with a protected characteristic who perceived themselves to be a victim of an incident because of that, was automatically recorded. I think that’s a mistake. It went too far.’
Not that he has any tolerance for delinquent police officers, declaring that recent years have revealed ‘the most appalling misconduct and criminal acts by serving officers who should never have been recruited and who should have been kicked out of the force long before dreadful things happened’.
Under Watson, GMP has kicked out hundreds of officers deemed to have been corrupt or simply useless (he introduced a new test for aspirant officers, having been stunned to discover how many were functionally illiterate, unable even to fill out an incident report). In a sense, Watson is trying to reintroduce what is sometimes called ‘good, old fashioned policing’. This was clear from an interview he gave to the Daily Telegraph a year ago, when he said one of his first decisions was to replace what he called officers’ ‘scruffy kit’, which didn’t even have the force’s insignia, with smart new uniforms.
‘If you turn up to work, if you’re a female officer, you tie your hair up, if you’re a man, you’ve had a shave, you press your clothing, you polish your boots, you look smart.’
It is perhaps not surprising that Watson comes from a military family background. His father had been a Royal Navy officer in Rhodesia but the family left the country along with many other Britons when Robert Mugabe took power.
Sir Stephen himself was 18 when he returned to Britain and still has a faint Rhodesian accent. I noticed that especially when sitting close to him at lunch after the speech was delivered. I also saw that he was wearing Union Jack cufflinks.
Some of the other attendees at the lunch were former Metropolitan Police officers, who felt the Met desperately needed his brand of leadership.
On all the vital measures, such as arrests per officer, and reducing crime rates, that most emblematic force, the original one created in 1829 by Sir Robert Peel, has been eclipsed by Manchester.
Sir Stephen didn’t rise to the bait but emphasised how supportive the Mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, had been. When film emerged a year ago showing one of Watson’s officers kicking and stamping on the head of a 19-year-old, Mohammed Fahir Amaaz, during a fracas at Manchester Airport, Burnham made sure to see the police footage of the whole incident.
This showed that Amaaz had, just before, broken the nose of a female police officer in a sustained assault. Burnham went on the radio to warn those marching in support of Amaaz: ‘There are two sides of this complicated situation… people’s careers are put on the line. We feel for the police officers who were injured.’
Would London’s mayor, Sir Sadiq Khan, have done the same?
And do the Home Office apparatchiks want someone like Watson to be the country’s top cop?
When I asked a former Met Detective Chief Inspector, David Spencer, now Policy Exchange’s head of Crime and Justice, he was not encouraging: ‘The Government should replicate the Watson playbook of police leadership across every force.
‘My biggest fear is that the current system is more likely to suppress future Watsons coming through.’
If that is the case, public confidence in the police will slide still lower – possibly with consequences that no government could survive.
