Politicians neglect the long-term work that must be done to truly reform policing
“What has been done will be done again,” says the book of Ecclesiastes. This Solomonic saying characterises plans purporting to create a “British FBI”. Repeatedly, governments have tried invoking the talisman of J Edgar Hoover whilst futilely re-arranging policing deckchairs. These attempts to emulate an American institution are ironically exemplars of the bumbling British bureaucratic blunders blocking change, and the state’s utter failure to learn from past failures.
Here is a synopsis of the long-running farce. In 1989, the Met Commissioner, Sir Peter Imbert, called for a “British FBI”. The idea caught on and, in 1991, a National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS — no, not that one) was being touted as the first step to create a national crimefighting agency. It wasn’t. No one was sure what the NCIS did, it had insufficient funding, impossible to organise, and it faced fierce resistance from other agencies and police services. In 1995, John Major announced he would pursue a “British FBI” expanded from the NCIS. Nothing of note resulted.
After years of talk by New Labour, yet another “British FBI”, the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), opened in 2006. Like the NCIS, SOCA was an amalgamation without proper powers, proper strategy, or proper staffing. Its main job was to figure out what it did. It failed. “Crime-Fighting Agency ‘Failing and in Turmoil’” read a 2008 Daily Telegraph headline. No reform was proposed, only more amalgamation. Plans were mooted to marry the NCA and the dismally ineffective Serious Fraud Office (SFO), presumably because misery loves company. SFO insiders managed to stop that, showing a competence at Whitehall games they never displayed in crimefighting.
The coalition had its own go at a “British FBI” with the National Crime Agency (NCA). As with its predecessors, the NCA was an amalgamation of the last one (SOCA) and various other bits and bobs of law enforcement. It had pitifully low funding, insufficient staff, constant turnover, and no one was sure of its precise role. As a result, the agency has been a disaster, popping in the news periodically a fresh failure (most recently, botching grooming gang investigations through their own incompetence). The only good thing which can be said of the NCA is that it’s not quite as incompetent as the SFO.
Rather than fixing things, the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood has unveiled her own attempt at playing the “British FBI” game. The National Police Service (NPS) takes the NCA and merges it with other bits and bobs, compounding failure with negative synergy.
he NPS will bundle the NCA with the Met’s consistent failures on counter-terrorism, the City police’s disastrous inability to combat fraud, and various other disparate responsibilities. The SFO may or may not be shoved into this. The result will be confusion over its mandate, turnover in staffing, and the absence of proper funding to handle this wide-ranging portfolio of problems.
British politicians are unable or unwilling to understand how the FBI was built
Nowhere in this announcement is there work to actually create a higher standard of national police and weed out the existing failures. This requires more rigour than the professional development interviews Mahmood proposes to test local constables. FBI level duties with North Yorkshire police level training is always going to fail. Mahmood says the NPS will be “deploying world-class talent and state-of-the-art technology”. Again, this is familiar and insubstantial rhetoric (no politician has announced mediocre talent and technology). A few graduate recruitment schemes won’t be enough to change things, nor will flying in some American to head the agency (witness former FBI agent Lisa Osofsky’s inability to fix the SFO). There is no point to buying up hot tech without competence to implement it. Look at history. The NCA, we were promised, would “harness the latest technology” and be at the cutting edge of fighting cybercrime; instead, a decade later, an inspection revealed that the NCA had failed to even modernise its SOCA-era technology, let alone innovate. Mahmood’s depressingly familiar white paper promises that the NPS will be the same thing, once again.
British politicians are unable or unwilling to understand how the FBI was built. Started in 1908 as an entirely new agency, poaching the best investigators it continually increased its powers, innovated in applying technology (like with fingerprint database), and created a rigorous training programme. Over a decades-long process, the FBI became, for all its faults, a genuine national force to fight crime, terrorism, and espionage. The US government is also willing to pay the tab (roughly $10 billion a year). Mahmood and her predecessors have not been willing to abandon short-term headlines for the long-term work of fighting back against chief constables, other agencies, and the Treasury for the money and time to build such a force in Britain. The result is that organised crime improves and innovates over decades, while the best British politicians can do is think up acronyms and create performance metrics.
As criminals act with increasing impunity, a true “British FBI” is an excellent idea. Regrettably, working for actual beneficial change seems taboo to British politicians of all stripes. Instead, we can look forward to a continuation of the cycle. Expect, in ten years or so, more grand announcements, novel bland acronyms, and enthusiastically marketed deckchair shuffling. To the detriment of Britain, what has been done will be done again.
