Perhaps these public servants hope that enough dust has settled from the MPs’ expenses scandal. Let’s remember that it was in secrecy that this massive abuse of public funds was allowed to operate. Transparency was finally acknowledged as the single best cure for preventing corruption. But now some officials are trying to bad-mouth FOI and go back to the old ways. I’ve seen claims that FOI is a waste of public money, that it diverts from the serious business of bureaucracy, that it might even be jeopardizing police investigations. All this is nonsense. FOI is the single best regulator of efficiency and probity. It’s certainly cheaper and more effective than the hundreds of regulators currently in operation.

Yet here’s the latest FOI gripe from Chief Constable Ian Latimer of Northern Constabulary in Scotland: He claims that the number of people making FOI requests is going up.

“There is concern that additional funding will be required to support this business area in 2009-10, diverting resources away from operational policing.”

Firstly, isn’t citizen involvement precisely what our leaders claim to want? Now they have it – and they’re moaning. Turns out they don’t actually want the public asking challenging questions about who does what, whay, and for how much.

On the matter of funding – let me remind readers of the vast amounts of cash police forces are spending on Public Relations (i.e. propaganda) departments. Re-read the investigation I did for the Times on police PR spending. We found that police forces across the UK were spending £39m each year on press and PR – enough to fund an extra 1,400 full time officers and more than enough to cover the annual police pay rise withheld by the Government. The ratio of PR to FOI officers was also striking; many forces having 12 PR people for every one FOI person (that’s them telling us what they want us to know as opposed to actually answering our questions).

You can watch it here: http://bbc.co.uk/i/plbtd/

Welles relates stories from his travels around the globe dealing with border police and bureaucracy in general. He longs for his father’s day when people had free movement as opposed to, “nowdays [when] we’re treated like demented or delinquent children.” What on earth would he make of modern-day Britain, the most watched place on the planet?

He tells of being stopped at the border of a nameless European country by typically officious and bullying policemen. He’s at pains to tell us he is by no means an anarchist or against the police. He may play a practical joke on the police but he does not advocate breaking the law. Rather he wants to bring the policeman to law.

The best bits begin 9 minutes in where he explores the insidious dangers of ‘red tapism’.
“Think of all those forms we have to fill out. Why should I have to confide my religion to the police? No one’s race is anybody’s business.”

Yes the policeman has a difficult job a very hard job, he says, but, “it’s the essence of our society that the policemans’ job should be hard. He’s their to protect the free citzien. Chasing criminals is an incidental part of his job. The free citizen is always more of a nuisance to the policeman than the criminal. He knows what to do about the criminal.”

“We should be grateful for the policeman. But we should be grateful, too, for the laws that protect us against the policeman. There are those laws and they’re quite different from police regulations. And those regulations do pile up. The forms keep coming in.”

“The bureaucrat, and I’m including the policeman here, is part of one great big monstrous thing – really like a blackmailer. You can never pay him off. The more you give him the more he’ll demand.”

We accept each new demand because we don’t want to get into trouble with the police. It’s easier just to hand over whatever new piece of our personal lives the authorities require, to agree to yet more surveillance, more forms, more databases; to grant the police more powers of arrest.

Why should we make trouble? A better question in a democracy would be, as Welles says, “Why should the policeman make trouble for us?”

This was re-stated in a minister’s written answer yesterday in parliament.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmhansrd/cm091110/text/91110w0010.htm

10 Nov 2009 : Column 218W

Prisons: Freedom of Information

Philip Davies: To ask the Secretary of State for Justice whether he has plans to extend to private prisons the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. [298646]

Mr. Wills: On 16 July, the Government published the response to its consultation on extending the Freedom of Information Act by means of a section 5 order. It noted that it was not minded to include private prisons in an initial order. However, the Government have made it clear it intends to keep the extension of the Act under review.

Secrecy feeds suspicion of a boys’ club stitch-up. Chief constables need to be open on pay and perks

Secrecy can be sexy. It’s essential to any good mystery novel. But there should be no mystery surrounding the pay of top public officials. In October 2008 I made freedom of information requests to every police force in the country seeking the full extent of chief constables’ perks and pay. I’d heard rumours top cops weren’t just getting top salaries but all sorts of other benefits, from grace and favour homes to chauffeur-driven SUVs and private health insurance.

These perks may be perfectly acceptable – after all, it’s a tough job. What is not acceptable is the vault-like secrecy in which they are awarded. Several forces told me their chiefs refused bonuses out of principle. But of all those who accepted them only one force, North Wales, fully disclosed the amount.

Why the secrecy? The official reason is that disclosure would be an invasion of chiefs’ privacy. Here’s the response given by City of London police: “We do not believe that disclosing the exact value of the commissioner’s bonus will add significantly to the public interest. By contrast, given that the commissioner has refused consent to disclose and has a reasonable expectation that the exact value of his performance-related payment will remain confidential, we believe that disclosure would be prejudicial to the commissioner’s rights and freedoms or legitimate interests.”

What about the rights and freedoms of taxpayers to know how their money is spent? What about knowing the criteria on which these bonuses are awarded? Are chiefs paid for achieving political goals? For decreasing crime statistics? For increasing the number of ethnic minority officers? We just don’t know.

We saw what lay behind MPs’ cries of invasion of privacy. What might we find hidden behind police chiefs’ resistance? On Thursday we got a glimpse: the Belfast Telegraph published the results of a freedom of information request made by a former Police Federation chairman and member of the Northern Ireland policing board, Jimmy Spratt.

Spratt sought the compensation package of Northern Ireland’s outgoing chief constable Hugh Orde, who is now president of the Association of Chief Police Officers. He managed to unearth a compensation package that included rent-free living in a £600,000 luxury home (purchased at taxpayer expense) along with the payment of all utility bills, including phone bills, electricity, rates, heating and property maintenance. This is in addition to a salary of £183,954 plus an annual bonus of up to 15% of salary. Other extras included £360 a year for broadband, £600 for private healthcare, and membership fees for Acpo and the Chief Police Officers’ Staff Association, estimated to be £1,000 annually. Another £8,294 was claimed for oil and £13,413 for rates, while £33,904 was spent to repair “defective combined drainage system” and to replace the kitchen.

Now you might think that a member of the police board (the Northern Irish equivalent of a police authority) would know exactly what comprises a top cop’s compensation package, as the board approves it. Not so. Spratt tells me that when you have a £1.2bn budget “you can’t really keep track”.

“What you’re presented with are accounts that are, well I wouldn’t exactly call them basic, but they’re not going into any great detail, and it’s only when you start probing into the detail that you find these things out. I wanted to know what I was signing my name to.” If only more police authority members did the same. As a former chief negotiator on police pay, Spratt thought he had a good idea what was on offer, but was “completely surprised” at the extent.

Where are these packages set? Spratt is finding that difficult to pin down. He’s been told they’re set by the Association of Police Authorities but its acting executive, Tania Eagle, told me that’s not the case. “It’s very unusual for one agency to be fully responsible for policy.”

That’s the problem. We need clear lines of accountability. We need to know who’s in charge of setting and approving these packages and we need to get them out in the open. Even Acpo is starting to agree. Spokesman Andrea Newman says: “Acpo is of the view that chief officers should be open and transparent about their remuneration and should be open to scrutiny – but disclosure is a matter for individual chief constables.”

If these payouts are to be respected then chief constables must come clean about their pay. Secrecy feeds suspicion that these perks are based on politics and boys’ club favouritism rather than effective policing.

Not one to believe hype, I was sceptical when I popped in the first series of the much-acclaimed TV series The Wire. For those who haven’t seen it, this is a series that breaks all the rules of TV drama and yet the hype is merited: it is the best thing on television.

Each episode is like a chapter in a book and the stories build across the season. The first deals with the police closing in on a drug dealer which is common enough in a cop show, but what makes The Wire different is that it focuses on the lives of the dealers and users as much as the police. There is none of the easy morality common to other police dramas. Instead there is reality. The writers know their subjects inside out. These are not champagne socialists writing about the lives of poor kids in Hackney, they are veteran newspaper hacks and homicide detectives who know the gritty scenes they describe.

I used to cover crime for a newspaper in South Carolina in a city with a large concentration of projects that were infested with drugs, and I often wondered why the people in these sink estates didn’t clean up, move out, get a better life. What did I know? A college girl from an English family? But at least I could talk to the vice squad who filled me in on what was happening. The stories the police told me didn’t always fit into the newspaper format, focused as it is on the end result: who got shot, when and why. The ‘why’ being the least explored part of the story. It wasn’t until I saw The Wire that I understood how these stories could be told. If you want to understand the cycle of poverty and addiction look no further.

The realism of The Wire is due in no small part due to the ability of the writers to get inside the institutions they cover. David Simon spent a year in Baltimore Maryland’s homicide division. Such inside knowledge informs the series and gives it the needed reality that makes it so powerful. Could such a show be written in the UK?

I’m not a crime reporter anymore but I am a freelance journalist and so I asked the Metropolitan Police if I could visit my local police station. In the US I went ‘round back’ all the time, even did shifts with various cops as a ‘ride-along’. Some forces in the UK offer this insight to members of the public, but not the Metropolitan Police. Even the full-time crime reporters in London aren’t allowed in. The only way I’m getting into my local police station is if I’m arrested.

Frankly that’s a cost I’m not willing to bear. It strikes me as counter-productive for the police to fortress themselves against the public whom they are meant to serve and protect. By refusing to let us in, they foster an attitude of ‘Us and Them’. Both for themselves and for us. The tie that might link us is broken.

I had another encounter with the ‘Us and Them’ attitude in Tottenham Court Road tube station. The escalators were shut but none of the guards were telling anyone why or when they might resume. When I went over to ask, the guard pointed to a gang of teenagers and said: “Your colleague there pressed the emergency stop.”

My colleague? What did he have to do with me?

In the mind of the TfL official it was clear all who were not TfL were some ‘other’: that great repulsive organism – the public.

Aren’t we the reason for TfL’s existence? If it wasn’t for us paying our extortionate fares this official wouldn’t have a job. And yet he views us all as one amorphous mass comparable to an enemy.

All institutions are susceptible to this type of thinking, but the danger is even greater when there is no competition. Where there is a monopoly on service the best solution is higher levels of transparency. We should be allowed into our local police stations, we should be able to see crime incident reports. It may not be easy, but an open door can bring many rewards, not least the best show on television.

Police chiefs net thousands from secret bonus scheme

A secretive bonus scheme set up to reward the country’s top 300 police officers is paying out hundreds of thousands of pounds every year.

The police service refuses to disclose either amounts paid to individual officers or total payments from the Chief Officers’ Bonus Scheme.

But The Times has learnt that senior Metropolitan police officers shared more than £190,000 in one year, while the top ranks at Greater Manchester collected more than £53,000.

Scotland’s most senior officer, Stephen House, the Chief Constable of Strathclyde, was paid a bonus for his first six months in post.

In some cases the bonuses are awarded on the basis of “self-evaluation” by chief constables. Critics claim that the payments are further evidence of what has been called a “gravy beat” at the top of policing. There is also concern among the top ranks that the bonus culture damages the image and integrity of the police.

* COMMENT: what have they got to hide?

* Knife-crime czar’s £200,000 ‘gravy beat’ job

A few days later the president of ACPO wrote to the paper seemingly in favour of full transparency of police bonuses. However, I’ve yet to see any of these figures disclosed and the forces continue to refuse my requests for this information.

Investigation is a little like psychiatry where the most telling details are often those kept hidden. When only one police force is willing to tell the public what it pays its Chief Constable in bonuses curiosity is piqued. What do they have to hide?

The police chiefs who accepted bonuses not only refused to reveal the amounts, but also declined to say what they were for. Some Chiefs told us they refused bonuses ‘on principle’ which makes one wonder what principles are at stake? We can’t know that until we know the details of the bonuses.

They cited the Data Protection Act, claiming that it would be an invasion of their privacy for the public to know the details of their salary and benefits. This may interest chief executives of public companies who must disclose this information in their annual reports.

It’s a topsy turvy world when the public have more rights to find out how the heads of corporations spend their shareholders’ money than the public do the heads of their public services.

The Data Protection Act is a badly written law. It is understandable that no one can understand it, but it is the implementation of a European Directive designed to protect the privacy of private individuals not to help public officials avoid public accountability.

The law hinges on a fairness principle and a balancing test is used to compare personal privacy interests to the public interest in knowing the information. Under this test, if the information is determined to be private, it can be released anyway if it is found that the public interest in release is more important than the privacy interest. There have been several cases now, including a High Court case on MPs’ expenses, where this balancing test has been done and the public interest found to outweigh the individual privacy interests.

In the case of Chief Constable pay there is clearly a valid public interest in this information. The public pay this money. They have a right to know how much and what it is for. Are the bonuses for cutting particular types of crime? Has this resulted in changes to the way crimes are recorded? Until the bonuses are published we just don’t know how they are affecting policing.

Another issue of concern is the massive non-compliance with the Freedom of Information Act. Of the 57 requests sent out at least 38 forces failed to answer legally. They simply let the deadline come and go failing to provide a legal reason for their continued delay. The police enforce the law, so what does it say when they don’t obey it themselves?

Once upon a time people complained of rarely seeing a bobby on the beat. Now they’re lucky to get a full glimpse of a policeman’s face.

Watching the video footage of police searching the office of MP Damian Green I noticed that practically the first words out of the investigator’s mouth were: “turn that camera off.’ This was in response to another MP daring to film the police in action as they searched and seized Green’s possessions without a warrant.

According to the Tory party, the posting of the video footage was delayed because the Metropolitan Police demanded that the officers’ faces be blanked out. Why?

Robert Peel created the principals of policing when the Metropolitan Police was first created in 1829. He ensured every police officer be issued a badge number, to assure individual accountability. His most famous principal:

Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public…

That’s worth keeping in mind as the police increasingly demand special rights which they deny the law-abiding citizen. Here’s an example: Go to any protest or an event held outside Parliament and you will see police officers filming people who have committed no crime yet if any Joe Public attempts to film the police he will quickly find himself harassed, threatened with arrest or have his camera seized or film deleted.

Go into any police station and you will find yourself under the gaze of CCTV, yet if you dare to get out your own camera you’ll be ordered to stop immediately; if you persist you’ll be threatened and likely ejected from the building.

Don’t be fooled. This is not about security. It is about power. We know it’s about power because if citizens wear masks, the police force their removal. Being able to identify someone is the primary way of holding that person to account.

It is well documented that people behave differently when granted anonymity, and not usually for the better. In a crowd or under the orders of a powerful leader, people will commit all sorts of outrageous behaviour, say all kinds of offensive things if they feel cloaked by the mantel of anonymity.

The police have a monopoly on force so it is right that in a democracy, police officers are individually accountable for how they exercise this force. Anonymity invites abuse. Yet police forces are increasingly demanding anonymity for their officers. The officers who shot Jean Charles de Menezes remain unidentified, as do the officers who killed Derek Bennett, 29, when they thought his cigarette lighter was a handgun.

I’ve worked as crime reporter in the US and the default position there is the opposite: police are identified by name and their photographs are published unpixilated. Anonymity is granted rarely and only if there is a quantifiable threat to the officer. Even FBI agents are named in court cases. Individual accountability is the cornerstone of public service effectiveness. Common to all totalitarian systems is that agents are hidden. Is this what we want from our police?

It is not yet illegal to film the police or to disclose information about an individual officer’s behaviour. But it soon will be. Part 7, item 76 of the new Counter-Terrorism Act 2008 would make it a criminal offence to elicit information about a constable which is ‘of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism’ or ‘publishes or communicates any such information.’

That last bit is incredibly wide-ranging and completely open to abuse. It allows the police to decide what should and shouldn’t be published about them. Such a law would effectively criminalise the disclosure of such vital pubic interest matters such as the behaviour of the Met Police in the immediate aftermath of the de Menezes shooting. And bear in mind, too, that the bar is now set low on what is considered an ‘act of terrorism’: heckling outside the Labour Party conference, wearing a T-shirt criticizing the Prime Minister, daring to publish empirical facts about Government policies, all that’s been deemed a threat to our security.

The police need to get back to basic Peelian Principals. They can’t expect to have the trust of the public when they are ashamed even to show their faces.

It’s hard enough to get anything like accurate empirical data out of Government. So full praise for Mr Green for bringing important matters of public interest to our attention. A democracy is meant to be comprised of an informed electorate. If this government isn’t busy shredding facts then the next best thing seems to be to arrest those who expose them.

The number of shredders purchased by the Home Office for the last 5 years.

Date: Wed Feb 22 00:00:00 GMT 2006

How many shredders has the Department bought for the last 5 years, how much did they cost and when were they purchased providing all information detailing the reasons for the purchases.

Response

Shredders provided in 2005 for the Department’s HQ relocation to 2 Marsham Street were supplied by Anne’s Gate Property plc within the scope of their overall PFI contract for the provision of accommodation services. There are around 42 shredders in 2 Marsham Street for 3,500 staff.

Their purchase cost to AGP is not known, nor is the very small element of the monthly PFI charge that notionally relates to the costs of shredders. The shredders are provided for the destruction of privacy marked papers which are not required to be archived. This can be for a number of reasons including the retention of electronic copies and destruction of duplicates.

South Carolina is not renowned as a progressive state but residents could at least claim they were more enlightened than the residents of Mississippi – a real backwater! I read in the papers that the Mississippi Legislature earlier this year approved changes in the state’s Open Records Law to provide citizens with more access to crime reports. The idea is that citizens not only should have access to their government, but that opening law enforcement incident reports is a matter of public safety as well as being a crime-fighting tool.

Try telling that to ANY police force in the UK where all criminal incidents reports are strictly off limits to the public.

Since the FOIA, it has been possible to request figures about crime and policing and many local newspapers are doing just that.  The Sunderland Echo made an FOI request to Northumbria Police asking for the number of sex assault reports.  On 27 September it reported:  “From January 2006 to July 2008, detectives in the city received 669 reports of sexually-motivated attacks” That is a sex assault every other day, although: “There is nothing to suggest Sunderland has a worse problem than other UK cities.”

Numbers released to the Worcester News under the FOIA show that: “The number of people in south Worcestershire given a police caution for violent crimes has risen from 306 in 2004/5 to 566 in 2007/8.   The sharpest increase is in the number of cautions for actual bodily harm”.

The 26 September edition also contains a comment on this story: “One solicitor we have spoken to makes it clear he believes the increase in the number of police cautions is a matter of finance, though the police deny this.  The cost of bringing a thug to justice should not be a factor.  Decent, law-abiding people want to see justice being done.”

These articles show why FOI is useful as it helps the public more accurately gauge crime in their area and what police are doing about it. Through public oversight, the police are able to earn the trust they deserve.  That is not simply because justice is done but because “decent, law-abiding people” see it done.

The UK is one of the most watched societies in the world, yet the police are loath to release crime data

We may finally be let into the great secret of just how safe – or unsafe – we are as momentum builds to publish a breakdown of criminal incidents in London, though the battle is far from over. The Metropolitan Police plans to publish some data as early as next month. However, initial indications are that only property crimes (not violent crime) will be revealed, and that the data will be aggregated into large, artificial geographic regions called “super-output” areas.

I’ve long campaigned for the release of criminal incident data broken down by street, having lived in the US where it was easily available. I worked as a crime reporter, and not only were anonymised crime incidents published weekly in the local newspaper (and now online), but as a reporter I could go through individual incident reports down at the station.

Knowing what crimes happen and where is important for several reasons. First, people want to know how safe (or unsafe) they are. They need accurate and detailed data if they are to form an opinion of the safety of their neighbourhood. When they know what’s happening, they are in a better position to help or support the police. They are also better able to hold the police to account. This is perhaps what the police fear most, but it is a misplaced fear according to Richard Pope, the creator of civic website planningalerts.com (a site that mines planning applications to local authorities and provides alerts by postcode) and groupsnearyou.com.

“The police are coming at this the wrong way,” Pope says. “They’re scared that people are going to use it against them, but it could really help the police.” A few years ago he had the idea of building a civic website using crime data mapped out and accompanied by a discussion forum where neighbours could talk about problems in their area and liaise with their local police officer. “But we couldn’t get any raw data,” he says, so the project never got off the ground.

It seems ludicrous that, sitting in my flat in London, I can look online to see what’s happening on a street in Chicago and yet know nothing about what’s happening outside my front door. However Richard Thomas, the information commissioner, has said that releasing crime data from the grip of the police into the hands of the public would violate victims’ privacy.

The Met also cites privacy as a reason not to release location specific crime data. Yet the Data Protection Act does not prohibit personal information being disclosed, even if one considers anonymised crime reports “personal”; and Boris Johnson’s pledge was only ever to publish crime data by street level, not by exact address. The law’s purpose is to ensure that disclosure is for a legitimate purpose. State-mandated ignorance benefits no one.

Crimes are not a great secret, particularly not violent crimes – such as the spate of stabbings in the UK in recent months – though without access to the raw data, how can we know how and where it’s rising? Pope thinks the main problem is that the police are not technically savvy, citing an encounter at a meeting between locals, the council and the police where the Met admitted it couldn’t provide incident detail broken down by area – so the council ended up paying the Met just to get this information.

In my own freedom of information request made to the Met in July last year for a breakdown of crime by postcode, I encountered this, too: “It is not possible to produce crime data based upon the first three digits of the postcode,” the Met said, adding that “crime data is recorded against the BOCU or borough which, under Home Office counting rules, it was allocated against rather than the address of the crime. This allocation is the method against which crime is presented in most instances in a geographic format.”

Yet Brian Paddick, a former deputy assistant commissioner of the Met, has gone on record saying the police already use crime mapping data themselves. So how exactly do the police record crime?

Pope says that any technical issues are surmountable. “The Met use GIS, at least for some crimes, and every incident will be logged down to street name. Technically, putting it on a map is easy.”

Aron Pilhofer, editor of interactive news technology at The New York Times, has plenty of experience of turning government data into useful public tools. “Almost every police force I know of, even in the smallest town in the States, uses GIS as a way of analysing crime. It’s a very powerful way for police departments to spot trends and patterns. It’s been proven to be one of the most powerful tools in crime fighting. I find it impossible to believe that it hasn’t made its way into the UK.

“Are they really saying they lack the technological skills to convert that information into an anonymised data feed? I find that difficult to believe and, if true, that says a lot about the department and the people working there.” So it’s either a failure of police capabilities – or of willingness to inform the public. We may find out which next month.

The facts on crime data

Immediacy: You can’t wait months to get information. You want to know immediately, at least within the week, when a crime happens. The Met plans to publish only monthly.

Proximity: The data must be broken down to a geographic area people understand, such as street or postcode. The Met plans to publish data by “super-output areas”. A super-output area comprises an area about the size of five council wards. Richard Pope says: “These will be no use to people whatsoever.”

Detail: Personal information such as names and exact addresses can be stripped but we need to know the type of crime, when it happened and where. Currently the Met plans only to publish what it calls “tier two” offences, which include burglary, robbery, theft and handling stolen goods. This is useful, but serious and violent crime is what most concerns the public.

It works in America – and could help to improve crime clear-up rates dramatically

Most police forces in American cities provide the public with a list of all crimes, broken down by street or city block. You might read of a robbery on the 1600 block of 9th Avenue at 11pm for example, or three assaults in close proximity on Tuesday.

When I was a crime reporter in America, I was able to view all police incident reports, jail booking records and every warrant signed by the magistrate. I had some privileges as a reporter, but all this information was considered to belong to the public. The logs can be found in local newspapers or online and give the enterprising citizen the ability to build their own crime maps such as: www.spotcrime.com and http://chicago.everyblock.com/crime/. People use these maps to band together to pressure their police to tackle problems. As most police chiefs are directly elected, solutions are quickly found.

The police in Britain, however, feel they “own” crime data and the public have no right to know what is happening. Yet access to criminal incident data is vital, as it allows the public to judge the effectiveness of the police and crime policies. In a void of ignorance, a politician or police chief can claim anything he likes about crime: that binge drinking is endemic or under control, that muggings are increasing or falling, that policing is working or failing.

The police can also hide their failings. Northumbria police claimed that only three crimes of note had occurred one weekend in May, yet a freedom of information request revealed that, in fact, there were more than 1,000 incidents, 161 of them violent.

I asked the Metropolitan Police last summer if they could publish this data, if not by street then at least by postal code. No. The Met’s excuse was that it was technologically impossible (which I doubt), and in any event, “had it been possible to produce this data, it would have been likely rejected as a breach of the Data Protection Act”.

Shamefully, the Information Commissioner has objected to the plan of Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, to allow people to know what crime happens in their street, arguing that it would breach the privacy of the victims of crime. But the Data Protection Act does not prohibit personal information being disclosed. Its purpose is to ensure that such disclosure is for a legitimate purpose.

Yet again a policy that would be of great public benefit is being blocked by an unthinking, fetishistic attitude towards privacy. A balance can easily be struck between the privacy of those reporting crimes and the overall safety of citizens. The only people made safer by the current policy of wilfully enforced ignorance are poorly performing police chiefs.

Long arm of police spin-doctors costs almost £40m a year

Tough on crime – or on the image of crime?

We found that police forces across the UK are spending £39m each year on press and PR – enough to fund an extra 1,400 full time officers and more than enough to cover the annual police pay rise withheld by the Government. The force at the top of the league (Police Service Northern Ireland) spends eight times more per person on PR than the lowest (Derbyshire). Meanwhile, forces spend nearly ten times more on PR (what police want us to know) than on FOI (what we want to know).

Also while resources are pumped into PR, we found a distinct lack of interest in responding to our FOI requests. Only 19 of 53 forces responded to our requests on time. All the rest broke the law. They had a variety of explanations though some offered none at all. Police Service Northern Ireland had the most novel excuse – their FOI officer was on an advanced driver training course. It had no affect in speeding up their tardy reply which came more than a month late. If any of us were to break the law I doubt such excuses would carry much weight. Even those committing non-crimes such as parking get no leeway.

When we called the press offices for comment, however, it was remarkable how quickly forces found the time to re-examine their figures to decrease the amounts, often claiming the initial figures they’d given us were incorrect.

There is lot more detail than we could get in the newspaper so check out the summary or the full database for the full story on how your police force responded.

Summary of press and PR spend in the 52 police forces questioned

Full Database (Excel). Here you’ll find a sheet with the main findings, a summary sheet and finally the full detail of all our requests to 52 police forces.

Police PR Press Release

Link to Secret Squirrel page

This quote from Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville of the Metropolitan Police says it all:

“CCTV was originally seen as a preventative measure. Billions of pounds has been spent on kit, but no thought has gone into how the police are going to use the images and how they will be used in court. It’s been an utter fiasco: only 3% of crimes were solved by CCTV. There’s no fear of CCTV. Why don’t people fear it? [They think] the cameras are not working.”

Of course, if private companies and individuals want to waste money on preventative measures that don’t actually work, then that’s their business. What is disgraceful is the amount of taxpayers’ money that has been handed out by the Home Office on this useless and invasive technology.

A senior police worker is facing a disciplinary hearing for “damaging the reputation” of West Yorkshire police. Philip Balmforth is in trouble for granting an interview to The Times last month on Asian girls going missing from Bradford schools. Bradford City Council complained to the force claiming his high-profile work was damaging the city’s image and was “bad for regeneration”.

Now, I thought the police’s role was supposed to be about solving crime, not engaging in “reputation management”. Obviously I’m behind the times: clearly PR has taken over our public institutions.

Public sector bodies should not be in the business of reputation management. The reputation of a private company has value because it is by reputation that customers choose to buy goods and services. But most public institutions are monopolies; we have no choice but to buy, if not use, their services. In the absence of competition it is only through public scrutiny – and whistleblowing – that some level of accountability is gained. To try to restrict this is wrong.

Yet many public institutions forbid staff from speaking to the public or press without clearance from the all-powerful press offices – and permission doesn’t come easy unless you’re peddling a saccharine story. The fine line between co-ordinating communication to provide the public with clear information and propaganda used to push an agenda has been crossed by many bodies.

Mr Balmforth is a national expert on forced marriage. Why should he have to clear everything he says with a press officer? He was giving facts about crimes and should not be used as a pawn to sell a particular political policy. Bradford council’s wish to airbrush out ugly realities comes at the direct cost of the happiness, even the lives, of young girls.

We think it absurd that Thailand has a law against insulting the King. We are shocked by Turkey’s prosecution of Orhan Pamuk, the award-winning novelist, under Article 301 of the penal code for the offence of “denigrating Turkey’s national identity”. We might laugh at Brunei’s constitution which declares: “His Majesty the Sultan can do no wrong in either his personal or any official capacity” and further admonishes that “No person shall publish or reproduce in Brunei or elsewhere any part of proceedings. that may have the effect of lowering or adversely affecting directly or indirectly the position, dignity, standing, honour, eminence or sovereignty of His Majesty the Sultan”.

Now just replace “His Majesty the Sultan” with Bradford council or West Yorkshire Police and you get an idea of the thinking in some of our public institutions.

Police misconduct costs forces £44m
We need this data to catch and fix problems in system

This is the first-ever disclosure of compensation payouts for public liability claims and clearly shows the value of freedom of information. The high percentage of claims that settle out of court is worrying as it hides the extent and exact nature of allegations of police misconduct.

Also surprising, was that many police forces didn’t actually know how many times they’d been sued or even how much taxpayer money they’d paid out in public liability compensation. How can we have an informed debate about police conduct and the ‘compensation culture’ when the data is unknown? (I’ll be posting up the full database of responses soon.)

In the UK, we have little knowledge about the machinery of government – those records and data created and maintained by the state in the course of its public service duties. Yet this is the data that citizens must have if they are to meaningfully hold the state to account.

How professional and competent are the police? This is a question that gained new relevance in light of the fatal shooting by the Metropolitan Police of an innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menzes. In order to answer this question I made Freedom of Information requests to all 55 police forces asking for data about the number of claims received, their progress and final payouts over the past five years.

The results were intriguing and showed that record-keeping continues to be a problem for many police forces. A sizable majority could not say how many claims had resulted in court action, not did they always know how much they had paid out in settlements and it took quite some digging for some forces to even know how often they’d been taken to court!

The reliance on government-imposed mandates at the expense of direct accountability became clear. If it’s not required by Whitehall, many forces simply don’t see a point in keeping accessible data, even if it is clearly in the public interest – such as the amount of taxpayer’s money they’re paying out for police misconduct. For example, Kent Police provided no information at all stating that “we do not at present collect or collate this information and therefore are not in a position to provide it.” Cheshire Police told us that wrongful arrest was “every day sort of stuff” and they “don’t have any need to keep [the data] in the format you asked for.”

Another surprise was that Cleveland Police, which is in the top 3 for both compensation and claims per 100,000 – stated that since 2004 they have stopped recording the number of court actions.

Many forces were loathe to be compared with each other. Durham claimed that its data was “unique and should not be used as a comparison with any other Force response you receive.”

Some forces claimed the only way they could determine if a claim had resulted in court action was to look through hundreds of files at a cost that ranged from 10 minutes per file (Wiltshire Constabulary) to 60 minutes (Strathclyde Police).

The Metropolitan Police, North Yorkshire Police and Greater Manchester Police force claimed (incorrectly) that the data was already published in their annual reports and failed initially to provide page numbers to hundred-page documents. While Warwickshire Police incorrectly used the data protection act to hide the amounts paid out in compensation.

Only 23 per cent of claims make it to court and several forces succeeded in keeping 100 per cent out of court. This is either good or bad news depending on one’s point of view and the exact nature of the claim.

Court is expensive so there is a value-for-money argument in settling cases. But if the claim is a legitimate complaint of police misconduct then there is a public interest in knowing the details so that any systemic problems can be identified and fixed. If every allegation is brushed under the carpet and the claimants paid to keep silent, then problems aren’t known and can’t be fixed.

I would be interested to hear from anyone who has brought a claim against the police to know if the force required a confidentiality agreement to be signed before agreeing to pay out.

Police forces which failed to respond to the FOIA request
South Yorkshire Police
West Yorkshire Police
Hertfordshire Constabulary
Humberside Police
Leicestershire Constabulary
Nottinghamshire Police
Surrey Police

Kent County Constabulary responded but said “we do not at present collect or collate this information.”
Dorest Police said: “It’s a bit of a mess really, the numbers don’t add up.”

Even the chairman of the Independent Police Complaints Commission has voiced his dismay at the length of time the report had to be withheld from the public. He said in a statement today:

“Our investigation was completed within six months and we share the frustration that it was not possible to conclude the legal processes more quickly.This is not just something that afflicted the Stockwell case. It happens in other less high profile cases which are nonetheless just as painful for the families and officers involved.”

Chair Nick Hardwick also responds to the belief of some politicians, such as London Mayor Ken Livingstone, that the police should not be held accountable for their actions.

“Let me be clear what the trial was not about. It was not about the split second decisions that the firearms officers had to make when they confronted Jean Charles de Menezes in that tube train – nor indeed just about the death of Jean Charles de Menezes himself, terrible though that was.

The questions the trial did address and indeed the ones the public were asking in the aftermath of the incident were these:

‘If they thought he might have a bomb, why was he allowed twice to get on a bus and then on the tube? If they thought he didn’t have a bomb, why did they shoot him?’

Police officers tested 150 revellers as they arrived at the pub in Sheep Street between 10.30pm and midnight on Friday. The pub managers barred anyone refusing to co-operate with the test from entering.

Det Sgt Steve Duffy, of Banbury CID, said two people tested positive and were searched but not found to be in possession of drugs. The pair were then banned from entering the pub, but not arrested.

That pretty much sums up the uselessness of draconian methods of policing. They antagonize the general public with heavy-handed invasions of privacy while doing little to actually tackle real crime .