An interesting observation made on twitter today by @alantravis40 (the Guardian Home Affairs Editor) was:  Police use online #antiwinsornetwork to organise protest march – Home Office minister replies with letter at bit.ly/IZQszW #mismatch

In social media terms, boy do the Home Office have a long way to go.

In the face of 35,000 police officers marching in protest and the opportunities that presented to connect, engage and explain their position, they managed to tweet twice today.

By any standard, that’s lamentable and a major opportunity missed. You don’t connect, engage and explain by erecting a wall and periodically shouting over it. Anyway, here’s the policing ministers letter for your consideration.

To: Police Officers in England and Wales

10 May 2012

Policing is an essential public service that will always have the support of this Government. As the Home Secretary and I visit forces around the country and talk to officers, we are constantly impressed by the work you do for your communities, and it gives us enormous pride. You put yourselves in harm’s way and are often the service of last resort, picking up the pieces and maintaining your professionalism throughout.

All organisations have to keep pace with the modern world, and the whole country is facing economic difficulties which are affecting policing, too.  I know that the spending reductions which police forces are required to make are challenging, but they are necessary.  Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary has set out that savings of over £1 billion a year can be made while maintaining the service to the public.  The two-year pay freeze and better procurement will help to make further savings.

I appreciate that there is concern about the reductions in the number of officers and the wider changes that are being made, including proposed reforms of pay and conditions.  So I wanted to set out our approach to these issues.

First, we want to recognise the professionalism of police officers.

I believe that police officers are professionals and should be recognised as such.  I also believe that officers deserve the best training to equip them for the challenges they face, allow them to develop their skills and professionalism, and invest in their future.

That is why we are working with the service to create a new Police Professional Body, for all the ranks and including staff, which will be led by the service itself, to ensure that officers have the right training and skills for the future.  When the Professional Body is set-up, it will not charge individual officers or staff fees for membership or require a licence to practise.

Second, we want to reduce bureaucracy to make it easier to do your job.

By ending central targets and trusting the discretion and skills of officers as highly trained professionals, we can move away from the bureaucratic culture which has grown in policing.

Working with forces and officers, we are doing everything we can to eliminate unnecessary form-filling and red tape, and we are setting up a new police ICT company, to be owned by police and crime commissioners, dedicated to improved ICT.

Third, we want to ensure that police officers continue to be rewarded for the exceptional job you do.

We are having to take difficult decisions across the public sector on pay and pensions.  It would not be right to exempt police officers from this.

The lion’s share of the savings to police forces come from the two year pay freeze which applies across the public sector.  The savings from Winsor Part One are less than 2 per cent of the total officer pay bill, and the Part Two proposals do not take money out of the overall pay bill in the short term.

However, I appreciate that there are concerns about some of Winsor’s Part Two proposals.  As you know, these are being discussed through the police negotiating machinery.

We believe it is right in principle to reward officers for the job they do and the skills they have rather than time served.  But we will take great care to ensure that police officers are fairly treated.  And we will continue to ensure that officers are rewarded for the exceptional job you do:

• Police officers will continue to earn more than other emergency services
• Police officers (constables and sergeants) will continue to be able to earn overtime, which is not available to prison officers or the armed forces, who also cannot strike
• Police officers will continue to retire earlier than most in the public sector
• Police pensions will continue to be amongst the best available.

The pensions contribution increase for the majority of police officers from April this year was 1.25 per cent – in line with the average across the funded public service pension schemes, with the exception of the armed forces.  We are also committed to protecting those who were within ten years of their current Normal Pension Age on 1 April this year from the full impact of the longer term reforms.  So we have treated police officers fairly.

Fourth, we will ensure that any proposed changes are properly discussed.

One of the Government’s first acts was to honour the third year of the previous police pay deal, and – as the Police Federation requested – we agreed to accept the Police Arbitration Tribunal’s award on the Winsor Part One proposals.

We will continue to ensure that any changes to pay and conditions are fully discussed with your representatives, and we will always listen to constructive advice.

Fifth, policing will continue to be a public service, accountable to the people.

Police forces have been using the private sector to deliver some of their services for a number of years now.  If forces cannot make savings through such innovation, there will ultimately be fewer police officer jobs.

These decisions are taken by chief constables and approved by police authorities or, from November, elected Police and Crime Commissioners, so there is full and proper accountability.

Private contractors are not, and will not be, permitted to exercise the powers of arrest and detention given to sworn officers, beyond the limited detention and escort functions already allowed.  Policing is, and will remain, a public service, and the office of constable will remain the bedrock.

Finally, we will continue to value the finest police service in the world.

Police officers do difficult and often dangerous work, and cannot strike.  I am determined that we recognise this, treat officers fairly and pay them well.

But we also need to update the service to ensure that the hardest-working officers doing the most difficult jobs will be rewarded, and to acknowledge and reward professional skills and continued development.

Today we announced legislation to create the National Crime Agency and I will shortly be launching plans to promote swift and sure justice, ensuring that we have a criminal justice system which backs the police up and makes it easier for you to do your job.  We want the strongest possible police service with the powers to fight crime.

We must take some tough decisions and do the right thing for the whole country.  But I want to assure officers that we will continue to value, in the Prime Minister’s words, the finest police service in the world.

NICK HERBERT

Florida State University researchers found that, over two years, violent assaults consistently increased in Minneapolis as temperatures rose toward the 80s. They attributed the change partly to “social opportunity”: when the temperature goes up, more people spend more time outside. (In other words, they argued that weather affects crime rates more by driving them outdoors where they are more likely to encounter each other or an unsecured house door rather than by making people more susceptible to violence.)

Craig Anderson, from Iowa State University, argued there is a linear relationship between heat and violence, with assault rates peaking at the highest temperatures his model to explain heat-induced aggression is illustrated here . He argues that a straight-line relationship supports various psychological and physiological processes. In hot weather, the body exhibits changes — increased heart rate, blood circulation and sweating, and metabolicalterations— associated with sympathetic nervous system activity, which in turn are linked to fight-or-flight responses. Hot weather also increases testosterone production, tilting that equation towards fight.

Anderson warns that physiological explanations are not proven, but he thinks there’s evidence that heat fuels anger through a variety of psychological effects. (Though as Wired.com points out, the rationale might not be so simple: “Studies show that in hot weather people are more likely to interpret neutral signals as signs of hostility, and less likely to condemn violence.”)

In fact this relationship is not a linear one – crime drops at very high temperatures. James Alan Fox, Professor of Criminology at Northeastern University, suggests there’s an upper limit to any correlation. “Crime levels are highest when the temperature reaches the mid-80s; but especially uncomfortable conditions with the mercury over 90 degrees result in less violent crime. Temperature has some effect on violence in the home, but a much stronger impact on violence in outdoor or commercial settings. In both situations, however, the rate of violence tends to decline when temperatures reach the 90s.”

The correlation between heat and violent crime shown in @jamesalanfox ‘s article is stark. Perhaps the long range weather forecast may be more effective indicator of potential workload and the need to change staffing levels than you may have thought…

Reposted with permission from an original article by crestadvisory.com – (Additions and any mistakes are mine!)

The report is a summary of findings from two evaluations of Home Office Alcohol Arrest Referral pilot schemes which were set up across 12 police forces over the period Oct 2007 to Sept 2010 to test whether providing brief alcohol interventions in a criminal justice setting could impact reoffending. Interesting stuff when the ‘something must be done’ argument gets trotted out on a public platform somewhere near you.

The reports key findings are that:

‘Overall the evaluations did not suggest that AAR schemes reduced re-arrest. Average costs per intervention across the pilot schemes varied from £62 to £826, but most schemes did not break even as they did not reduce re-arrests overall’.

The variations in cost and the failure to break even being no small matters in the new ‘age of austerity’.

‘Over one-half of those arrested for alcohol-related offending within the pilot schemes had not been arrested in the six months prior to the trigger arrest and also were not arrested in the six months following. This suggests that the majority of those arrested within the night-time economy are not prolific offenders, at least in terms of arrest records’.

Implications for there being limited benefit in an offender centric strategy?

‘There was some evidence of reduced alcohol consumption among those who received the intervention, but for a number of reasons this finding should be treated with caution’.

Possible health benefits to bring to the partnership bargaining table?

‘Delivering interventions in a custody setting is possible, but requires good co-operation between custody staff and alcohol workers. Having an established custody scheme in place, such as a Drug Interventions Programme (DIP), may smooth the way for delivery and could have potential cost savings if workers could be used for both alcohol and drugs work’.

But are the interventions worth the effort?

The report makes for interesting reading. You will find it on the Open Eye website

Essentially the event showcased four application areas: voice biometrics (recognising people over the phone by their speech patterns), call automation through call steering and routing, secure interview transcription and speech enabled stop and search.

Whilst all offer significant value, from a frontline perspective the applications that took my eye were the secure interview transcription and speech enabled stop and search.

The secure interview transcription provides voice to text transcription, separating the words spoken by each person in the interview into separate streams so the system always knows who is speaking and then converting that stream from voice to text. In short, automating the transcription process. When you consider just how much time and effort goes into manual transcription of interviews across the criminal justice system, if the system proves to be robust and accurate enough in real world use, the savings to be made here are potentially vast.

The speech enabled stop and search application has been trialled in Kent Police (in collaboration with the NPIA). Essentially it enables a stop check to be carried out over Airwave in a 60 second phone call without any paper being involved! Yea! In excess of 500 trial forms have been completed so far. The app guides the officer through the collection of location, ethnicity, powers, object of search and grounds, and provides a unique record identifier. The Kent Police Inspector who demonstrated the app was very enthusiastic about its use and it certainly looks like an interesting and very practical thing.

As with all these events, whilst the tools were interesting, it’s the context that eventually matters and drives adoption (or not), and a range of speakers all made the point that the ‘age of austerity’ requires that innovation and transformation be grasped. Creeping incrementalism just won’t deliver in the current context. There is clear evidence that the service at the strategic level is embracing the new reality. Lincolnshire with its G4S contract, West Mids and Surrey with their current ‘end to end’ business change tender process etc etc.

Ironically the blockages to innovation could be the very people who are about to be charged with overseeing and delivering it, the Police and Crime Commissioners.  In his ‘New era in Policing’ speech to the Institute of Government, Nick Herbert called for ‘innovators, dynamic leaders, community champions, pioneers and entrepreneurs’ to step forward as PCC candidates. Judging from some of the candidate announcements and profiles that I’ve seen so far, innovation is about as likely as Fabio Capello being asked to return for a second spell as the England Manager.

In an ‘always on’, 24/7, digital world the candidates (with a few notable exceptions) appreciation of modern campaign communication is lamentable. Lame, limp, ghastly websites (where they exist), micro media channels (where they use them) full of garrulous ramblings, little use of facebook, google +, youtube, social media insight and analysis etc etc. Lots of people stepping forward with ‘an outstanding record of public service’ having served on every committee evenly remotely associated with some dimension of policing (however tangental) for a very long time. Yawn. Anyone see those previously mentioned ‘innovators, dynamic leaders, community champions, pioneers and entrepreneurs’ appearing anywhere?

Judging on the (admittedly limited at the moment) campaign evidence so far, and with a few notable exceptions, there’s going to be a lot of talk, but innovation seems in short supply.