Read Baroness James of Holland Park's Lecture (Pdf 86KB)

HOUSE OF LORDS Thursday 1st May 2008 Police and the Public in the 21st Century By the Rt Hon Baroness James of Holland Park It is a pleasure as well as a privilege to be included as a lecturer in this series organised by the Lord Speaker in partnership with Queen Mary’s College, University of London, to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Life Peerages Act 1958. The Lord Speaker in her inaugural lecture on 6th December gave a comprehensive and fascinating account of the history of this and subsequent legislation, and of the women who have played a distinguished and innovative part as Members of the Upper House. She set in her lecture a difficult standard for others of us to follow. In choosing my subject I am not claiming to be an expert in the police service and my personal knowledge cannot equal that of many in this audience tonight. I have never served as a policewoman or been a member of the Police Authority, and my service as a bureaucrat in the Police Department of the Home Office and my time as a magistrate in London can hardly qualify me as an expert in the problems of policing. Nor, I am ready to admit, can my creation of that maverick commander of the Metropolitan Police, Adam Dalgliesh, even though a previous head of the murder squad admitted that he was a good cop while somewhat envying his hundred percent success rate in murder investigations. My title is Police and the Public in the 21st Century and it is as a concerned member of the public, but one with a respect for the police service born from personal experience, that I speak to you this evening. Our attitude to the criminal justice system and to the police service of which it is a part is largely formed in childhood, influenced by early experiences and parental training and examples, and to an extent the social class to which we belong. I hope, therefore, that you will excuse the egotism of a few brief personal recollections. The England into which I was born two years after the end of the First World War was so fundamentally different from the England of today that if a contemporary child could be mysteriously transported into our family home she would feel utterly disorientated and confused. A Victorian child, on the other hand, would probably feel that much was familiar, including gaslights, oil lamps, and meals eaten on an invariable predictable weekly rota restricted to vegetables and fruit in season. Only one product of technology, then called the wireless, would be totally unfamiliar. I was educated at a state primary school and then a local authority grammar school. Only one child I knew came from a family with a car. During my schooldays, from aged five to 16, nothing was stolen, no policeman ever appeared in school, no child came from a home broken by divorce. It was not in most areas a difficult society to police, and policing was indeed locally based. Police areas were small; the county town would have its force as would the county. Police officers were locally recruited and often came from known families. Chief constables, usually recruited from senior officers in the armed forces, were able personally to know most members of their force. They understood their community because they were part of their community. One of my earliest memories is of my father saying that if I were ever lost or in difficulties I should find a policeman. So from childhood the word was a synonym for a benign and powerful presence on whom I could rely. I wonder in how many British households that advice would be given today. It is tempting to look back with nostalgia and see the inter-war years as a golden age. It was very far from that, and the Second World War was a catalyst for overdue reform in most of our public services, some carried out with more enthusiasm than wisdom. Our country today seems as remote from those interwar years as the 1930s were from Tudor England. The standard of living of most – but not all – of us has consistently risen. Science and technology have developed at an almost frightening pace, greatly 1 extending our horizons and opportunities, our comfort and physical well being, but confronting us with new and difficult moral and ethical choices, particularly in the field of the biological sciences. For many, modern life is materialistic, restless, stressful and over-burdened and morality has largely become a matter for each individual. The former strong pillars of society – the Church, the Law, the Monarchy – stand less securely as bastions of our nationhood. Those who are called to exercise authority in State, in Church, in schools and universities and in the family, do so in an age when authority has almost become a pejorative word. We are told now that respect has to be earned but, even when it has been earned, it is rarely given. Serious crime has become international. Criminals as well as the police have recourse to modern technology. The old complex, delicate but resilient web which held together people with common traditions and beliefs has in many of our cities been replaced by communities of widely differing faiths, traditions and language living side by side, often in a fragile tolerance. We do, indeed, walk on shifting sand. Policing can never have been more difficult than in our complex and rapidly changing world and there is a danger that the close links between local communities and the police, on which Sir Robert Peel originally built the force, will be fractured. We too live in a decade when the general perception is that crime has greatly increased, but to what extent remains controversial. When I was at a dinner some years ago, the then Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, in his speech, said that he was something of an expert on crime fiction, having just received the latest Home Office criminal statistics! Certainly figures about the extent of crime in England and Wales, which are inevitably out of date by the time they are published, can never be easy to interpret and are often challenged. There can be confusion, and not only in the public mind, about the different bases of calculating offences which range from those resulting in conviction and sentence, the number of arrests made, the number of crimes reported, and estimates of the number of offences which are not reported, usually because the victims have no hope of effective action. Horrendous crimes which receive wide coverage in the press, particularly in the tabloids, have a strong influence in determining the public’s perception of the level of crime. These cases, usually murder, particularly where children are either victims or perpetrators, confront us with age-old and insoluble problems about the nature of our society and the existence of evil, and threaten our cherished beliefs in innocence, goodness and love. But they are happily very rare and most people’s perception of the level of offences is based less on atrocious crimes than on their own experience and the experience of family and friends. It is difficult to persuade people that we live in a more peaceable world and that crime is under control if our inner cities are made intolerable no-go areas by noisy and drunken louts every Friday and Saturday night, and when teachers, fire-fighters and even nurses in A and E departments are regularly assaulted. Youth crime is a particular worry. Most of us would agree that the home and a child’s earliest experiences are of fundamental importance in bringing up that child to be a responsible, law-abiding, happy and fulfilled member of society. Very few children from stable homes with a mother and father providing consistently loving care and discipline find themselves in the youth court. Social workers, however well motivated, cannot replace parents. And even when both partners are involved in a child’s upbringing, they can be so tired at the end of a working day that there is little time or energy to give children what they most value − the undivided attention of their parents. The police have to deal with the results of family breakdown but this is not a social evil for which they have responsibility or can be expected to remedy. It is central government that has a major part to play, but even the strongest and most concerned government cannot make people virtuous or abolish what theologians call original sin by Act of Parliament. If taxation is punitive and the cost of housing and the other necessities of life are so high that families can only manage if both parents work full time, we can’t be surprised if mothers and fathers who would prefer to put in fewer hours in the interest of their children are unable to do so. It is 2 irrational to pay tribute to the importance of the family if it is more financially advantageous for parents to live apart than together or to be voluntarily idle rather than in work. And there are other fundamental changes which can alter our perception of policing and of the law which the service has the duty to uphold. We feel ourselves to be under almost constant surveillance. We are uneasily aware that the struggle to defeat international terrorism can encroach on fundamental rights which for generations have been the bedrock of our criminal law. And the law is now intruding into areas of our lives in which people may hold strong religious views, human sexuality, abortion, adoption, ethical questions arising from the advances in biological research and medicine which raise profound questions about the very nature of human life.

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