DORSET POLICE: Questions and answers with Chief Constable Martin Baker

CRIME SCREENING

MP: Figures released under the Freedom of Information Act show that 23,328 calls out of the 50,648 made to the force last year were not taken beyond an initial investigation – nearly 46 per cent of calls. People have been asking for reassurances – how do you respond to this?

MB: I think it’s all about context. It starts off with us last year taking 764,000 calls, so a huge amount of demand is coming through the front door just by way of telephone. Over 90,000 of those are 999 calls that required an emergency response of some sort. That’s 250 a day that we are responding to in terms of 999 calls and over 670,000 calls that came in over the switch board required some sort of secondary handling so somebody else had to take the call and deal with what is being reported. That just gives you some idea of the volume the force is dealing with and is undertaken a day. That’s 1,800 a day that we are actually dealing with beyond the initial call handling. We attended nearly 123,000 incidents last year - so huge volumes. We arrested just short of 20,000 people last year across the board. Huge issue there and we asked the public during the course of the year what they thought of the service they received and we achieved a more than 94% satisfaction rating for the service we gave people. Unfortunately at times we are in a conflict business, we arrest a lot of people, and some crimes are reported by people as a counter allegation about someone that made an allegation against them. So customer satisfaction is going in the right direction. It is not perfect – we want to improve the level of satisfaction that we give to everybody. But it would indicate that the vast majority of people are satisfied with the service they are getting from us.

MP: But for people in Dorset who have reported a crime and it hasn’t been dealt with because it might be a petty crime or there were not enough officers, to them that petty crime may be a very important thing to them. Do you think that people should prioritise things a bit more before complaining?

MB: We need to know when crimes are being committed because one of the most important things we can do is not only to know about it and record it but actually be able to say 'is this part of a series – is this very unusual for this area'. So it’s vitally important that people do report crime to us. Unfortunately sometimes people have a misperception about the level of crime. For the past 10 years burglary has come down by nearly 60 per cent, car crime by 57 per cent in Dorset.

MB: We have now got the lowest level of crime for seven years in Dorset. Most serious violent crime is now in it’s third year of reduction. That message doesn’t come across sometimes. None of that would have been able to get done if we didn’t know what was going on so it’s vitally important that people report things to us.

I think what’s unfortunate is that there is a perception that if we don’t physically respond immediately at the time that nothing is being done and nothing could be further from the truth. That’s really really important. It might be that an officer can follow up the report with a visit to discuss crime in their area. However what we can say is that actually when the pubs turn out next Friday night we will have some people in that area or wherever it is. Is there something we can do to improve something in the area or improve street lighting. Every investigation has to be proportionate to the level of crime and resources available.

MP: When someone calls in to Dorset Police, how is it dealt with?

MB: When we actually get the call the initial call handler will make an assessment about whether an officer is required to attend and if they are is it an emergency. So if it’s a serious or violent crime we will always go immediately. If there is an offender at the scene or in the vicinity we will always go immediately. If the victim is vulnerable or there is an immediate danger to life we will go immediately.

One case study the Echo printed suggested that officers didn’t go to the scene when a man was being verbally attacked in Weymouth. Perhaps what he didn’t know and perhaps what we should have told him was that all our officers at that moment were looking for a missing child. There will unfortunately be very rare occasions when there is a higher priority because someone’s life is at risk. And we can’t respond as quickly as we’d like to. Sometimes we are perhaps not very good at telling people why we are not able to attend. We need to assess all the things I mention to decide what we need to do and get there as soon as we possibly can. If an officer goes to a scene, the information is checked by a supervisor.

MB: This whole term of crime screening. One of joys of the Freedom of Information Act is that we are very accountable. It costs Dorset Police £90,000 a year to answer these requests and a lot of that is from the media. It’s published on the website because we want the information to be available. Unfortunately the FOI to do with crime screening was a national request to all 43 forces. We were one of 18 that answered when asked about crime screening. Unfortunately there is no national definition for crime screening and in all good faith we gave an answer that we thought was accurate to the question. It would appear that actually all the forces went about this in a different way because the figure itself is misleading to say the very least. The point is screening doesn’t mean that nothing gets done. Screening is a very misleading term. We told the enquirer about that first level of investigation and the second level of investigation and added this together - 23,328.

MP: How would you define screening?

MB: All crime is investigated. We train people in investigate crimes that don’t require an immediate police assistance by getting them to ask the right questions on the telephone. The very fact that somebody reports crime to us means immediately from our system we can tell if they have contacted us before, whether they have reported a crime to us for any reason. We will be able to see if there are any crimes in that area that might be linked. If they’ve had anything stolen we will be able to put that on the database so if anybody comes in custody with those items we can link it right back to that crime. It means that if we have somebody in custody we can see if we need to talk to them about that particular crime. So actually it means it can help us to work out serious crime, stolen property, whether somebody is particularly criminally active in a certain area. It gives us a huge amount of information. I think the public will understand that the financial climate we operate in – I have got limited resources and we do have to prioritise. It certainly doesn’t mean that it is not investigated.

MP: Do you think the public need to look at the bigger picture?

MB: I think people generally are very understanding but unfortunately it is sometimes really hard to get across the complexity and processes of what we do. So I am very grateful to be able to explain it.

MP: What perception do you think the public have about this issue?

MB: Whenever I sit down with a group of people from the public they utterly understand where I am coming from. Unfortunately lots of methods of communication whether it’s the website, newspapers or radio stations, TV, by their very nature have very truncated news and information so by their very nature you can’t get into the detail so it is really important that in some of these instances people do understand what we are talking about.

MP: Do you think as a force you should be more open about why you can’t attend calls so that people know what is going on and why they have been prioritised?

MB: I think often we are and sometimes we are not and we ought to be more open if we are not about the reasons why we can’t go immediately after a report has been made to us. The other thing is we need to be aware of the fact that no matter how much explanation you give to people they may not be satisfied. That is very unfortunate but that is sometimes the case. We have a very rigorous system for looking into any complaint about any member of the force or that the service wasn’t good enough. For example we use mystery shopper type exercises and get members of the public involved to see whether or not we meet their expectations.

MP: What has been the highest reason for complaints this year?

MB: We have a low level of complaints and they have gone down year on year over the past several years. What we inevitably get is less serious complaints. So the complaints are about people feeling they were spoken to rudely by officers or not taken seriously. All of those are looked at very carefully in a case by case basis and if there is a requirement for an apology then we will ask the officer or member of staff to apologise to the person concerned. I have no qualms about that.

If we have got it wrong then we will make an apology. There are times when these complaints come from people arrested and as soon as they sober up the following day they understand why the officer was perhaps been more formal or forceful than they might otherwise have been. But I am very clear there is no excuse for incivility and it’s something we work very hard on. Equally I don’t expect my officers to put up with foul language, shouting or swearing either on the telephone or face to face. We will deal with people professionally but from time to time people are hugely irrational, immensely aggressive and if they are sitting behind the wheel of a car goodness knows how they are driving the vehicle.

MP: Do you think as a force you are transparent enough?

MB: We are probably one of the most highly audited public services in the country. There is not a week goes by when their isn’t some external organisation auditing what we do - whether it’s the audit commission, the police authority’s inspectors or Her Majesty's Inspectorate.

MP: Your motto is ‘Dorset Police aims to make Dorset safer and to make Dorset feel safer’ - is there a reason why you don't publicise serious crime?

MB: Well the needs of the investigation are often critical in the first hours and days so we will sometimes have a key suspect who if they were alerted by way of publicity that something is in the wind would simply disappear. There are sometimes key aspects of an enquiry that we keep very confidential because when we interview a suspect only those that committed the crime or witnessed the crime are likely to know. Certainly aspects of investigations aren’t made public at an early stage. TV cameras turn up, radio, far more readily than they might in the past and what we’ve tried to do is adapt how we deal with scenes of crime to try and give people reasonable access but accepting that needs of the victim and investigation have to come first. Quite often that means the needs of the family as well as the victim of the crime.

One of the very sensitive areas of our work is investigating sexual offences and rape.

In the vast majority of occasions those allegations arise from those who know each other. It may arise from a long standing relationship or from those that have met each other and something has clearly happened in the course of the evening that leads to an allegation of rape. The need to maintain confidentiality in respect of the victim, the need to secure witnesses to what happened and need to ensure we don’t compromise the investigation by releasing the info too early are very important.

Add to that then the potential for the public to sometimes be led to believe that some kind of stranger attack has occurred and that would be incredibly unusual in Dorset. It is a very very tricky balance for us. Our whole ethos of course is based on protecting the public. So if at any time the information needs to be released to make sure the information will be released at the earliest opportunity. If it’s an issue about the public’s right to know rather than protection then I think we are moving to a different territory where we do have to consider what does this mean for victim and their family, what does it mean for the investigation and how the community are going to feel about it. Actually we might want to go the community and discuss it face to face before they see a headline that suggests to them that something awful and dreadful has happened. So they think a stranger attack has happened rather than explain the context of what has happened. That can be a very sensitive thing to do.

MP: But sometimes the press and the public don’t find out about attacks. For instance the war veteran that was violently beaten up in their bed in Dorchester after a burglary – things like that annoy people wouldn’t you agree?

MB: Yes I absolutely agree that if there is something going on it is really important that the rest of the community take the necessary steps to prevent themselves from crime like that. Without looking at the case I don’t know why that decision was made and if we got it wrong then quite clearly we should have done something different. But certainly if there is something we can do to protect the public then we ought to be doing it.

TARGET DRIVEN POLICING

MP: There is a lot of debate about target driven policing – does this happen in Dorset Police? Do you feel that targets change the way that officers work?

MB: Well what we very much try to do is focus on quality rather than quantity. What is very important to us is the quality of our investigations. How people are treated by us when they need a service from us. For example I don’t set targets for how many arrests my officers make or how many people they have to stop and search or how many crimes they have to detect. But what I do set very high standards about is customer satisfaction, public confidence in the force and the quality of our work.

MP: Where does that come from then when people think officers in Dorset are targeted?

MB: Some forces in the country have at times set arrest targets and I read the other day that the Chief Constable of Kent has decided to stop and remove targets from his staff. It has been a way of people trying to improve the service of their forces and there is no doubt that nationally the home office regime for monitoring the performance of police officers has very much focused on numerical targets. The Home Office now only impose one overall target for the police – which is the level of public confidence that the force and local authorities are tackling the issues of crime and disorder and anti-social behaviour that matter in that area. Now that doesn’t mean that beneath that there aren’t all sorts of numbers and indicators or activity but the Home Office say that is the only performance target that is required of us. Quite clearly I want to see crime going down so I am keen on making sure that we do everything we possibly can to lower those levels so I will certainly be monitoring those numbers.

MP: Is there anything that you will have to cut back on or not go ahead with because of the economic crisis?

MB: We are the fourth lowest spending force per head of population. There is a comparison of forces – how much is spent on the front end and how much you spend supporting them – IT, finance etc. We are very lean already. Of all police forces we spend the highest proportion of our budget on police officers. That’s paying police officers – feet on the ground. Our big disadvantage is that visitor numbers are not allowed for in our government funding formula.

PUBS AND CLUBS

MP: What problems is the force facing regarding the night-time trouble spots outside pubs and clubs?

MB: Neither are we funded as part of a formula for how many pubs and clubs in the area – however the average is worked out across the whole county. We lose money because it’s averaged over the whole of rural Dorset and averaged on how many pubs we have per square hectare.

MP: Some forces have introduced fees for the pubs and clubs because of the expense and demand on the police. Should that be done here?

MB: Well it’s something we discussed with local authorities over a period of time. I guess they will always have in mind the principle of who pays and the fact that this is a very difficult times for all businesses. I certainly think there is more scope for people that are making a disproportionate demand to pay more for the service. Because actually it is a big drain on our resources and a lot of policing takes place when people are indoors with the curtains closed and they actually won’t see the service they are getting.

MB: We put a huge amount of effort into the supervision of licensed premises to try and improve the standards of managers in relation to door staff to try and prevent problems. But you always have to be alive to the fact that particularly in our area people do come to the coast for stag and hen weekends and so on and so fourth. They do go into the nightclubs and you have to have sufficient people around to be able to police it.

MP: Is this something you are actively trying to do?

MB: It’s certainly something we are well aware with and the chairman of the police authority and myself went to see the Policing Minister this year with the support of all Dorset MPs to argue that the budget formula at the national level should reflect that particular challenge. At the moment we are in discussion with the Home Office and the department of Communities and Local Government and we are hopeful that the budget formula will change to reflect that issue. The difficulty is the formula has floors and ceilings. If Dorset was given just what the formula says it would be £3million short.

MP: Whose decision would it be?

Mb: The local authority has to make that decision. It’s certainly a matter that is on the table and we do have discussions with them about it. What you have to do to satisfy the legislation is justify that one particular pub or club causes consistently causes all the trouble.

ANTI-SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR

What is actually been done to tackle anti-social behaviour?

The reports have increased over the last 12 months. At the same time we have put 77 neighbourhood policing teams into place across the force, very locally based in local communities so we are finding out about much more of what was going on by now we have people physically based on the ground and their job is to spend their time in local communities and they are discovering these things and recording them. We don’t rely on the public to tell us about a crime, if we get information about a crime then we record it – it is not as though we are waiting for the public to tell us. For example test purchasing – none of these crimes would have been detected if our offices had not been out there carrying out investigations.

THE FUTURE

MP: What are your main priorities for the next year?

MB: At the serious end of the business it is very important that we do tackle serious and organised crime because there are a small number of people who are very actively involved in organised crime. Through the newspaper you will see the number of trials where we have taken very serious criminals to court and they have got very substantial sentences. That work will be relentless because they are the people at the end of the day bringing drugs into our community and they are the people affecting local neighbourhoods. It is also very important for us to work in partnerships with other communities locally in neighbourhoods to tackle things like anti-social behaviour. We have to be very clear about what are those things affecting a particular area or neighbourhood and are intractable and difficult to deal with. Also those things affecting an individual because that’s how anti-social behaviour can also show itself. We are very focused in ensuring that not only will they have a response from the safer neighbourhood team but that actually that is escalated beyond the local so that we can bring all our resources to bear on particularly difficult issues. I think the third area is making sure we are working with our partners to potential threats such as swine flu, flooding, so that we are actually ready to respond if there is a major public emergency when we have to be able to respond and able to deal with very quickly.

POLICE VISIBITY IN YOUR NEIGHBOURHOOD

MP: What success have the teams had in terms of visibility on the streets?

MB: We have had community beat officers for a long time. Now the extra funding for the teams has enabled us to appoint 162 police community officers across the force and then we put them together with the constables and sergeants that form the leadership for the teams. Then of course we have attached the 300 odd members of special constabulary to those safer neighbourhood teams and we have 100 volunteers – a lot of those support the teams so actually it is a very very strong team effort. They are absolutely here to stay.

MP: So is this combating the problem of visibility on the streets?

MB: Absolutely – their job is to be out there and be visible. Of course what they do as well as patrolling the streets is go to public meetings, schools etc. They might not always be walking along a given street at a given time because there are a variety of things going on as well as patrolling. Their job first and foremost is to be a visible presence in the area they are working in and deal with the issues that matter to that local community in partnership with all the other agencies.

MP: Are safer neighbourhood teams here to stay – can the public count on this?

MB: Absolutely - they are a key part of what we do. The public really appreciate what they do.