Message to the Commissioner
Sophie Khan on professional training and false securities
It is not every day that you get to meet the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in person. Since taking on the stewardship of the Met Police, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe has had to manage a number of controversial police incidences and still make time to lead the 31,000-strong member force through the budget cuts. So it was a pleasant surprise that the Commissioner agreed to a meeting with the legal challengers he would normally face at court.
The meeting was arranged to highlight the issues faced by police action lawyers and their clients in bringing challenges against the Met Police and for the Commissioner to take back our message to the rest of his team. The Commissioner outlined the inherent “structural obstacles” in running a large organization and the difficulties in overcoming these to achieve real change in police culture. Training, supervision and accountability of his officers were at the top of his agenda. This comes at a time when one of the aims of the College of Policing is to develop a more professional approach to police officer training. The College last month published the first Code of Ethics for police officers and last week Rachel Tuffin, Head of Research at the College of Policing said that they wanted “to introduce formal CPD for police officers, which means we will be encouraging them to seek opportunities to improve in all sorts of ways – some of which would be in partnership with universities.”
The increased focus on professional training will assist the Commissioner’s mission for change and introduce a new way of policing, replacing the tick-box approach towards “evidence-based policing”.
This will see police resources deployed on specific police projects rather than on chasing targets and lead to better engagement with the public. So how does the use of body worn cameras fit into the new approach?
This month saw the launch of the camera trials across 10 London Boroughs. Five hundred police officers will be equipped with cameras for a year. The College of Policing will publish guidance on good practice but it will be difficult to see how the College will be able to enforce non-compliance with the guidelines when the on/off button is controlled by the device wearer. The cameras have been purchased from Taser International, an American company which is also the manufacturer of the controversial Taser stun gun. The recorded data will be stored to their cloud hub based in Arizona and accessed via a web-based management system.
It is unknown whether the Commissioner has explored the privacy issues of an American company retaining data on British citizens. But I hope he has obtained adequate safeguards to ensure that any data retained by Taser International will be deleted after 31 days in accordance with our rules.
We must not forget that the Commissioner does not have a mandate to introduce a mass roll-out of cameras. His reluctance to take views and opinions from outside policing circles suggests that his mission for “real change” is a myth. A statement from the Met Police at the launch of the trials stated that the trials were to find out “how to do it, not whether to do it”. There was no mention of public engagement even though the Commissioner was criticized for his failure to consult on the mass roll-out of Tasers by the London Assembly’s Police and Crime Committee last October in their report on Arming the Met: the deployment of less-lethal weapons in London.
Public engagement for one will not cost millions of pounds. If a link can be forged with community leaders and activists about policing issues in their communities then rebuilding public trust can start to begin. Having said that, sitting in a room with glary-eyed lawyers couldn’t have been easy for the Commissioner. Now his team need to do the same sans the lawyers.
My message to the Commissioner is not to put his faith in a gimmick. Cameras are not the solution. They are a false security and should be reserved for specific projects which depend on video evidence.
If his mission is truly to see “real change” in police culture then he must allow the professional development programmes to take their course and let the evidence judge the camera.
Author details
Solicitor Director at Sophie Khan & Co Solicitors and Higher Court Advocates specialist in actions against the police. Email: sophiek@sophiekhan.co.uk
No comments:
Post a Comment