The Chief Constable of Nottinghamshire, Steve Green, has been making waves with his cry of pain at the weekend that he is having to farm out murder investigations. His force is apparently unable to cope with the wave of crime that has rolled across Nottinghamshire because his officers are so tied up with bureaucracy. As the Sunday Telegraph reported:

'Nottingham has been one of the worst affected areas for gun crime, which hit record levels across England and Wales last year. Mr Green said ministers had a "fixation" with keeping officer numbers up - but had, in fact, been responsible for policies that had taken police away from front-line duties to do jobs that should be carried out by civilian staff, such as writing Home Office reports. "We are reeling with the murders," he said. "We are in a long-standing crisis situation with major crime and it won't go away overnight." '

On the Today programme (0715) this morning, the Nottingham Labour MP Graham Allen expressed irritation with Mr Green, claiming that he had not said a word to him about this apparent crisis in his force before unburdening himself to the Telegraph. So what to make of it?

There is no doubt that the police are indeed hamstrung by paperwork and targets and all the apparatus of a heavily bureaucratised, politicised service. But other forces don't appear to have this problem. So does the fault lie with Mr Green? Maybe. But in addition, one has to ask why Nottinghamshire's serious crime rate has exploded in this way. Here's one possible contributory factor.

In the late 1980s -- well before Mr Green's watch -- I happened to spend some time in Nottingham looking in depth at the drug problem. What I found was astonishing. It was not just the explosion of crack cocaine in the city. It was the extraordinarily short-sighted strategy being pursued by the police at that time to contain it. To be more precise, it was a strategy not to contain it. It seemed to consist of police setting up surveillance over crack houses, which they watched for month after month without making any arrests. Instead, they were lying in wait to catch 'Mr Big'. But there was no 'Mr Big'. Instead, the nature of crack cocaine addiction and trade being what it is, there was a relentless procession of Mr (ands Ms) Littles, all buying -- and then turning into dealers, and getting bigger and bigger, and spawning more dealers among the people buying from them; and so on, and appallingly on. Meanwhile, the Notts police did little apart from watch -- so much so that crack cocaine was being dealt openly in cafes in the Radford Road, a few yards down from the police station itself.

It was all too apparent then that this exponential growth of crack cocaine in Nottingham was inevitably, if left unchecked, going to create a lethal gang and crime problem in the town. So, it seems, it has proved. Drug crime is a major cause of Mr Green's headache. It is hard to avoid concluding that his problems stem in part, at least, from a cockeyed policing strategy -- by no means confined to Nottingham -- which has left him a deadly legacy.

Posted by melanie at March 14, 2005