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- The Observer,
- Sunday December 21, 2003
The ability of the state to acquire knowledge dwarfs that of the individual. It seems to have every advantage. It can monitor emails, track movements through mobile-phone and credit-card records, receive the names of men who have logged on to paedophile websites, collect footage from CCTV cameras, cross-refer information in scattered data bases, tap phones and open letters. It ought to be feared and respected. But the state's apparent power is also a curse which accelerates the decline in deference to authority.
There may have been a time when David Westwood, the (soon to be ex-) Chief Constable of Humberside, might have got away with blurting out during one of his hopeless media performances: 'But I didn't want them dead. My officers didn't mean them any harm. We didn't kill them, Ian Huntley killed them. Why are we being blamed?'
That line can't work anymore. Although it's been a bit of a joke to watch the same newspapers which wail about the 'blame game' and the 'compensation culture' search for people in authority to blame and sue for someone else's crime, they're doing no more than reflect what their readers think and the paradox of an incompetent authoritarianism.
The public has watched uncomplainingly as Tory and New Labour governments have given the police nearly everything they wanted. On paper, Britain can look like a country under martial law. With their enhanced powers, the police or social services or mental health workers generally do know something about a murderer before he strikes. But knowledge doesn't always bring power. The catch, the reason why the draconian measures on the statute books don't give Britain an effective police force, is that once you get beneath all the press releases and gestures from Home Secretaries and Prime Ministers the criminal justice system is as decrepit as many other public services. It has been fragmented by privatisation and twisted every which way by targets and 'eye-catching' anti-crime initiatives, as Tony Blair once called them. The money his Government has pumped into law and order has been wasted on the enormous cost of coping with a prison population which has gone from 46,800 in 1992 when Blair and Michael Howard were preparing to begin their anti-crime arms race, to 73,900 today. While many are happy to see the incarceration of people who shouldn't be in jail and should be let out, the system hasn't the resources to investigate people who should be sent to jail and should never be let out.
The voters, meanwhile, are promised that authoritarian measures will protect them. They can be forgiven for pointing the finger at the police rather than criminals when the promised protection proves to be illusory and a state which knew, but did nothing.
I imagine that most people have read all they can take about Soham by now. The only point that hasn't been rubbed home is that even if Humberside hadn't deleted reports of the rape and underage sex allegations against Huntley, the criminal records department wasn't a slick and omniscient fact-checking machine. It consisted of a couple of underpaid female clerks who were overwhelmed by having to deal with about 100 requests for background information a day.
A criminal just as terrible as Huntley was Anthony Hardy, 'the Camden Ripper', a deranged misogynist who murdered at least three women and possibly five others. Several he photographed in pornographic poses after he had killed them, and then hacked their bodies to pieces and dumped them in wheelie bins.
Unsurprisingly in a society awash with information, police and psychiatrists knew plenty about him before he was convicted. A lay appeal panel allowed him out of a mental hospital even though psychiatrists had marked him down as a threat to women. You can't blame the police for the panel's decision. Any police officer who consulted the criminal records would have deplored what the panel had done. He would have seen that Hardy had stalked an ex-wife he had beaten up before they divorced and had been arrested for raping a prostitute. They would have noted that a woman's body had been found in his flat, although at the time her death had been put down to natural causes.
How often the police did consult the files was questioned after Hardy was convicted last month. Frances Mayhew, a theatre administrator, told the Mail that Hardy had called her in the middle of his killing spree to say he had found a handbag she had lost in a bar. She was welcome to pop round to his flat and pick it up. Ms Mayhew phoned Camden police to check if it was safe to visit him. Perfectly safe, she was told. When he opened the door, she saw a slob with tracksuit trousers hanging down his backside and 'black crosses [and] really odd pictures of human anatomy on the walls'. She fled. She received letters from him at home and work. She called the police again and was told that 'the letters were not serious enough for them to check out'. She believes that two women's lives would have been saved if the police had taken her seriously.
The Metropolitan Police inquiry is still going on. Perhaps it will find that Camden police did check the file and found nothing to incriminate Hardy. For nowhere is the gap between the promised security of the knowledge economy and shambolic reality of the criminal justice system greater than in the upkeep of criminal records. You might have thought it would be relatively easy, what with the information revolution and all that, to transfer records to a database. Detectives could then call up the histories of suspects with a press of a key and employers could weed out paedophiles who want to work with children.
But a 1999 internal audit by the Metropolitan Police found that 80 per cent of its records on the Police National Computer contained errors. Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary found that the error rate varied between 16 per cent and 65 per cent in the other forces in England and Wales. A second Met survey last year found that in 0 per cent of cases - that is, in no cases whatsoever - was information about a conviction put on the Police National Computer within 28 days. While the police struggled to maintain elementary data banks, the task of unmasking potential child abusers at the new Criminal Records Bureau was given to Capita, a doltish private company Whitehall allows to cruise round the public sector smashing-up basic services. The stories about schools being kept closed because Capita couldn't vet teachers in time for the start of term followed.
When chief constables and politicians promise to cut red tape and get bobbies on the beat what they mean is that they will cut basic record keeping and deny bobbies on the beat information which might lead them to suspects.
To be fair, the Government has been trying to clean-up criminal records for two years. But even now, the National Association of Probation Officers can call its members in any big court and come up with horror stories. In one south London court picked at random this year it uncovered a wife beater whose previous conviction for incest wasn't given to the judge and a serial attacker of women whose previous sex crimes weren't on his record.
I assume that even the combined forces of Capita, the Home Office and the police can't indefinitely postpone the day when a criminal records system can be made to work, and that would be progress. It would also be a help if sex crimes, particularly those of men like Huntley, who sleep with underage girls, were investigated robustly. The papers last week were filled with girls from Grimsby who had illegal sex with Huntley. None could be persuaded to press charges. Some didn't want to because they didn't trust the authorities. Others because they liked him. As the deleting of Huntley's records shows, the police weren't that bothered either way and let Huntley gain the impression that he could interfere with girls with impunity.
The experience of tackling racial crime shows that what works isn't the eye-catching initiatives of the restless state, but officers who are determined to prosecute and don't accept excuses for failure. As with hatred of blacks, so with hatred of women.
