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if what we read and hear in the media about this case is true, or near true, some heads need to roll and the people that made her life a misery need dealing with.

Fiona Pilkington Tragedy: Asbos Clearly Make Crime Worse
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By Iain Martin
A brilliant and important observation appears in the latest column by Mary Dejevsky in the Indy. She’s writing about the horrors of the Fiona Pilkington case, in which a mother killed herself and her daughter after years of harassment from her feral teenage neighbours. Disgracefully, the police paid virtually no attention to her pleas for help, in the process providing proof of how far removed policing in Britain now is from its core job. That should to catch criminals so effectively that it puts off other potential criminals.


Leicestershire Constabulary/Associated Press
Undated handout photo issued by Leicestershire Constabulary of Fiona Pilkington, left, and her daughter Francecca Hardwick, 18-years-old. But Dejevsky rightly identifies the failure of Asbos (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders) as central to this crisis of policing. New Labour introduced them in order to show how seriously it took the kind of low-level crime which blights neighbourhoods, and particularly poor neighbourhoods. But the effect - it’s those old “unintended consequences of progress” again - has been the opposite to that intended. Instead, it has trivialised such behaviour to the extent that Asbo culture is endlessly laughed at on television rather than being treated seriously.

“There were, Alan Johnson said yesterday, “no excuses”. Quite so. But his specific criticisms and remedies should not go without challenge. First, there is the matter of anti-social behaviour. Mr Johnson said the agencies were wrong to regard such anti-social behaviour as the Pilkington’s experienced as “low-level crime”. But what, pray, does the description “anti-social behaviour” denote? By separating this sort of persistent petty crime from “real” crime, the Government has invited the police to treat it differently. And this was surely the purpose. The Blair government correctly identified this sort of persistent and neglected offending as something voters were worried about, especially in deprived areas. But the effect of classifying it as “anti-social behaviour” and slapping “Asbos” on offenders was that it was no longer treated as a crime. It was a nuisance to be tackled by cut-price “community” officers, not the fully paid-up variety. Mr Johnson regrets that perhaps ministers “coasted” on anti-social behaviour. But this is a direct consequence of separating it from crime.”

Precisely: treat crime as crime. Read the whole thing here.

Twenty years ago Mrs Pilkington would have had a much better service than she got in the years leading up to 2007. There were many thousands less police officers. In March this year there were 144,000 police officers. In March 1987 there were 120,000.

We have 24,000 more police officers yet those available for front line policing have been slashed dramatically. I don’t have access to any figures for the amount of officers available for day-to-day policing calls so I can only go by my own experience. In 1987 one division I worked in paraded 18 officers split between 4 police stations. This did not include 3 rural cars which covered the villages, 1 officer in every neighbourhood beat & a rural officers who shared all the villages between them. We put out 9 patrol cars in the division plus a walker in each of the town centres & the police stations were open 24 hours a day.

Now those same 4 towns have a maximum of 8 officers between them, we are lucky if they can put out 5 cars in the whole division, all of the police stations are closed longer than they are open.

Back in the day the village bobby lived on the patch & knew everyone & everything there was to be known. He probably looked after 2 or 3 villages. Every estate had a neighbourhood officer who lived on their patch, they often had a little police office attached to their house, they too knew everyone, they were a vast source of information. What they knew & what they did couldn’t be recorded in an exel spreadsheet yet their value to policing was enormous.

Then someone in a wendy house somewhere decided that the only way to measure the success of an organisation was to match its performance against a written down set of criteria & the way to do this was to count beans. Suddenly, the value of everything was measured in beans & rural/neighbourhood officers didn’t grow any beans on their patches. Add to that the fact that they lived in expensive police houses.

The theory went that if you did away with neighbourhood & rural officers not only could you pull them all back to the nick where they could produce a few beans, you could also save the expense of maintaining their houses, sell them off & plough lots of lovely lolly into all the new & dynamic projects which were about to hit the world of UK policing. We lost a generation of intelligence which we are only now getting back, amazingly enough, through local PCSOs, who will, within a few years, be just as valuable a tool to police intelligence as the old village bobby.

It made good political – read voting – sense to increase the number of bobbies, so every government promised more. More bobbies means more votes ‘cos we all want more bobbies on the streets, only they never made the streets. They all went into disparate little ‘remit’ teams. You know the teams, they are the ones you ask for help when you’re struggling to meet all the frontline priorities who turn round & say “sorry, mate, not my remit”.

So we had the burglary squad, set up to specifically target burglary beans, the robbery squad busy collecting robbery beans, sexual offences squad, paedophile squad, computer crime squad, diversity squad, more officers means more potential for naughty goings-on so the rubber heel squad was boosted. We had the serious crime units, the bloody serious crime units, organised crime, it goes on. Then there are the units who monitor the other units, who count the beans, who supervise those who count the beans, who make sure the right beans are being counted.

So every time an Inspector of Constabulary comes a-calling & says, “now look here Mr Chief Constable, your force is doing particularly low in detections of spanner-wielding credit-card thieves” we have to have a department whose soul aim is to reduce spanner-wielding credit card thefts.

The problem for those on the front line is that most of the calls we get don’t lead to all the remit-beans. Nobody measures the prevention of crime, nobody measures kids who piss up your garage & chuck eggs through your windows, nobody measures depressed people who threaten suicide but never go through with it. You don’t get a bean for sitting outside a row of shops stopping the kids from spitting at people with special needs.

And if they’re not measured, they’re not important.

If the next Inspector of Constabulary comes round & says “Now look here Mr Chief Constable, the behaviour of teenage yobs in this area is apalling, this chart shows a 150% increase in bad language in front of old ladies, get it sorted” you’ll have so many shiny-arses out of their offices that the problem could be sorted in a year.

It ain’t gonna happen, though.

We still have these in a handful of our rural back drops Mostly up North. Southern urban sprawls from London to the Home Counties and to East/West of these areas do not have these any more.

However, like the rural post office and school - these are still under threat




So why not upgrade and make them a real police officer with powers of proper arrest? They cannot hold them without a proper bobbie We do try to pair up ours with either a special or a regular (both of whom have powers of arrest and can "stop/search" if sound reason to do so. (We do have the power to stop/serach anyone under the Police Reform Act 2002: we happen to use this thoughtfully without antagonising the public at large. I like to reassure folk that we do the job responsibly)

Sadly we do specialise staff into teams of expertise which does lead to this charge.. of