On rank stupidity

Chapter 4. The Sheehy Report

As a constable, I rarely saw any officer above Chief Inspector, so I was sorry to have missed the Chief Superintendent getting a lift from HQ to another station during my shift. On the way, his police car was diverted to a disturbance. The boss arrived just before half a dozen of my colleagues were lifting a handcuffed man horizontally into the police van. As the doors closed an agitated man was going from officer to officer asking who was in charge. He was apparently unconnected with the event but felt that excessive force had been used to subdue the man.

The event had finished, so the officers were standing by, waiting to get back on patrol. The gentleman was directed from constable to constable and then from a sergeant to the Chief Superintendent. “Yes, I am in charge”, said the Chief.

The man explained, “I am very unhappy about how that poor man was treated and one of your officers has just told me to Fuck Off!”

The Chief Superintendent paused and considered the situation. “Then”, he said “Why are you still here?”. With that he and his officers got back in their cars and went about their day.

Several questions arise from this. Firstly, what is a Chief Superintendent and of what are they in charge? Don’t worry I will get to some other questions that you may have (or you can comment at the end)!

At times in this book, I say that ‘I was in charge of … whatever’, meaning that things were happening because I was making them happen. In a hierarchy, every line manager above me was also ‘in charge of … whatever’ too, even if they didn’t contribute to whatever it was, or even know about it. The Metropolitan Police has lots of people in charge of things, unless they start to go wrong, when hardly anyone is even present, let alone in charge.

Policing is hard to understand from the outside. It looks like a top-down military hierarchy, but really isn’t. The confusion arises, I think, from the public seeing the police at their most visible, when keeping public order among crowds. They are deployed in ‘military style’ formations and senior ranks give ‘orders’ to lower ranks. But public order is a tiny part of the business, far less than 1% of my working career was spent doing this.

The most important rank, is constable. The constables do all the operational work and make all the decisions that the rest of the ranks then have to address. In a single working day constables act as arbitrators, social workers, priests, lawyers and judges (and almost any other profession you can think of). They make life-changing decisions, then suddenly they have to drive cars assertively through congested roads, then get out and run, jump over garden fences and wrestle. They will occasionally close a motorway or a mainline railway or order an office building to be evacuated. Then they write it down. Almost all of the time, remarkably, they get it right.

Their decisions will occasionally require support, which is what the other ranks are for. So, for clarity, here are the Met Police ranks:

The Commissioner is in charge of the:

Deputy Commissioner,

Assistant Commissioners,

Commanders,

Chief Superintendents (approximately equivalent to a military Colonel),

Superintendents,

Chief Inspectors (approximately equivalent to a military Major),

Inspectors,

Sergeants and,

Constables.

The Constables are in charge of all incidents, the streets and everything else.

This looks like a top-heavy organisation, which is what Sheehy thought when he was asked to review the police responsibilities and rewards (and therefore ranks) in 1993 . He recommended abolishing three ranks, which for a time actually seemed to happen, but the Government then buckled in the face of the police backlash .

Sheehy’s background was in business (British American Tobacco), so let me show you the ranks from a business perspective. The Commanders and above are the Executives, these ranks are all members of the National Police Chiefs Council. The Metropolitan Police is huge so its geographic operations are split into Command Units. When I started there were sixty, in the nineties they were reduced to thirty and now there are just twelve. Even when there were sixty these were Medium Sized Entities each with hundreds of workers. Each had budgets and assets measured in millions of pounds. This is how the ranks map onto today’s business terminology:

Chief Superintendents - Chief Executive Officer

Superintendents - Chief Operating Officer

Chief Inspectors - Department Head

Inspectors - Team Leader

Sergeants - 1^st line supervisor

Sheehy’s idea was to abolish CEOs and Departmental Heads. I’ll just leave that idea there.

For more on this topic, try Iain Donnelly’s excellent memoir ‘Tango Juliet Bravo’. An appendix at the back has a detailed and lively explanation of all the ranks. I commend the whole book. My guide is a bit shorter.

A needless confusion to the rank system is that the two London forces are led by a Commissioner, a Deputy and several Assistants. Outside London, the other UK police forces have a Chief Constable, a Deputy and several Assistants.

A distraction is that (since 2012) each force outside London also has a politician called a Police and Crime Commissioner. These are not police officers at all. I will write an Original Note about why they are expensive, a complete waste of that expense and do more harm than good. Nothing personal, but they should all be abolished ASAP, for the public good.

I said at the start that constable is the most important rank doing all the work. To show this I will just talk you through what I did after the arrest described in ‘On suspicion’ . The arrest of a car thief took seconds from suspicion to arrest; the necessary bureaucracy took hours. From the scene, I had to call for a police van to transport the prisoner to the station and a police driver to take away the car. These would've been other constables from my shift.

Back at the station I would report the facts to my sergeant in the Custody Suite and then write down my ‘original notes’ of the arrest. I would then solicit the help of my constable colleagues to notify the victim, interview the person arrested, search the stolen car, possibly search his home address. I would need to find out the circumstances of the theft before searching and interviewing.

All these actions needed to be done as soon as possible, there were, after all three other people who had been in the car, who, even now, might be hiding evidence and property.

All this work just after an arrest is now called the ‘golden hour’. The ‘golden hour has always been there but it was discovered and written into procedure in the late 1990s. The ‘golden hour’ is where criminal cases are won or lost. As each minute of the golden hour elapses the difficulty of giving the work to anyone else increases. The actions are interdependent, the information increases, the room for error in a hand-over expands. The need to stay on and incur overtime becomes essential for operational efficiency.

This fact has created the concept of the ‘officer in the case’, the bedrock of London policing. The idea that the originating officer is best placed to organise whatever happens next, with the help of colleagues as necessary. It is also the basis of a brilliant flexible supervision concept known as Gold, Silver and Bronze. The rigid hierarchy set out above melts in the heat of a Major Incident being called by an operational constable. This allows the best information to be passed up a chain of command in the order of whomever is present and able to take charge rather than in strict rank order. Sheehy, to his credit, thoroughly commended this idea. I will do a separate Note - ‘On Public Order’.

Over the years various efficiency studies have been tried to move on from the ‘officer in the case’ concept. I am not sure where we are in reinventing this particular wheel, but if we are not operating on the ‘officer in the case’ model now, we will be soon.

Now, you may have some questions about the profane Chief Superintendent who introduced this chapter. Personally, I very rarely swear, it is unprofessional and hard to justify. Shouting is fine and sometimes a good tactic; swearing, is rarely OK, but, it may be the only language that some people understand. Probably, our Agitated Man did not need to be sworn at, but who is to judge excessive force that this passerby felt he had seen? The constables on that Chief Superintendent’s Command Unit arrested seven or eight thousand people every year and the training at the time was for the constable to take every arrested person by the arm so that they would know that they had been arrested. Every arrest was a Home-Office-approved exercise in force. Who is to judge if it is excessive? An age-old question of ‘Quis custodiet ipso custodes?’

In my view, the best judges of excessive force are people who are experts in using force in these precise circumstances (as opposed to rugby players or soldiers, for example). In the first instance, for policing, that means Senior Officers who have experienced the office of constable. Luckily for the public purse on the occasion above there was one at the scene to address the issue without any unnecessary bureaucracy.