As ugly as I seem…

What sort of injuries might the police classify under the term ‘serious violence’? You may be surprised but the above scratch would likely be recorded as grievous bodily harm. (Image from AlishaV)

One of my main aims behind writing this here blog is to help explain the law and police customs on behalf of those who may hear stories about the justice system in the news and think ‘that can never be right’.

Today there’s one such story in the papers concerning how community resolutions have apparently been used inappropriately to deal with reports of ‘serious violence’.

The implication of the headline is that offenders responsible for some of the most serious crimes we deal with are being let off with a slap on the wrist and victims are losing out as a result.

From the face of it, ‘that can never be right’ would be a very sensible reaction.

Serious violence demands a little more than an apology, surely suspects should be put before the wig-wearers at Crown Court and sent for a lengthy prison sentence?

It’s at this point it’s important to consider exactly how ‘serious violence’ is being defined so we can understand what offences within the category often actually look like.

Offences that have been considered ‘serious’ in reference to this story include causing actual bodily harm (ABH) and wounding or inflicting grievous bodily harm without intent.

When it comes to the police decision as to which level of assault we’re going to record (or ‘crime’ in police speak), suffering pain is the benchmark for ‘actual bodily harm’.

This means were you to playfully punch a colleague on the arm and your colleague felt some pain, even in passing, we’d be obliged to record an offence of ABH were your colleague to make a complaint to ourselves.

Why? According to our ‘criming’ standards (by which I mean the exciting Home Office Counting Rules), feeling pain makes the difference between a common assault and ABH.

Now consider the benchmark for recording an offence of wounding. This is a category in which the severity of injury can vary hugely.

We define a ‘wound’ as a breaking of the continuity of the whole skin.

This could be a huge Holby City extra style gash running the length of someone’s body and this sort of wound is likely the sort you’d imagine as ‘grievous’.

Equally so though, it could be no bigger than a paper cut.

Because it’s the breaking of the skin that qualifies a wounding as such, many of the injuries that we record as woundings – I’d go as far to say the majority – are relatively minor, sometimes so small that they can’t even be photographed.

With the definition of ‘wound’ so encompassing, statistics for what is recorded as ‘serious violence’ can be somewhat skewed.

The 10,160 incidents of serious violence certainly doesn’t mean 10,160 people with stab wounds, broken bones and worse.

When it comes to agreeing community resolutions in relation to these sort of offence categories, it’s essential to keep in mind that we are victim led and that without the consent and agreement of the victims themselves, community resolutions aren’t even an option.

When we attend incidents, we have to consider the circumstances and will ask the person reporting what course of action they would see as appropriate. We do our best to explain the options and come up with a course of action that the victim is happy with.

Take a hypothetical example of two friends who after a few too many sherbets fall out and one ends up pushing the other against a door latch causing a very, very small cut to the forearm.

A complaint is made and as we’ve got a break in the skin, we have no choice but to record a crime of inflicting grievous bodily harm without intent. A serious crime has been registered, time for court!

Speaking to the now-sober victim though, he doesn’t want his friend to go to court. He’d rather an apology be made and they look at putting the matter behind them.

As we’ve checked his friend out and found he hasn’t been in trouble for violence in the past, we pull out the local resolution form and resolve the matter there and then.

It’s a proportionate, appropriate and very sensible way to sort out what at first appears a very serious offence but in reality is actually not quite as it seems.

So looking beyond the raw figures and into the detail of how wider a definition ‘serious violence’ can be, the story isn’t quite as shocking as it first appears.

Local resolutions are all about common sense, by properly understanding how we define the different levels of assault hopefully you can be reassured that our own understanding of common sense has not been lost.

P.S. If you’d like to know more about the different levels of assault, have a look at my blog on the subject from last September.

For more on community resolutions and restorative justice, have a look at the Restorative Justice Council website and also see what our ACPO lead, ACC Garry Shewan, had to say on the story here.

Hungry for more info on local resolutions? See our own website for a little more on how they’re used and why they’re useful.

Half of the people can be part right all of the time, some of the people can be all right part of the time, but all of the people can’t be all right all of the time…

Both the FBI and CIA had prior knowledge of one of the Boston bombing suspects, does this mean they should have acted though?

In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, there’s been a lot of comment from the media about the failings of the security services that despite Tamerlan Tsarnaev having been interviewed by the FBI in 2011 about possible links to Islamic extremism, the leads weren’t followed up and opportunities to prevent the attack were missed.

Comment has followed a similar line in reporting on Jimmy Savile, the Philpotts and other stories where police, social services, security services and others apparently ‘knew’ of issues and yet failed to act.

To use my own force as an example, it’s important to understand how intelligence comes to us and how it can be used so that decisions to act, or not to act, can be appreciated in their proper context.

We gather intelligence from a variety of different sources including officers on the streets, external agencies and Crimestoppers to name but a few.

Hundreds of intelligence ‘logs’ will be received by the force on a daily basis concerning everything from serious criminal activity to licensing issues, ASB to fly-tipping.

As people let us know things for a variety of different reasons, reliability is always a big consideration when we decide what steps to take when a new log comes in.

Some of the information will be second or third hand, it may be rumour, could have been misinterpreted by the source or even deliberately false.

With the quality of intelligence varying so much, it’s not uncommon that the intelligence paints a contradictory picture.

We may ‘know’ all sorts of things but without verification, there may not be grounds to act there and then.

With something like Tsarnaev having been previously interviewed by the FBI, it may seem tempting to take the view ‘they suspected he had extremist connections and did nothing – wasn’t it obvious he was the sort of person who might plan an attack?’.

This view though doesn’t take into account the reliability of the information and misunderstands the context.

The FBI will likely have similar information of thousands of others, this isn’t to say that they should be ‘acting’ on said information though as often it will not be appropriate to do so.

Viewing the FBI’s 2011 interview of Tsarnaev and his subsequent link to the bombings as a failure is very difficult, principally because it raises the question of what steps could realistically have been taken in the circumstances.

Assuming the information was unverified and isolated, there’d likely be insufficient grounds to justify actions such as arrests, searches and surveillance.

There will be plenty of people in the UK as well as the States about whom similar intelligence will be held suggesting links to extremism. Any one of those people could potentially be planning a similar attack to that seen in Boston.

As was seen this week in the case of three men jailed for plotting terror attacks on Wootton Bassett, strong intelligence can lead to a strong case and police intervention.

Simply having some suggestion of a link to extremism though, especially through unconfirmed sources, is never going to give grounds to take immediate action and nor should it.

With hindsight, security services’ ‘knowledge’ of a threat may seem concerning but what would be far more concerning would be steps taken to act on every piece of information they hold, no matter how doubtful.

Seeking to do so may lead down a very dark path indeed with a large toll inflicted on civil liberties.

If anything, the example stresses how important it is that information is shared so that we have the quality of intelligence we need to act effectively.

A call you could make may represent the missing piece of the jigsaw that we’ve been looking for, so if you know something you think may be of use, please call us on 101 or speak to the Anti-Terrorist Hotline on 0800 789 321.

Apparently absent in the Tsarnaev case, the consequences of such missing pieces are all too apparent.

One of us cannot be wrong…

Online conjecture following the Boston Marathon bombing was generally unhelpful, is there potential to harness public interest for more useful ends?

Out of all of the steps that the police in the States would have taken in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, appealing to the online community for help solving the case was not likely to be one of them.

Like many others, I first became aware of the bombings when graphic images of the aftermath began to find their way into my Twitter timeline.

This was ahead of any of the news channels picking up on the story, it was too soon to say what had happened but even at this early stage some users were making unwarranted assumptions about what had happened.

As it does, the true picture began to emerge slowly with the mainstream news needing to verify their sources before reporting. Even with this professional journalistic approach some stories found their way into the headlines that turned out to be misleading.

With images and videos uploaded directly from the scene onto social media, rumour about the significance of certain ‘clues’ encouraged some using message boards and forums to take it on themselves to try and piece together what might have happened.

The sum of the efforts was well represented by the since removed ‘Find Boston Bombers’ forum created on Reddit.

Footage was assembled and with the available ‘clues’, uninformed theories gathered pace to the extent that names of ‘suspects’ were mentioned despite their being nothing to support a suggestion of their involvement.

As The Onion well summed up in its ‘Internet Comes Up With 8.5 Million Leads On Potential Boston Bombing Suspect‘ article, the large amount of time spent online by amateur detectives had been distinctly unhelpful and counter-productive.

In the professional investigation, many different sources of evidence will have contributed to the formulation of theories including forensics, intelligence, human testimony and perhaps most importantly of all, the expertise of the investigators when it comes to managing major incidents.

Not only lacking any real knowledge of investigation, without any supporting context from other sources of evidence as outlined above a few blurry frames from a camera phone could never have been sufficient information on which to base credible theories.

As such though well meaning, most of the theories generated online were ill-informed and in no way helped further the official investigation.

The problem I think was that the public’s interest to help had not been guided, instead it had been discharged unsupervised and at random.

Imagine instead if there was a mechanism through which this eagerness could be harnessed to help rather than hinder the actual investigation, to employ the resources of the many eyes and ears available for a useful end.

Take witness identification as an example and the ‘trace, identify, eliminate’ strategy that we sometimes use to help further investigations. Could people be asked to tag themselves in scene photos so the police are able to contact them as potential witnesses?

As another example, a portal through which witnesses could upload photos and videos from the scene would be hugely beneficial in terms of the evidence gathering process.

With some thought and structure, public ‘crowd-sourcing’ could be a powerful investigative tool and one which in the wake of serious incidents such as the Boston bombings could be very valuable indeed.

There’s potential in the pitfalls of the Boston example, potential that is worth serious consideration.

There’s so much you have to know…

What am I going on about when I talk about getting some ‘CPS advice’?

As I mentioned on me Twitter feed earlier today, this shift I had to give the Crown Prosecution Service a call to get some advice in relation to a prisoner I’d been dealing with.

This is something we have to do fairly frequently on the Investigation Team, what does ‘going to CPS’ involve though and why do we have to do it? For that matter, who are the CPS anyway?

First things first, the Crown Prosecution Service is the department responsible for prosecuting the criminal cases that we police officers present to them as a result of our investigations.

They give advice on the cases that we’re putting together, make sure cases are in a suitable condition to be put to the courts and it’s the CPS lawyers who present said cases to the court itself.

As a condition of their employment, all Crown Prosecution Service employees have to wear crowns whenever on duty as a sign of their legal authority.*

The CPS has been operating ever since 1986, prior to this date police forces would prosecute their own cases.

When it comes to ‘going to CPS’, whether we have to do so or not depends on the type of cases that we’re working on.

For simpler jobs, such as a minor assault or low value criminal damage, we police can make the decision about whether there’s enough evidence to take a matter to court and so don’t need to consult with CPS beforehand.

More serious offences, or anything involving a domestic or hate crime element, usually require us to ask CPS to have a look at the circumstances of the report and the available evidence as only CPS can authorise us to charge someone with said offence.

So, we police are allowed to decide to charge people with low level offences whilst CPS have to check serious crime cases before they’re able to go to court, what does the process itself involve?

Like with many other areas, each force will have different procedures but in the West Midlands, we have a program called Electronic File Build (Battlefield 4, eat your heart out!) which links in with our own custody computers.

When we need advice, or in any case if we’re charging someone to go to court, we can upload much of our evidence electronically to the File Build program and then zap it straight across to CPS.

This means CPS get an outline of the case along with copies of statements, exhibits and the like within minutes of us sending them and then can reply to us in the same fashion.

Prior to using this electronic system, we used to fax paper documents (children of the 1990s, see here) or if the fax machine wasn’t working, even read out whole statements over the phone which you can appreciate took a lot of our time so the electronic system is much more efficient.

Once the documents are sent, we’ll then pick up the phone and speak to a CPS lawyer at one of their call centres who may ask a few questions about the case and then will give us a decision.

If you hear in the news that police have ‘submitted a file to CPS’, this is usually what is meant, although the exact mechanism varies and for complicated cases officers will meet with CPS representatives in person to discuss the evidence.

Having CPS oversight is useful as particularly in serious cases, the law can be very complicated hence why it is necessary for a legal professional to review the case to ensure that we have the best chance of getting a conviction in court.

So there’s the process of how and why we have to get CPS advice in as simpler terms as I think I can manage.

If you fancy some bedtime reading, you can take a look at the Director’s Guidance on Charging but if not, simply take away that CPS are the legal experts who work with us to help ensure the cases we investigate arrive at the best possible result.

* Okay, this bit may not be true although what the CPS lawyers wear whilst working in their call centres is a matter for themselves!

Behind That Locked Door…

Everyone knows that by exploiting a weak point in the Death Star’s design, the Rebel Alliance blew it up. Did you know that your household locks may have a similar weakness that criminals could exploit? (Image from mharrsch)

For reasons known only to Darth Vader, when the engineers were designing the Death Star they built in a vent that should someone happen to shoot down, the entire space station would instantly be rendered inoperable by virtue of it being scattered across the galaxy.

This wasn’t a good idea but then weak points, deliberate or otherwise, rarely are which raises the question of why they exist in the first place.

Even though the whole Death Star thing happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, weak points are still things that crop up from time to time and at the moment in the world of home security, are causing a few issues in relation to a type of lock commonly used on uPVC doors.

The ‘Euro cylinder’ is a type of lock that’s often found on plastic doors and like the Death Star, unfortunately has a weak point that criminals with tools a lot less sophisticated than proton torpedoes have been able to exploit.

The method, known as lock snapping, involves using a tool to apply force to the lock cylinder which then responds by snapping at its weakest point. It takes minutes to do and and allows the bad guy to simply open the door and step inside.

In Yorkshire the lock snapping method has been a factor in a quarter of their burglaries and unfortunately, criminals in other areas are getting wise to this simply way of gaining access to people’s homes.

What can you do to secure your own Death Star then?

First of all you need to identify whether your locks are the type that are vulnerable to being snapped.

It’s hard to tell just from looking at them which is Euro cylinder type although this photo shows what they generally look like. Better, ask a locksmith for advice as to which locks you have.

If you have Secured by Design standard doors (fitted after 2010) then you should be okay, older locks though may need to be checked.

Having identified any Euro cylinder style locks, you then want to consider upgrading the barrels to break secure models. You need not replace the entire door, just the mechanism which should be a fairly quick job for a professional.

Combined with following the other sensible crime prevention tips I have offered on this blog over the years (here, there, here, here, here and there too), as well as our Safer Homes advice, you should considerably lower the chances that you’ll return home to discover a break in.

The weak point in the Death Star is generally considered a good thing, depending on whose side you’re on. The same can’t be said about your locks though so go check them before a criminal does it for you!

I make mistakes that I learn from ’cause I’m young…

Some of Paris Brown’s tweets were ill-advised sure, but wasn’t her youth – and the experiences that come with it – why she was picked for the YPPC job in the first place?

A quick post this and one I’ll start by stating firstly that I think Ann Barnes has rightly condemned Paris Brown’s tweets as being ‘silly’ and ‘offensive’, secondly I’ll add that I’d not usually go for Tulisa lyrics for my blog titles but in this case, it’s appropriate…

As you’ve likely seen in the news over the past couple of days, shortly after seventeen year old Paris Brown was given the job of Youth Police and Crime Commissioner for Kent Police, The Mail on Sunday ran a story in which they published a series of historic tweets from Paris’ personal Twitter account.

The controversial tweets made the headlines, a clearly upset Paris made a public apology and her boss issued a statement of support for Paris, rejecting calls for Paris to be removed from her post.

The role of Youth Police and Crime Commissioner was to bridge the divide between young people and the police. It aims to provide representation for young people to help promote inclusiveness in process of making decisions about how the force is run and what its priorities ought to be.

Many of the people that we deal with are younger and whilst officers and those making decisions about how the force operate try to be as inclusive and approachable as possible, I can see that having someone from a younger background available to facilitate communication and understanding could be quite invaluable.

To do the job well, it stands to reason that said person needs to be young themselves so they can honestly claim that they’ve got the credentials to speak for the younger members of the community that the force polices.

They need to be able to illustrate how the experience of growing up today is very different from that of what youth would have been ten or twenty years ago – they need to reflect what ‘it was different in my day’ really means.

The qualification that this background of youth gives at the same time affords the person some leeway to make mistakes – an essential part of the experience that they represent.

Find a seventeen year old candidate for YPPC who’s whiter than white and you’ll have found someone who’s not right for the job.

Instead, pick a teenager who has made mistakes that he or she regrets and will learn from and you’ll have a candidate in a much better position both to represent the thousands of other young people making similar mistakes, and to help give the advice that represents those people’s experiences.

P.S. This blog from A Dragon’s Best Friend I thought was interesting in terms of the context under which young people use social media and the consequences, it’s well worth a look.

Cautioners…

Caution is advised when venomous snakes are around, how do the police decide if a caution is appropriate when it comes to crime though? (Image from TampAGS)

As you may have seen in the news, today the government has announced that it’s going to be reviewing how us officers make decisions as to when it’s appropriate to issue cautions to offenders.

Whilst the figures suggest that overall use of police cautions has fallen by over 40% during the past five years, concerns have been raised that cautions have sometimes been issued to repeat offenders and for offences that appear serious enough to have been put before the courts.

Understanding what cautions are, how decisions are reached to issue them and why they are useful is important in understanding the role they play in the criminal justice system.

Starting off, a caution isn’t a conviction and so as you may have read on my CRB blog last year, doesn’t need to be disclosed when applying for job unless specifically asked about.

A caution is closer to an official warning from the police, having admitted guilt a person being issued a caution signs a caution form in custody and the matter is finalised there and then. We deem the associated crime ‘detected’ or solved and the case is closed.

Cautions can be ‘simple’ or ‘conditional’, the latter meaning that they are subject to appropriate conditions, say paying compensation, and there are similar options that we can use for under eighteens too.

Following considerations about what is in the public interest, we make decisions when deciding about how to dispose of a case by looking at all circumstances.

An offender’s previous offending history is obviously an important part in looking at whether they might be eligible for a caution.

If someone has come to the attention of the police for the first time, a caution may be the way forward as it offers that person a chance to get back on track, to make amends, to ensure that they don’t repeat the same mistake.

Working in the other way though, someone whose criminal record shows they’ve done the same sort of thing over and again will need some stronger intervention and so may well find themselves shipped off to court.

In the West Midlands, we use ‘gravity scores’ by which each offence category is given a score according to how serious it is, mitigating and aggravating circumstances are then considered which alter the score accordingly.

The final score, between one and four, indicates whether a caution would be appropriate or not.

This helps ensure that decisions about issuing cautions are consistent across the force.

As for why cautions are a useful option, I’d disagree that there’s a motivation for issuing them on the basis that police “don’t have to prepare so much paperwork” as the Magistrates’ Association has suggested.

Rather, public interest is I think the larger consideration with it simply not being the best option in terms of cost, time or use of resources to send someone who has admitted guilt to a low level offence to court when a more proportionate option is available.

Of course to the victim no offence is ‘low level’ and their views are important in deciding what is the right course of action.

Charging someone rather than issuing a caution does indeed require some extra work, a relatively short ‘first hearing’ file, but this is done electronically and shouldn’t take much longer than an hour or two to put together.

As the Ministry of Justice has announced, the review is wider ranging than simply examining whether cautions are being issued appropriately and seeks to establish also whether they are issued consistently across forces and how the acceptance of a caution impacts upon individuals.

Due to be published in May, the findings are likely to be very interesting, particularly in terms of showing to what extent the way that cautions are viewed and employed varies around the country.

I sent a message through the Internet but it rejected…

Via West Midlands Police Press Releases –

Officers to be able to make legally binding online arrests using Twitter

April 1st 2013

WEST MIDLANDS POLICE have welcomed today an announcement made by the Home Secretary, Theresa May, introducing new legislation that will enable officers to make legal arrests over social networking website Twitter.

From September 2013, police officers in England & Wales will be able to make legally binding detentions with their officially sanctioned Twitter accounts thanks to changes in the law introduced by the Government’s Digital Policing Bill.

Over two hundred million people use Twitter, a microblogging website on which users publish short 140 character updates, with hundreds of officers from police forces around the country having taken to the site to help promote their work.

Under the new legislation, officers will still be required to caution suspects as they would in any other arrest and will be required to use the hashtag ‘#twitterarrest’ to ensure that the detainee understands that they’ve been arrested.

Following the online arrest, the detained person will then be required to present themselves to the custody suite at a station of the arresting officer’s choosing.

DS Kimo, who maintains a Twitter account on behalf of the force, said of the new online powers ‘Being able to arrest suspects by tweet alone will save a considerable amount of police time, I think it’s a really positive move and one that brings the police into the digital age’.

Alongside the ability to make arrests online, the Digital Policing Bill also includes proposals to allow officers to issue cautions via Blackberry Messenger and to take payment for traffic fines in the form of funds held by players of FarmVille.

An example of an online Twitter arrest from a trial held in Walsall earlier this year.