Examination of Witness (Questions 40-59)
20 OCTOBER 2004
Chief Constable Terence Grange
Q40 Chairman: Have you a better way of
dealing with it that does not involve sanctions at the end of
it?
Chief Constable Grange: There
have got to be sanctions. Intrusive supervision and surveillance
programmes are very sanction-oriented. There are any number of
sanction-oriented things you can do within the community with
somebody. I am unconvinced that sending them to prison for breaching
an ASBO is the right solution.
Q41 Chairman: You have just said that
you would send them to prison for breaching an intensive supervision
order. At the end of the day, you have to have some sanction.
Chief Constable Grange: At the
end of the day that will happen. I just do not agree with it.
Q42 Chairman: I do not see the difference
in position.
Chief Constable Grange: It is
a personal belief: you keep prison for criminals.
Q43 Chairman: They become criminals through
breaking an order, do they not?
Chief Constable Grange: No, actually
they do not; there is just a sanction that a magistrates' court
imposes on them for breach of the ASBO. It is not a criminal offence.
Chairman: Any prison sentence is a sanction
imposed by a court. The distinction is very fine.
Q44 Mrs Williams: Given that we have
a responsibility to look after people who live in the community
and they should be allowed to lead a normal life without having
to face up to these yobs and vandals in the community, surely
you cannot disagree with that? If I have understood you correctly,
you are not too keen on ASBOs when they do not comply with that
order at the end of the day. I do not feel you are actually telling
us as a committee what the real alternative is to make sure that
Joe Public out there is able to lead a normal life. If you can
answer that, I would link it with something else. Do you as a
force, not just you but your staff as well, become frustrated,
angry and concerned when you work extremely hard to take a case
to court and then perhaps the magistrates are rather lenient and
you do not achieve what you set out to achieve, knowing full well
that the person who was in court in your view has committed an
offence? That is why they are in court in the first place.
Chief Constable Grange: My officers
become very frustrated when people do not receive the sentence
they think they should get. When I joined the police force, I
took an oath to investigate matters and place the evidence before
the courts, and that was my business, and what the courts did
was their business. That is not to say I do not get exceedingly
frustrated. I have a case in view of a woman selling drugs across
southern Wales from Bristol and she got four and a half years.
Frankly, I would have locked her away for life, but I know the
lady, I have known her for 15 years, and she has caused death
through selling drugs for years. In terms of anti-social behaviour,
the officers in Welshpool were so frustrated by their inability
to get an anti-social behaviour order, the one they have got,
they were screaming with rage. I understand that. In terms of
all their efforts, when they have worked hard to put a really
good case together and then it is turned down by the Crown Prosecution
Service for reasons with which they disagree, they are frustrated,
but you have to accept that is their role. They are independent
and that is their function. If the courts do not give a sentence
you would like them to give, that is their function, and, yes,
it is exceedingly frustrating. There is an interesting debate
to be had about members of the public leading their normal lives.
Some people are supposed to completely alter their normal lives
so that other people can lead their normal lives. You like absolute
peace and quiet and children are noisy.
Q45 Mrs Williams: Are you playing with
words here?
Chief Constable Grange: No, I
am not. The difficulty is that the definition of a normal life
is made by the person who is making the complaint. The other people
live different lives. If you have neighbours and one family is
very noisy and boisterous and the next door neighbours are very
quiet, you have conflict. Should you use an anti-social behaviour
order to deal with that? I am not sure. I think that might be
at the end of a long process of trying to get some agreement about
how you live side-by-side. When I was a kid, some kiddies ran
around smashing and throwing things into the street and disregarding
everybody. There have to be sanctions against that. I fully accept
that. When they commit crimes, they should be dealt with. Where
that takes you in terms of the courts is, in my view, a matter
for the courts. If you make it anything else, you have a very
odd society, it seems to me.
Q46 Mrs Williams: I am sorry, but I find
your answers inconsistent. If you lived in that neighbour's house
24 hours a day, 52 weeks a year, I am sure you would change your
mind.
Chief Constable Grange: You have
to take it from both points of view. The position of a noisy family
is that that is normal. The position of the quiet family is that
the neighbours should not be noisy. Arresting the noisy family
will stop the problem for now. It is debatable whether it will
stop it for ever. Finding some way they can live together, if
they can, is possibly the best resolution. Frankly, I do not think
the police are necessarily the best people to do that. We can
go in and say, "Any more noise and you will be arrested".
With some people that is precisely what we do. I am talking about
the extremes. We have had people in our force area who think it
is quite normal to rev a motorcycle at 1 o'clock in the morning
in their front room. We arrest them and they move, and then they
do it somewhere else because they are never going to stop doing
it. I understand how people feel about that, but some people see
anything the neighbour does as noisy. How do you manage that?
We are constantly trying to work out the right answer.
Q47 Chairman: Surely, that judgment is
made by the court on the basis of a reasonable person? That is
the whole point about putting ASBOs before the court: that judgment
is made and it is sorted out that way. I agree with you that obviously
it would be nice to have things sorted out in some gentlemanly
way beforehand, but that may not be possible. It may be that the
court makes those distinctions. I am not quite sure where you
are heading with this one.
Chief Constable Grange: I accept
that but that surely should be at the extreme. Otherwise, you
constantly ratchet down the level at which you take out ASBOs.
Q48 Chairman: How many ASBOs have you
got in your patch?
Chief Constable Grange: We have
17.
Q49 Chairman: How many is that in comparison,
say, to the average in England?
Chief Constable Grange: I have
no idea. I do not know what the figures are for the other forces.
Some forces have very few, some have more. Each police activity—and
some forces do far more than others—has different problems.
Q50 Mrs Williams: Is that 17 under the
new Act?
Chief Constable Grange: No, these
are anti-social behaviour orders.
Q51 Mrs Williams: I know that but is
that under the November 2003 Act?
Chief Constable Grange: Yes.
Q52 Mrs Williams: How many anti-social
behaviour orders did you have before that? Has it been made much
easier now since the 2003 Act?
Chief Constable Grange: We were
not successful in getting them before that. When we applied, we
did not get them. We have had difficulty getting them through
some of our courts.
Q53 Mr Edwards: Can we move on to serious
and organised crime. Will you tell us what the main problems that
confronted your force were? Can you tell us what proportion of
your efforts and resources go into tackling organised and serous
crime?
Chief Constable Grange: At the
centre of the force, at headquarters, we have an intelligence
unit comprising four people; a surveillance unit comprising 18;
and four senior detectives that oversee that. Each of my divisions
has proactive units, usually comprising up to ten officers and
the ability to call on as many officers as they need additionally
who are trained to do surveillance, if surveillance is what we
do. External to the force we have Tarian, which has 50
officers we can call on through the appropriate tasking and co-ordinating
process, to do operations within my force area if necessary.
Q54 Mr Edwards: Do you second staff to
the National Criminal Intelligence Service and the National Crime
Squad?
Chief Constable Grange: Yes, but
not many.
Q55 Mr Edwards: How do you manage the
need for specialist skills like detecting fraud and financial
intelligence?
Chief Constable Grange: You examine
how many cases are coming in and you apply resources accordingly.
Occasionally you find yourself unable to apply resources. When
Operation Orr commenced, nobody in England and Wales was
expecting that to arrive. Nobody had the kind of in-depth base
of computer specialist skills to strip out all the information
contained in a computer in the way necessary for the 6,500 people
on Operation Orr, so we had to recruit. We now have four
people doing that kind of work, but behind that we have access
to resources in three of the biggest forces in the country which
have far more of those resources. In terms of financial investigation,
I now have four people. They are reasonably successful. You could
argue there should be more but finding the funding for more of
them is always an issue.
Q56 Mr Edwards: You have come top of
the league for detection rates. Is that still the case?
Chief Constable Grange: Yes.
Q57 Mr Edwards: How do you explain that?
Are you that much better at detecting crime than other forces
or does it reflect the nature of the crime that goes on in your
force area?
Chief Constable Grange: There
is a wide range of rationale behind that. It starts with what
the relationship between the public and the police in the force
is. It is a very good relationship. When the public phones us
up with information, we respond to that. We investigate every
single crime that is reported to us. All but one of the other
forces has what they call crime screening. They investigate at
best 60% of the crimes reported to them; they do not investigate
the others.
Q58 Mr Edwards: You said "all but
one force"?
Chief Constable Grange: Yes. I
believe there is one other force in the country that does it.
Q59 Mr Edwards: Is this in England and
Wales?
Chief Constable Grange: That is
for England and Wales.
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