At present here in Britain there is a debate going on as to whether we need a law enforcement body similar to the FBI.
THis has been brought about by a particularly nasty abduction and murder of two little girls.
THe murders occured in Cambridgeshire which has one of the smallest constabularies in the country. It also has very little experience of major incident investigations, being a sleepy rural county.
Some people (me included) feel that it would have been beneficial in this, and similar, cases if there were a national police body that could come in and provide the resources expertise and experience of these, thankfully, rare crimes.
THis would be over and above the current local police forces.
I would be interested in the experience of other countries that have a similar arrangement as to the effectiveness or otherwise of such a body.
We do have some national police bodies in the areas of organised crime and intelligence.
Well, the main deciding factors should be:
[ul][li]Are local law enforcement units cooperative with each other when faced with criminals operating across several jurisdictions?[/li][li]Are local law enforcement units willing and able to share information with each other?[/li][li]Are there any areas of England where populations are too sparse to support local law enforcement and/or local law enforcement is corrupted by local power brokers?[/li][/ul]
When the Americans established their FBI, Prohibition had made illegal activity highly profitable, state lines were being casually crossed by smugglers and bank robbers, big-city police departments were rife with corruption, and local sheriff’s departments in backwater states didn’t have the funding to conduct serious investigations… Establishing a disciplined Federal agency that could travel freely and was (ideally) free of corruption was a necessary step. Among other things, it fostered national databases of fingerprints and criminal records.
Too bad J. Edgar was such a fruitcake.
Our Canadian example is the RCMP, who were (and are) vital in the sparsely populated Northwestern territories, where the local tax base simply isn’t large enough to support a permanant local constabulary. The RCMP is a fairly respected agency, to the stage where a policeman (a Mountie) is an important Canadian symbol. I can’t think of any other country that holds a law enforcement officer in such symbolic regard.
Are the local police in the various venues in England capable of communicating with each other freely, to share information on criminal activity? Are they well funded? Are they reasonably honest? If so, adding another layer of law enforcement may not be necessary at all.
Besides, England is so puny compared to Canada and the U.S., you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a cop from the next jurisdiction.
What services would this body provide that could not be provided at a local level? I’m not disagreeing, but curious as to what exactly ‘failed’ at the local level that could be addressed by a national organisation.
I presume you know – given your past recreational adventures – about this firm:
http://www.ncis.co.uk/
I also assume that Org would, in this scenario, constitute an embryonic base from which to expand.
Instinctively, I think I’d prefer local officers with local knowledge investigating local crimes - augmented, as in the case of the two girls, by experts in various fields as required.
Q: Two people are currently charged in relation to the deaths of the two girls. What other cases, or areas of crime, do you think would benefit from us having another layer of investigation ?
I am familiar with NCIS; they are familiar with me. One firm one never wanted to cross. (Off topic; using NCIS to follow football lads round the country implies that they haven’t got enough real work to do)
I think that there’s a case to be made that events like Soham are so rare that no one force, even the Met, would have the resources and know-how to bring to bear, whereas a national body may have.
In old fillums the police often call in “Scotland Yard”. Was not this the de facto equivalent of an FBI?
and to answer BRYAN EKERS points:
Are local law enforcement units cooperative with each other when faced with criminals operating across several jurisdictions?
Yes but there is inter-force rivalry.
Are local law enforcement units willing and able to share information with each other?
I don’t know but that is partly what NCIS is for.
Are there any areas of England where populations are too sparse to support local law enforcement and/or local law enforcement is corrupted by local power brokers?
No. Northern Ireland is a totally different situation and is policed separately from the mainland.
spooje; as far off as equating the Washington DC police with the FBI. Scotland Yard, a/k/a the Metropolitan Police, operate in and around London, which refers rather broadly to 33 boroughs spread out over a fairly large area. Interestingly, the highly urbanized “City of London” (the square mile within the original boundaries of ancient London) has it’s own City of London police, not associated with the Metropolitan Police.
I suppose one could make an analogy that Scotland Yard represents the District of Columbia state police (if there is such a thing), while the City of London police are the equivalent of Washington DC’s metro cops. In any event, Scotland Yard has no authority over the rest of England.
Experience of police work at this level and of this type.
Using the above to build up a bank of knowledge and techniques
THese are just my feelings and I think to act on the back of the Soham murders would be wrong as they are such a rare type of crime (and are apparently solved).
Without wishing to sound picky, what specialisations? What’s wrong with the resources at local level? I understand that centralised groups can offer specialised training and equipment, but I’m not sure in what areas these are weaknesses of the current structure (I genuinely don’t know).
It just seems to me that some staff are so specialised eg profilers that individual forces can’t justify them on a full time basis. Ditto soime kinds of scientists.
I am not sure about this which is why I am asking.
I can tell you from (bitter) personal experience that NCIS works very well indeed.
There was a public call yesterday by the chief constable of (I think) Lincoln for a public debate about whether some, many or all of the 43 regional forces should amalgamate. In his view this would cut down on unnecessary duplication of effort & ease information sharing etc.
Comments I’d heard suggested that when the smaller police forces have to commit the degree of manpower that a case such as those two girls requires, this leaves the force’s area of responsibility very sparsely policed. I don’t know if this is genuinely a problem.
The much stronger argument for the view that Cambridgeshire is too small to support its own police force is the continuing distortion to its budget arising from the resources tied up in policing the protests against Huntingdon Life Sciences.
There may be a case for an English FBI but, so far as I can judge, recent events in Soham don’t really strengthen them. This was a local case that was solved locally. Yes, the bodies were found just across the border in Suffolk and the two suspects have strong connections with Lincolnshire, but neither of these facts seem to be hampering the investigation. As it is, specialists were available, in some cases from private firms who provided their services on a commercial basis.
Scotland Yard, which is, in a sense, the first among equals among the English police forces, has long had a national coordinating role and provision exists for it to provide specialist assistance to local forces in long-running, high-profile cases. In this particular case, the Cambridgeshire force sought that assistance at an early stage, although I suspect this had more to do with the overwhelming media coverage the case was attracting. One assumes that the biggest disadvantage about calling in a national unit, whether Scotland Yard or some other body, is that, however the investigation is structured, it must ultimately rest on the efforts of the local officers. Local officers with local knowledge will always be indispensible. Tensions with the ‘experts’ from outside are however probably unavoidable, but restructuring the formal relationships won’t reduce the problem; I would suggest that such tensions are simply a natural part of any major investigation.
The Forensic Science serviceis a national body, as I understand it (HQ in Birmingham). Psychological profilers and Pathologists are not employed directly by the police. They are likely to be employed by a university/hospital trust and called in as and when necessary. There’s no requirement, to stick with the locals, just that it’s generally more practical.
While I could understand the need for reinforcements for local forces engaged in intensive investigations, no national organisation could supply the required local knowledge effectively.
And you mght be surprised by just how much dedicated analysis there is. Plus additional testimony, etc. Profilers are always studying new methods and corolating data.