England’s second largest police force is on a rollercoaster. GMP’s failures have become familiar headlines in recent weeks, months and years as they have gradually emerged into the daylight.
Amid that turmoil, the force now has a new Chief Constable and an improvement plan that has the support of both the Home Secretary and a mayor hoping to draw a political line under what went before. Much has been said publicly about the will and need to turn a corner, even if that was disrupted by the inspectorate returning last month and warning that continued failures were now putting the public at risk.
So while the national spotlight has been on the Met of late, in Greater Manchester a force sometimes described as ‘the Met of the North’ - not in a good way - is still living out its own crisis.
In part one of our investigation, the M.E.N. looked at what had gone wrong with the force's culture.
For part two, the M.E.N. has spoken to victims, serving and former staff, politicians and those in other Greater Manchester agencies to try and map the force’s practical route out of a dark period.
While there is no one single answer, few would disagree that honesty, communication and good leadership will have to be at the heart of the road to recovery, as well as empathy for victims and a working computer system.
It won’t be a quick task; one retired senior officer likens it to ‘turning around a supertanker’.
Mapping out the answers also means being honest about the problems themselves, no matter how much local leaders want a new dawn. For as the force tries to look forward, the appetite for a public debate about what the police do - and how they do it - has never been greater.
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If victims are at the heart of GMP’s failures, then victims are where the story must start. The force has been repeatedly criticised for its treatment of victims - for failing to prioritise crimes correctly, failing to respond to vulnerable victims fast enough, or at all; for failing to record their crimes, for not investigating their cases properly, for not protecting them and for letting their reports sit in enormous IT backlogs.
Monica (not her real name) is one such victim. An articulate woman in her 30s, she describes herself as strong and independent. That couldn’t stop firstly a rape, and then the way it was handled by police, driving her to sleep with a baseball bat under her pillow.
In March 2019, after a 16-year relationship had broken up, she went on a date. “I wanted to meet someone on the same wavelength,” she recalls, so had been chatting to a man on a dating website aimed at professionals. He was a businessman from outside of Greater Manchester; he was funny, ‘ticked all the right boxes’.
So they arranged for him to come to Manchester for a meal. He would stay in a hotel. “I knew for a fact I wasn’t going to have sex with him,” she says, as that was not something she would do on a first date. “I said if you want to come, we can go for a meal and sing karaoke.”
After dinner in the Corn Exchange, they went to the bar upstairs for a cocktail. He got the drinks while she went to the toilet. Looking back at it now, she says she noticed that some sprinkles that were on the top of his margarita were missing on hers. But at the time, she thought nothing of it.
He then ‘rushed’ her to the karaoke bar, she says. It was early for karaoke - before 9pm - and he immediately bought her a tequila.
“From then, I started to see really blurry. When they called my name to sing, I don’t remember how I got up, how I made it to the stage; I don’t remember how I sang. My speech started to get really bad, like when you’re thinking what you want to do or say, but you’re not responding.”
In the space of little more than an hour, she had gone from sober to incapacitated.
A bouncer ordered the man to escort her out. She then remembers nothing until she woke up next to him in a strange hotel room, with a splitting headache, at 4am. Confused and physically unable to do anything else, she went back to sleep, before later going home, still confused, still with a splitting headache and still feeling like she might be drunk.
She was, she recalls, ‘in a lot of pain, walking in a lot of pain’.
In the days that followed, fragments of memory started drifting back and falling into place. Monica went to St Mary’s sexual assault referral centre, where a counsellor said she had been spiked and told her to report it to the police.
“I went to Bury police station. They had me waiting for three and a half hours. When I finally saw someone, they said ‘we can’t get the sexual assault person to come over, you’ll have to go to Central Park’.”
At this point, she says, she still felt incredibly confused. “So I went to Central Park and waited an hour and a half to be seen.”
She says she was then asked a series of questions that included what she was wearing. It is a point she remembers, because she was asked why she had had her hair done and put on spandex pants.
During the subsequent investigation, CCTV that could have been taken from the hotel lobby - which she believes would have shown the man propping her up on the way to his room - was never requested, due to an admin error. There was also an error in the hair strand sample taken for forensics, although GMP later said that was the fault of the doctor, not them.
Officers seized her phone, but none of his devices.
But that was not the worst of it.
‘He looks like a nice family man, Monica’, she was told on the phone. ‘Why would he rape you?’
“I was in the office at work and I just screamed,” she says of that call, “from the bottom of my stomach.”
Variations on the same question were put to her throughout the investigation.
“They were relentless with the ‘he’s a nice family man, he’s a nice businessman, he seems like such a nice man’,” she recalls. “For months.”
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Prosecutors never charged Monica’s rapist, citing lack of evidence. The experience of the attack, followed by not being believed, would see her diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
“I slept on the sofa with a baseball bat for nine weeks,” she says.
“He’s going to do it to someone else. There’s been times when I’ve thought I’ve seen him in the street and I’ve wanted to go and crack his head open. This stuff makes you irrational and makes you think you have to be on guard - because that one occasion, I wasn’t on guard.
“The pain of the fact they didn’t do their job is going to last a lifetime.”
Despite that pain, Monica’s fury is laser focused. When she complained to GMP about failures in the case, some of her complaint was upheld, in a response she received this July.
GMP apologised for keeping her waiting at Bury police station, calling it ‘unacceptable’. But it also made an excuse.
“Please try to understand that we do have to prioritise our resource allocation in line with what presents the most threat, harm or risk at that time,” a detective from the City of Manchester division told her, adding that given there was no specialist officer available, transferring her for a further hour and a half wait at Central Park was therefore ‘acceptable’.
The force also admitted a process error by a Detective Inspector meant the CCTV footage from the hotel lobby was not initially retrieved. By the time it was followed up, it had been wiped. Despite this, the force told Monica: “The level of service you received on this occasion was acceptable,” because, it claims, it would not have made any difference.
What of the continual disbelief of her account? She received an apology and the force said the officer in question had been advised about their ‘choice of phrase’.
Monica says that misses the point. She believes the police knew they had made errors in the investigation and that this was a tactic aimed at persuading her to drop the allegation. "It's how they make many victims go away," she believes, "because if you go away they have one less problem."
She is very clear about what needs to change.
“For victims of sexual assault, only 100pc specialised members of the police force should be in contact with the victims,” she says, adding that the detective who dealt with her was not a specialist.
“Why? The lack of empathy I was a victim of. No other victim of rape should experience again the very cruel and condescending way I was spoken to by those supposed to be there to make sure my attacker would be caught and prosecuted, or the length of time I was made to wait at the police station.”
There should also have been ‘proper follow up to every step of the investigation’, she adds.
“If in my case things had been followed up correctly, no vital evidence would have been lost due to ‘schoolboy error’.”
Asked about Monica’s experience, GMP said it was unable to comment on specific cases, but added: “We recognise the traumatic affect rape and sexual assault has on victims, and apologise to any victims of this horrendous crime who feel they have not received the level of care and professionalism we expect from our officers.
“It is our absolute priority to provide an empathetic and thorough response, and our specialist officers work closely with victim service providers to ensure this happens.”
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GMP does have specialist rape officers and it has had some major successes in sexual violence cases, such as the jailing of serial rapist Reynhard Sinaga last year.
Nevertheless, charities spoken to for this article say Monica’s case reflects a wider problem within the force. It doubtless reflects problems within other forces too, given the country’s woeful rape conviction rates, yet GMP has had a specific factor at play: it took a decision, four years ago, that experts in the field could not understand.
In 2017 GMP disbanded its Serious Sexual Offences Unit - a 70-strong team of highly-trained officers, whose expertise had been showcased on a BBC documentary just the previous year, and who had worked hand-in-glove with victims’ charities. Its model is now widely considered best practice across British policing.
At the time, the M.E.N. spoke to trained detectives who were horrified GMP was scrapping the unit and dispersing its expertise to different divisions, where they would in large part work as generalists.
Former detective Margaret Oliver, who would be vindicated for her whistleblowing about child sexual exploitation failures within GMP, warned victims would be ‘sidelined’ and said the force had not learned its lessons from the Rochdale grooming scandal; Manchester Rape Crisis called the move ‘staggering’ and sent a 1,300-signature petition to Andy Burnham. But the mayor’s office supported the move and from then on, police sources have told the M.E.N, a lot of the expertise and knowledge was lost.
Some officers left for other forces; others went to work on unrelated units, such as the Professional Standards Branch; those that remained on division were expected to be jacks-of-all-trades, sometimes investigating rape cases, sometimes other crimes.
Victims Commissioner Dame Vera Baird QC, a former Solicitor General, says that while she cannot comment on specific cases such as Monica’s, she agrees with her that it is ‘absolutely imperative’ serious sexual offences are dealt with by experts.
“I think that is received wisdom almost everywhere,” she says, adding that she ‘really doesn’t know’ why GMP decided to close its rape unit and scatter its specialists out to general teams in districts.
“One minute you’re looking at someone whose bike has been stolen, the next it’s a road traffic death, perhaps, and then it’s a rape, and then it’s an armed robbery,” she says of detectives.
“Nobody has the opportunity to develop the expertise and it will be pot luck as to whether you get someone who has ever done a rape case before or has ever had any experience of dealing with a potentially traumatised victim.”
Duncan Craig, chief executive of rape charity Survivors Manchester, represents Dame Vera’s office in Manchester. He has worked closely with GMP on rape training, including on the Sinaga case. The closure of the specialist unit has ‘definitely’ had an impact on victims, he says.
“From a continuity point of view, what we used to have - when GMP had a specialist unit - was a team with really good relationships with my team,” he says.
“They could make sure we didn’t always go through huge processes - it’s a simple phone call. What you do then really get is victim care.
“I think also what we began to hear when the rape unit was disbanded was that victims would often talk about not being able to get hold of their officer, because the officer was out doing other things.
“My heart goes out to many detectives who were doing a really, really difficult job in really difficult circumstances - they just got busier and busier and busier.”
Anne Stebbings, chief executive of Greater Manchester Rape Crisis, says the unit’s closure signalled to her charity that ‘rape and sexual abuse as a crime was being downgraded as a priority, which was deeply demoralising’.
These days her team is no longer certain that a responding officer will be specially trained in how to deal with a victim of sexual violence, she says, while there has been a palpable loss of police expertise in the overall investigation of sexual offences. Neither is Rape Crisis involved in regular GMP training exercises in the way it once was.
“No attempt was made to work with specialist providers of support services to victims and survivors of sexual violence to look at the impact such a closure might have on the victims supported by those services,” she recalls, in echoes of other criticisms about GMP’s outward behaviour in recent years.
“Again, this was demoralising, with no attempt being made to get the views of victims and no opportunity for them to have their voices heard in this decision. This indicated a lack of respect for victims and survivors.
“We have lost the direct contact we had with a dedicated team who understood our service and the role we play in supporting victims; we have lost the opportunity to build relationships with named contacts with whom we could raise queries, rather than having to go through 101.”
Duncan Craig describes a similar experience.
Frequently, he says, the ‘independent sexual violence advisers’ in his team - advocates who exist to help victims navigate their way through a horrendous criminal justice process, a role introduced by government following the death of abuse victim Frances Andrade - now have to explain to detectives what it is they actually do, because often they don’t know.
It also became far harder for his advisers to pass on intelligence. Whereas previously they could ring someone in SSOU directly, ‘it turned into an info@GMP mailbox’. “We lost the relationship aspect.”
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In a statement to the M.E.N. four years ago, deputy mayor Beverley Hughes backed the scrapping of the SSOU in the face of such warnings.
At a press conference this week, against the backdrop of the public debate around Sarah Everard’s death, she noted that the original decision had been taken by the force’s ‘previous leadership’. Specialist teams were now being set up to deal with rape and sexual offences on each division, she said, adding: “I do think this needs a specialist capability to deal with those kinds of very sensitive cases.”
GMP confirmed that across the force, each of the ten districts has recently been appointed a rape and serious sexual offences lead, ‘whose remit it will be to oversee cases, ensure best practice and flag any emerging themes or issues - so that we are operating at the highest possible level in an effort to achieve positive outcomes for victims’.
"We also recognise the extremely low rate of rape cases which make it to court, and therefore continue to work closely with the Crown Prosecution Service to implement a rolling review of cases where a decision is made that there is insufficient evidence to proceed, to ensure that decision making is accurate and proportionate,” it added.
"We always strive to place victim care at the heart of everything we do and want to encourage anyone who has been victim to a crime to come forward. We will always aim to provide a sympathetic and professional response from GMP in all our interactions with victims, and offer support from specially-trained officers throughout the process, whether it results in a conviction or not."
So the SSOU decision is, at least partly, being reversed, albeit not until crisis here - and later the Met - had hit the headlines.
However the kind of relationship and communication breakdown described by rape charities over the past few years - and all the implications that has had - is not unique to sexual offences. It is more a case study in what has happened across the force; from the high-handed corporate attitude described in part one of this investigation to weakened divisional-level relationships with communities.
The scrapping of the SSOU had been part of a wider restructure started under Chief Constable Sir Peter Fahy and continued under his successor, Ian Hopkins. It was a policy known as ‘omnicompetency’: the scrapping of specialisms, replaced by a move towards general pools of cops, a strategy that was meant to be more efficient at meeting demand. At the same time, Chief Superintendents were moved off their patches and into headquarters, covering larger areas than before.
It was a move many point to as a major factor in relationship breakdown with outside agencies and communities, as well as immense stress and constant workload churn for the frontline. Pricewaterhousecoopers found earlier this year that omnicompetency had ‘eroded performance, not improved it’, leading to poor response times and longer investigations. Senior command admitted to them that the idea put down on paper in 2015 ‘had not been implemented as planned’. “Confidence in the model was now low.”
Yet even as long ago as November 2016, six months into the new model, a report to a Manchester council committee showed problems emerging.
“We have reduced the number of specialist divisional teams and brought as many officers as possible into the pool that can deal with daily demand,” wrote then-superintendent Arif Nawaz.
“This means that the officer who attends the initial report investigates end-to-end, taking the case through the criminal justice system. In essence the officer will take the initial report of crime, investigate it, process any prisoners, liaise with CPS, build a file and take the case to court.”
However demand had not reduced as expected, he admitted. Officers were only spending 38pc of their time actually dealing with crime on their own patches, while new shift patterns had already led to ‘some difficulties being experienced when partners and elected members are contacting their local teams’.
“Inspector visibility to communities, partners and elected officials has lessened due to their shift pattern and change in role.”
That was five years ago. You would be hard pressed to find any councillor or outside body who felt communication and visibility improved from there, while officers now found themselves pulled in every direction under the new model.
Fundamentally, the connection GMP had had with other organisations - and the community in general - was fracturing, just as it would do with victims’ charities.
One cop says some of the defensiveness at lower levels of the force then often came from a feeling that they just couldn’t cope.
“It’s over-promising and realising you’re under-delivering,” he says. “Then it becomes a defensiveness; you go into defence mode. And then it turns into hostility.”
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Some councillors spoken to for this article say they have genuinely seen more engagement from GMP in the last six months, particularly in Manchester, as the new Chief has set about restructuring the force.
That is far from universal, however. Cultures take time to reverse and in some areas, councillors still feel they are being stonewalled.
One senior Labour councillor in a different borough warns of a ‘complete breakdown of trust’ between the police and their own local authority, describing their division as ‘defensive’ and prone to deliberately withholding information.
“They pay lip service to partnership working, but appear to view most other partners, including the council, as an irritant. I don’t recall ever being forewarned of something of importance before it hit the press, despite meeting them every month for several years.” That includes the most recent police inspectorate report, which, given its concerns around domestic violence and other welfare cases, had implications for the council departments that hold statutory responsibility for safeguarding.
Labour councillors don’t tend to go on the record about their frustrations with the police, largely not wanting to be seen criticising Andy Burnham, however indirectly.
But in Stockport, that caution has been thrown to the wind.
Last month a group of Labour councillors wrote to the mayor in frustration at a spate of crimes in Cheadle Heath and Edgeley, which then continued, including a daylight knife attack on Dale Street. They described an ‘ever growing frustration with poor communication from Greater Manchester Police, both with us and the people we represent’.
They had requested assurances from the local division that extra patrols would be introduced, but ‘to date no such assurances have been given or communicated, after countless attempts at trying, which is why we are writing this letter’.
“It is not our role as councillors to tell the police how to do their job, but it is our job to represent local residents and pass on their concerns and expect that they will be given the assurances they ask for and a proportionate response to the issues that concern them most,” they wrote.
“We have seen the press releases from the Greater Manchester Combined Authority and the Chief Constable of GMP about a new dawn for policing and the approach to law and order. “Whilst this is good news, it will only be relevant if it translates into more targeted and proactive policing, much better communication with residents and an understanding that people need reassurances that the police are taking their concerns very seriously.”
They also noted that residents are repeatedly asked, ‘year on year, to pay an increased police precept’, but that it had not translated into improvements in the area.
In next-door Cheadle Hulme, Labour councillor David Meller expresses similar frustrations. While generally perceived as a ‘leafy’, low-crime community, Cheadle Hulme has nonetheless seen some serious incidents in recent months, including a shooting. But he says communication with the police has been hard.
“At times it feels almost like doing their jobs for them,” he says.
“I think there’s a sense of losing hope in the system and it’s a dangerous place to be, because the number of times I’ve gone to residents when something has happened and said ‘you need to report it, because something will be done’, and they just say ‘I’m not bothering with that, I don’t get a response back’.
“People are losing faith and losing trust. We’ve got a small window to address that.”
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The new Chief Constable has already announced the reversal of ‘omnicompetency’, explicitly indicating he knows the model has not worked. More Chief Superintendents have been hired and are now being placed back out on division, with one per borough. But the relationships will still need rebuilding.
“The first thing to do is to do some consultation,” believes one retired senior officer of what those Chief Supers now need to be doing.
“Meet with the chief executive of the council, the leader of the council, and say ‘these are the problems we’ve got’.
“No problem is solely a local authority or NHS or police problem. Neighbourhood partnerships need to be reinvigorated.
“There should be regular bi-monthly meetings between agencies and with councillors and then you do a multiagency analysis; you come up with the problems and the root causes. And then you form problem solving groups at a divisional level and at a local level.
“Every month the councillors meet with the inspector and someone from housing and health and you have an action plan.”
This echoes the Chief’s own words in July, when he told the M.E.N. that strengthening neighbourhood policing - one of many areas found wanting by the policing inspectorate - ‘means re-establishing the links with local authorities’.
“It means ringfencing them to particular localities,” he said of neighbourhood cops, adding that performance will now be measured - something that had stopped happening years ago.
“It means holding them accountable; Inspector Blogs who looks after this patch: on your patch your top 10 drivers of demand are this McDonald's, that pub, that A&E department, that children's home where you’ve got kids in the looked after system who keep going missing, the type who will end up being exploited by paedophiles. Those are your drivers.
“Your role in life is quite simple. You work with the local authority partners, and you sort it out, de-risk it, you take down the busy-ness of it, and you square it out with your people. You also engage with your public.”
In a region such as Greater Manchester, which likes to advertise its reputation for partnership working, the extent to which that had not been happening doesn’t fit the prevailing narrative. When consultants Pricewaterhousecoopers came into the force earlier this year, they found there wasn’t much of a partnership, particularly where mental health cases were concerned.
The way Greater Manchester’s public sector works needs to be ‘reviewed’, concluded PwC, to get a shared picture of demand and essentially work out ‘who does what in GM’.
“This is particularly relevant in areas increasing in demand, including concern for child welfare and mental health.”
It found police officers and civilian staff acutely aware of the high numbers of cases coming through that would be better placed in other agencies - particularly social services - but that they didn’t necessarily find it easy to refer in to councils. (Privately, councils would doubtless make the same point in reverse.)
This is a problem for the whole system to resolve, not just GMP, concluded PwC. There is also a lingering sense among many police officers that simply by virtue of the force being open all hours - a little like the role A&E plays for the health service - it has borne the brunt of other agencies not doing what they used to.
“When the cuts happened, the agencies withdrew into themselves,” agrees one retired officer.
“The police are one of the few 24 hour services, after the cuts, so not only are you bearing the brunt of your own cuts, you’re dealing with everyone else’s.”
A serving constable says partnership working is great in principle, but has not always worked practically from a policing perspective in the years following austerity.
“This stuff works well 9am-4pm,” he says, “but outside those hours it falls on its arse, as the other services don’t have capacity to do shift work or a rota service.”
Out of hours, often the only agency left to pick up demand is the police. Ten or 15 years ago, if there was a noise issue on a Saturday night, someone in the town hall might have been available to deal with it. These days, not so much. One such incident relayed to the M.E.N. by several sources a couple of weeks ago saw residents in Stockport tearing their hair out about a massive 48-hour house party that was shaking the street. GMP told them to call the council. But the council was closed. So - at a time when the control room was failing to cope with demand - they rang 999.
Nevertheless, the retired senior officer says none of that is an excuse for failing to communicate with the community.
Regular local meetings, be they public forums or conversations with councillors, are worth the time and resource, he believes. Rather than retreating into themselves, the cops are better off explaining what they can and can’t do. People will understand they're stretched, but they need that acknowledgement and an explanation in the first place.
“It takes a lot of heat out of the complaints in the community - and the councillors know exactly what position you’re in. I think that’s what’s been missing. I don’t think there’s been a dialogue with the community.”
Coun Sheila Bailey, one of the authors of the Stockport letter to Andy Burnham, agrees.
“When people hear nothing and never see a police officer, they feel as though there isn’t anything happening and the police don’t care,” she says.
“That’s not true. But it is an impression that’s gained - because of the lack of empathy.”
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Even the most empathetic cops may struggle to show compassion if they feel they are drowning, however.
GMP has for years faced a level of demand it simply did not understand clearly enough; it knew 101 and 999 calls were high and rising, but had notoriously poor data - made worse by failures within the new computer system - and didn’t properly analyse the information it did have.
In March PwC found that GMP’s front door, the Operational Communications Branch that houses the control room, needed to learn how to manage that demand ‘like many other forces have’, ‘before embarking on further long term change’. ( OCB was still struggling in July of this year, when average waits for 101 were 30 minutes in the third week of the month, against a target of 30 seconds; average 999 waits were two minutes and the longest a disconcerting 15 minutes.)
In the face of high demand, historically the force had effectively been finding shortcuts to stem an amorphous deluge of crime, rather than understanding what it was. Many crimes were deprioritised, downgraded or closed in order to hold back the tide, all of them with potential victims attached. In the process victims were not getting the service they needed, but officers themselves, partly due to cuts, an exodus of experience, the new ‘omnicompetency’ model and eventually the troubled IT system introduced in 2019, still felt they couldn’t cope. Everyone lost.
Police officers have told the M.E.N. of being given targets for closing crimes, a blunt instrument to drive down backlogs. One email shows officers on overtime being told in the summer of 2018 to ‘clear as close to 100 crimes per day...or more as possible’ and being ticked off for having not hit that target.
“Whilst I don’t want quality compromising completely, it is really important that you get through as many as possible as efficiently as you can so we can reduce the open crime queue,” they were told by a supervisor, who has since been promoted.
Many, many police officers know that isn’t a good approach. One retired senior officer explains the attitude is known as ‘cuffing’.
Cuffing is simply saying something isn’t worth investigating, even if it is - which began to happen ‘over and over again’ in GMP. “The trouble is, that becomes the culture and they can’t see the wood for the trees,” he says.
So when the inspectorate finally found in 2020 that GMP had missed 80,000 crimes in the previous year - that it was both under-recording and under-investigating - the response was to swing the other way. Crime recording and increasing arrests are now top of the priority list.
"Our practice around recording has very much smartened itself up," said the Chief a couple of months after taking post.
"We obviously need to sustain that, but of course, the point of the exercise wasn't to record crimes but to investigate them. If there is a viable line of inquiry, then it should be pursued."
GMP is certainly recording far, far more crime than previously. It currently has just shy of 80,000 open crimes, according to officers, three times its previous levels.
Nevertheless some of the structural changes needed to ensure the correct outcomes - the reorganisation of officers, the return to specialisms, the hiring and training of control room staff to correctly triage and risk assess crimes, the drive to improve cultural standards, a resolution to the broken computer system - will take longer. As a result, officers were telling the M.E.N. over the summer, the crime recording drive was simply creating a bottleneck; piles of crimes.
“I’d say the biggest thing is that we’re unable to identify risk,” one officer said in July of the implications.
“We have so many open crimes, crimes waiting allocation, open domestic violence incidents, ongoing problem solving, intel, but no way of pulling it all together to see where our greatest threats are, both emerging crime and actual victims.
“Once the crime is in, no-one seems to care; victims of sexual assault are getting no contact for 20 days.”
It felt, he said, as though ‘everything is a priority so nothing is’.
This was potentially dangerous territory, because a lack of understanding about what was hiding in the backlogs, and therefore the risk to victims, had been a problem before - and could ultimately pose a public safety risk.
“We are recording lots,” another officer told the M.E.N. in early September.
“So the process of recording is fixed. What isn't is what happens to the crime when recorded.
“That is what is weighing cops down. The crime isn't just sitting for days - in lots of cases, it’s weeks and months.”
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That was exactly what the policing inspectorate found when it returned last month. Less than a third of ‘grade two’ incidents - the second most serious type of crime, which includes domestic violence - were receiving a response within the required one-hour window. Many were, just as the officers had said, sitting for days, weeks or, in some cases, forever.
“This enduring service failure has given cause for concern about public safety in Greater Manchester,” said HMI a few weeks ago, in a fresh warning to the force.
So GMP is perhaps still not yet in a position where it can see the wood for the trees. Or, to mix metaphors, it is firefighting.
Surge activity ‘is not always elegant, not always sustainable’, conceded the Chief Constable in September of GMP’s initial drive to increase recording. This first stage, he insisted, is short term - ‘putting out fires’.
Nevertheless, that sense of being overwhelmed does little to encourage officers to express the empathy for victims that those victims need and deserve, say cops.
Police Federation representative Lee Broadbent, a constable in Tameside, argued on Twitter last week that current workloads of 20 crimes each inevitably lead officers to look for ways to avoid more cases, just to bat away the pressure - rather than thinking about the victim.
“At the point where our retained workload becomes unmanageable...a shift occurs from victim focus to self preservation,” he wrote. “Everyone is losing at present.”
Force command will hope this is a temporary blip, a rocky period that needs to be navigated before things get better. Nobody spoken to in higher levels of the force thinks the inspectorate’s findings were inaccurate or particularly unfair; more that they reflect the scale of the task at hand, particularly in the control room. More call handlers have been hired - after a long period of under-resourcing - and are being trained to triage demand. A new Chief Superintendent took charge of the unit a few weeks ago.
But it isn’t just demand that is causing problems. It is also the supply of officers.
GMP is particularly short of trained detectives. One supervisor tells of being nagged by CID to allow the brightest and best of their newly recruited uniformed officers to transfer over, even when they have less than 18 months’ experience.
“You used to have to have done three or four years before the detectives would speak to you,” they add.
“CID is full of youngsters only a few years in. They’re crying out for staff.”
For victims, that all has an impact.
Susan (not her real name), says she ‘basically had to investigate myself’ a vicious assault on her son in 2019, which left him with serious head injuries. It could easily, she notes, have been a murder. On day one the new computer system, which had just been introduced, 'had the biggest impact', she says, because it led to no officers initially being dispatched for a week, leading initial evidence and forensics to be lost.
The detective handed the case then turned out to be a trainee - entirely well-meaning, but completely inexperienced.
"Having a trainee impacted on the investigation, because she was frequently absent for weeks at a time whilst on training courses and no one stepped into her role," she recalls.
"In my opinion if someone is going to be absent for frequent amounts of time, I personally would think it's better to have them in a support role to other ongoing investigations rather than be assigned new ones.
"She often seemed to flounder and lose direction. I felt I had to keep making suggestions and pushing for her to speak to key witnesses."
A number of key witnesses were not chased up, she says, while others backed out as the investigation drifted.
“I felt I was always chasing something up and pushing for progress. Things were promised and didn’t materialise.”
When she complained to the detective's superior, she says, the response was 'curt' and 'rude'.
All the while, she says, the trainee detective was working off a computer system that simply wasn't working. She was told verbally, on a number of occasions, that iOPS had been to blame for problems. ("It was mentioned every step of the way.")
The attack, she says, was carried out by a group of teenagers who were already notorious in the area. Some of those responsible were eventually charged but the main culprit, she says, got away with it. GMP's failures were then compounded by the case going to court without the family's knowledge; by financial reparations being ordered that weren't paid; and by no victim impact statement being requested.
"It was a farce from the beginning right through to the actual prosecution at the end."
GMP recognises its lack of experienced detectives and is currently on a major recruitment drive, as well as using agency staff to plug the gaps and create desk-based investigations teams. One usually Conservative-supporting officer says the government also needs to take its share of the blame.
“The Theresa May years [when she was Home Secretary] of no recruitment have shafted us,” he says, adding that there are now almost no cops with between five and ten years’ experience - the ones who would normally be tutors to newly recruited frontline response and CID.
Veteran police officers speak with despair of the hollowing out of experience within the force. A second cop says experience among detective constables is commonly running at 12 months. “The ones that are left are stressed/sick/transferring to other forces or internal transfers to different departments.”
Another says the issue applies just as much to uniformed officers. “It’s not only detectives,” they point out. “Lots has been done to address it, but experienced transferees are not coming. Would you, if you were sat in another force?
“All local policing is suffering due to a lack of experience.”
So national-level promises of 20,000 new cops, as well as those coming through local increases to the policing precept, will take time to translate into officers who know their communities, their jobs and in some cases eventually their specialisms. Doubtless that is the case elsewhere, but when a force's reputation takes a hit, recruitment only gets harder.
One former GMP employee points out a further danger, in light of the Sarah Everard case. A desperate rush to recruit can, if you’re not careful, lead to darker places.
“Nobody is making the link between the standards of those recruited into the police service and the 2010 spending review, which saw a 24pc cut in resources overnight at GMP,” they say, also pointing to the government’s Windsor Review that cut pensions ‘and led to recruitment at inspector level without any policing experience’.
“Results? Officers struggling financially, making them vulnerable both in terms of nefarious behaviour and split loyalties if they have to take a second job; problems in recruiting good officers; problems in retaining good officers; senior managerial staff with no understanding of policing; systems compromised because of lack of resources and competence; and policing resources being stretched across societal issues, rather than confined to ‘policing and crime’ - of which violence against women and misogyny is a big one.”
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One strand to GMP’s improvement is not about the police themselves. It is about whether Greater Manchester’s body politic is up to the task of holding its force to account.
Ultimately, local accountability for GMP is these days applied via the mayor’s office - through Andy Burnham and his deputy Beverley Hughes, who has delegated responsibility for policing.
Police performance has dwindled in parallel with a reduction in public scrutiny, following the scrapping of the old police authority system.
Under the mayoral model that replaced it, public scrutiny has solely taken place via a panel that meets every three or four months and has looked at virtually no performance measures in the past four years, or the beleaguered computer system prior to it going live. Any observer of Greater Manchester’s police panel between 2017 and the end of 2020 would be forgiven for thinking barely anything had been amiss with policing, even as the force began its inexorable slide into special measures.
Some believe the old police authority system was far preferable. “The police authority had a major lever over the Chief,” says one former officer.
“At the end of the day, they could sack him if they wanted to. When the police and crime commissioner came in, he wanted to be the main lever of the force.
“And the Chief would say to councillors: ‘I’m not answerable to you.’”
The mayor himself acknowledged the implications of reduced public policing scrutiny at the last meeting of council leaders in early September.
“I guess if there’s a reflection on the last four years and everything that we’ve done, it’s that more of this process of public accountability needs to take place in the public domain,” he told leaders, “so that greater transparency, greater confidence, comes from the public being able to see those exchanges not just by myself and the deputy mayor but more broadly by elected representatives across Greater Manchester.”
The mayor promised regular performance reports would be presented to the police and crime panel in future, although there does not appear to be anything of that nature listed for the committee’s next meeting this Friday.
He also intends to introduce new, twice-yearly public accountability sessions, to which councillors from all districts will be invited, with quotas reserved for each borough. The first will take place in Oldham in November.
There are signs non-Labour councillors in various Greater Manchester boroughs are not satisfied, however. Against a backdrop of growing questions about the system’s general ability to hold itself to account, policing is the most pressing example of where good quality scrutiny has been needed.
Trafford’s Tory group leader Nathan Evans does not believe the mayor’s proposals amount to a substitute for councillors asking regular questions about specific issues, as they are happening.
“How will this actually challenge him?” he queries of the six monthly ‘town hall’ sessions.
“There needs to be monthly challenge on the issues experienced on a day to day basis.
“For instance, the raves of last year would need challenge as they happened. Leaving things for six months would achieve nothing.”
In Stockport’s hung council, the Liberal Democrats had the political leverage to insist a policing meeting with the mayor and his deputy be held in public, rather than behind closed doors, earlier this year - the only council to do so. Lib Dem crime spokesman Tom Morrison says the latest move is ‘a good start, but does not go far enough’.
“We need monthly police, crime and fire panel meetings, more community forums and a true three-way dialogue between the mayor, GMP and the residents they work for,” he says.
"We currently stand at a critical moment for the future of policing in Greater Manchester. I hope the mayor understands this and does not resume the secretive and failed behaviours of the past and instead allows his and GMP's work to be properly overseen and scrutinised as any democratic institution should."
In response to the criticism, the mayor’s office said public scrutiny of the emergency services was ‘of paramount importance’.
“That is why on Friday 26 November the first Greater Manchester police public accountability meeting will be held in Oldham,” it added. “The event will be live-streamed so all Greater Manchester residents can view it.
“There will be two police public accountability meetings every year and the times, format and frequency of the meetings will be kept under review. The mayor and deputy mayor always act when evidence is presented to them of poor performance.
“A new Chief Constable was appointed following last year’s HMICFRS report and he recently presented his plans for the future of the force and will be held to accountable for their delivery.”
Whether the last few years of poor performance played out alongside poor internal scrutiny, or the force misleading the mayor’s office, or a mixture of both, is impossible to demonstrate, however.
The M.E.N. has tried to answer that question using the Freedom of Information Act. In April we asked for all policing paperwork discussed in private between the deputy mayor and senior command since 2017, but it was rejected.
A further request for internal paperwork purely in relation to the force’s failing computer system, iOPS, went repeatedly unanswered this summer, well beyond legal timeframes, until a response was finally received after we approached the GMCA for a comment on this article. A complaint had already been lodged with the Information Commissioner’s Office in the meantime.
The GMCA’s eventual response still only provided the internal paperwork for 2021, however, missing out 2019 and 2020, the key period during which the new computer system was introduced and initially wreaking havoc. That information was withheld because ‘it may reveal limitations within authority processes which could be exploited’, said the GMCA, tellingly; it may also ‘impede ongoing police investigations and/or help the commissioning of a crime’; and may ‘jeopardise’ the justice process.
So, as ministers weigh up whether to devolve further funding to Greater Manchester, the public here still have to take on good faith assurances that the mayor’s office asked all the questions it should have done, as the country’s second biggest force descended into crisis.
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GMP has an improvement plan, one publicly backed by Home Secretary Priti Patel in an interview with the M.E.N. earlier this month. Many of the issues outlined in this article are acknowledged and referenced within it, as well as in the statements provided by the Chief Constable in interviews, meetings and in press releases.
The process of turning the force around will take time, by virtue of the many problems at play - particularly the culture of defensiveness described in both parts of this investigation.
We have covered Police Works - the broken part of the force’s IT system, iOPS - extensively before; if it is ditched this autumn, as most expect it will be, then the process of replacing it will necessarily take several years, as a new system is procured, officers are trained and data is transferred. One former employee with knowledge of the system says 'it’s almost criminal that staff and the public have been let down so badly' by iOPS; the Home Secretary has called it a 'scandal'. It will not be a quick fix.
The improvement plan itself was welcomed by the inspectorate last month. But - in common with many officers spoken to for this investigation - it was unsure how it would be delivered.
“It isn’t yet clear how the force will adequately translate this strategic objective into sufficient improvements in how it operates,” wrote the inspectorate.
“And in particular, it doesn’t clearly and adequately explain how it intends to protect vulnerable people in the short term.”
Victims Commissioner Dame Vera Baird says her office has offered to provide support and training for GMP, but has not yet been taken up on it, a situation she says is ‘disappointing’.
“Obviously it’s very worrying from a victim’s perspective,” she says of the continued problems in the force. “I’m conscious there have been several earlier inspectorate reports and the final one last year was very much saying ‘look, we’ve said this several times, and you haven’t done it, we are telling you again big style and we are coming back’.
“And still there’s no change. So that is worrying.”
The pressure for tangible improvement is therefore on, especially in the context of the national debates currently raging around policing.
Most experts interviewed believe GMP’s woes are not as acute or deep-seated as those in the Met. Having said that, there is more of a spotlight on the Met.
There is more national coverage and more national discussion of its limitations, while some of GMP's story may yet be untold.
Its woeful record on data, which has limited its own operations and often prevented those on the outside from understanding its performance, means it had historically been difficult to build a picture of the scale of its failures.
“One of the things about the recent failures is that GMP’s inability to produce data makes it hard to understand exactly how bad things are,” says Dr Matt Ashby, lecturer in crime science at University College London.
“GMP announces a failure and then a few months later has to announce it’s worse than they initially thought.
“Good policing, especially after austerity, needs scarce resources to be effectively targeted at the problems that need them most, which is very hard to do if you don’t have good crime data.”
It is not an observation the new Chief would contest. Data is one of many issues sitting in his in-tray, as is the need to target resources correctly after years of structural problems.
"One of the problems of GMP is that we've not enough capability in the right place, if that makes sense," he noted in July.
Step one, however, was to be honest that GMP was failing.
Much more is now known about how crime investigations and relationships had deteriorated and about its poor understanding of demand. Some decisions are being reversed. . The Police Works IT system is at least now publicly recognised as the problem officers always said it was.
Plus, there is at least an emerging debate about how the force is scrutinised under the mayoral model, a debate other parts of the country might want to monitor closely.
The final word, though, should go to the victims.
"Ultimately it comes down to computer system failure, poor leadership, under staffing & under resourced departments," says Susan of failures in her case.
"I personally also want our police force to take low level crime more seriously, because it so often leads to more significant crimes when left unchallenged."
That is, she believes, precisely what happened in her case.
"My son was repeatedly bottled, but for the grace of God, could well have been another Garry Newlove."
Monica says she has 'plenty' of constructive ideas 'on how GMP could achieve up-to-standard services for victims of crime and the wider public, so that cover-ups and half apologies, such as the one I received, are no longer the norm'.
"Real ownership of their errors and unprofessionalism would be the first step.
“Something I’ve learned in life is mindset is everything. If a detective thinks ‘oh here we go, another false accuser’, or ‘blimey, this is going to be hard work’ well, guess what? They are set to fail already.”
‘Training, training and more training’ is needed, she says, but not just to ‘tick boxes’. Victims such as herself would doubtless offer their time - as there is ‘nothing better than to hear it from those that suffered’.
“Empathy,” she concludes, “cannot be learned from books.”
