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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Comment
Duncan Campbell

The police force needs both graduates and artisans

Jack Warner as Dixon of Dock Green
Jack Warner as Dixon of Dock Green, who ‘would claim to have graduated with honours from the University of Life’. Photograph: BBC

Back in 1928, Edgar Wallace, who’d been a crime reporter before becoming the bestselling novelist, addressed a group of students on the subject of the police. He was full of praise for the service and told his audience that “the success of Scotland Yard, staffed by officers who have had none of the advantages of a public school education, is amazing”.

Those were the days when the idea that anyone with a decent education would seriously consider a job in the police was unthinkable. Times change. Now there is a proposal that, in the future, and possibly as soon as 2019, all officers should have degrees. The suggestion has been made by the College of Policing, the body responsible for setting the standards for police training.

The rationale is that the job is now of “degree-level complexity” and that other professions, such as social work and nursing, require new recruits to attain that level of qualification before they can practise. Currently, fewer than a third of officers have degrees.

There has already been a critical response from the Police Federation, which has expressed its disagreement on the grounds that this measure might well exclude some of the very officers that are most needed to reflect the society they police. Potential recruits from poorer families might shy away from the job, on the grounds that they were being asked to pay for their training mainly to save the government the bother.

When the police first began recruiting graduates in a big way in the 1970s, there was resistance and suspicion among many of the rank and file. They were wary of a new breed of officers who talked about “stakeholders” and “best practice” and moved effortlessly up the ladder of promotion without, it was often felt, having had to experience policing at its roughest and most demanding.

What would the police officers of the past, real or fictional, have had to say about the idea? DI Regan and DS Carter of television’s The Sweeney, played so memorably by John Thaw and Dennis Waterman, might well have queried whether one really needed a master’s degree to be able to explain the semiotics of “get yer trousers on, you’re nicked!”. And certainly Dixon of Dock Green would claim to have graduated with honours from the University of Life without having to pass a bunch of fanciful exams.

John Thaw (left) and Dennis Waterman in The Sweeney in 1974.
John Thaw (left) and Dennis Waterman in The Sweeney in 1974. Photograph: PA

There were some exceptions, of course. When Ngaio Marsh’s DCI Alleyn of the Yard was carrying out a murder investigation in her 1934 novel, A Man Lay Dead, he handed his card to a posh witness and elicited the telling response: “I see from your card that your name is Roderick Alleyn. I was up at Oxford with a very brilliant man of that name. A relation perhaps?” Alleyn, of course, is too much of a gent to explain that he is the very same, having graduated in 1915 and entered the police as a humble constable at the end of the first world war.

Many of the great real-life detectives of the past – whose qualifications were instinct, experience, common sense and patience – might well have viewed three years of academia as wasted time. I asked one former senior officer who had entered the job without a degree, but obtained two during his career, what he reckoned about the proposal. “My view is some, but not all, of policing can be helped by degrees but there is an artisan element, crafts such as how to work on the street,” he said. And that “artisan element” cannot be taught.

In any case, they could all have quoted the seventh of Sir Robert Peel’s nine principles of policing on the setting up of the Metropolitan police in 1829: “To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police.” In other words, the police should reflect the population they serve, and they would no longer do that if they all had to have initials after their name.

Anyone over a certain age can remember when the police required that any male officer should be at least 5ft 10in tall and any female over 5ft 4in. This obviously excluded many people who might have made excellent officers. And it is not so very long since female officers were considered only suitable for dealing with children and domestic situations, which again excluded many very able people from the service.

Not every job needs a degree. Journalists can wield enormous power – for good or ill – without any qualifications at all and it is right that this should be so, even if this right is often abused. To quote Alleyn again: “I have often wondered what is the most indecently preposterous job – a detective’s or a journalist’s.”

To impose on the police a requirement that would exclude so many members of society from considering entry to a profession that needs to be as diverse as possible would be a mistake. We need both graduates and artisans.

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