COMPUTER COPS OR COMMUNITY POLICING?

An article by John Shaw (*)

January 2001

So, now we know. Peter Ryan is from the FBI, not The Bill.

That mild Geoff Boycott accent has been concealing, well not J. Edgar Hoover, but apparently a plain clothes agent impatient with the traditions of uniform, a chief super who wants to be a gang buster.

Commissioner Ryan, nay Director Ryan, has a new plan to take the NSW police off the streets -where they are already scarcely visible - and focus them on organised criminals via computers.  Giga-bytes against the gangs.

These hard-core villains apparently live in some cyber suburb out of reach of what D.I. Burnside & Co call snouts, the informants and tipsters you cultivate off-screen in the patchwork of contacts made by working your patch, from dodgy characters to sharp-eyed citizens.

Ryan wants an elite force unsoiled by parking and traffic duties, gaming and liquor licence checking, and prisoner escort duties and other rich sources of information and platforms for police presence.

The uniform on the beat, it is proposed, is to be replaced by a plethora of civil servants taking over many of the routines Mr Ryan says his force finds arduous and time-consuming.  Most police work is, and even needs to be, just that.  The devil is often in the detail.

The Bill, the Bible of the beat - and required study in Mr Ryan’s alma mater, the UK Police College - hammers home the lesson that contact is crucial to successful police work.  It can’t be done effectively at arms length and with hands off.  (Nor can it be done with hands out, but that’s another story.)

The NSW Police Union is not going to come quietly on this one.  It will plead and protest that these latest Ryan reforms will reduce work for its members, particularly those who are never going to be computer whizzes, forensic experts or able to collar white collar criminals.

In effect, the Union is making the plod plea.  It would do better to plead for presence, advocate uniforms staying in traditional places and agitate against the rise of new enforcement agencies and new corruption opportunities.

The Commissioner already says he can’t keep proper watch on casinos because of fear of corruption of the watchers. He should be about creating bribe-proof cops, not handing surveillance of opportunities for the deadly triangle of money laundering, drug finance and clandestine meetings over to amateur auxiliaries.

Ryan’s plan to outsource the dull bits of policing seems a recipe for bureaucratic division and dispute, not to mention cutting cops off from community contact.

Five years ago the NSW railways were split into four sections by consultants and empire-builders. The splinters are now being glued back together because, as Premier Carr admits, they didn’t work apart.

If Mr Ryan gets his way despite the precedent of the railway fiasco, the odds are that by the time he has moved on from Sydney - Athens Olympics Security Supremo, or Sir Peter of the Yard - the Carr government, by then in its second decade, will be trying to put the police jigsaw together again - using as its model the re-assembly of the dismantled railways.

Mr Ryan says his latest senior appointments - there’s apparently always room at the top for a reshuffle - are to prepare the next leadership.

But what will it inherit?  Computer cops or community policing?  A police service or a CIB?  Law enforcement divided for the convenience of a few without benefit for the majority?

Today in the brave new world of detection by DNA, the cop with a computer in his car is Mr Ryan’s recipe.  Off the streets and into the screens?

Moreover, they’ll have to spend more time in the cars because there’ll be fewer stations.  Ryan’s Real Estate is the latest property agent, hoping to sell prime suburban sites in exchange for cash to spend on what he calls “a magical system”.

This will comprise laptops and palm pagers to cope with more drug use, urbanisation, social change, globalisation and cyber crime.  White-collar crime-fighting - the difficult bit - will be outsourced to consultants, the folks who brought you the recent series of debacles in tax, insider-trading, asset-burying and other pin-stripe prosecutions.

The “magical system” sounds as fantastic as “The Magic Pudding” and not only to Luddites.  It is not simply an argument about screens versus shoe leather, but about a flight from better policing to fancier equipment and labels.

About a dozen police commissioners ago when I was a cub reporter in Sydney the first step to catching an infamous child murderer was a clue a North Shore postman gave to the local constable.

Now the story from the suburbs is often silence.  Police need to be more visible, to be seen and to listen.  More car computers and fewer police stations does not sound like more presence.

* John Shaw was editor of the NSWCCL journal “Civil Liberty”, 1997-2000