Sir, The Winsor Report is a measured and comprehensive document that deals with many of the current problems facing a modern police service in the UK (leading article and report, Mar 16). There is one area, however, where with the hindsight of history he might have changed his recommendations. ACPO and the police staff associations in their submissions to him have been resolutely against direct entry to ranks other than that of police constable and he has decided to reject their combined pleas.
If that were not enough he has failed to appreciate that the police service is littered with disastrous attempts to allow recruits to leapfrog lower ranks. Officers of my vintage can remember the remnants of the ill-fated Trenchard and accelerated promotion schemes that did not guarantee raising the quality of senior officers. It is interesting to note that the most outstanding commissioners of police for London have been Sir Robert Mark, Sir Kenneth Newman and Lord Stevens — all highly educated and who entered the service at constable level and worked their way up through the ranks, gaining experience as they did so. Inexperienced officers injected into the middle ranks of the service would replicate the disasters of earlier years.
Ron Austin
(Retired Chief Superintendent, Metropolitan Police)
Hadleigh, Suffolk
Sir, Many of Tom Winsor’s recommendations make good sense. Some of his recommendations do, however, involve logical inconsistencies. It is one thing to attract more graduates and those with at least three A-level passes into the service; it is quite another to then have a direct entry or accelerated promotion scheme that will severely restrict their chances of promotion to higher ranks.
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Some two thirds of all entrants into the 6,000-plus, highly respected Los Angeles Sheriff’s department, in the rank of deputy sheriff (equivalent to constable), are university graduates. They all take their chances. The desire to raise standards at entry level on a par with Los Angeles would be swiftly undermined by direct entry into higher ranks. Nothing could be better designed to dissuade more highly qualified candidates from joining the police, or to create those tensions between politicians and chief officers wishing to impose externally determined higher professional policing standards, and officers conforming to “institutionalised rules and norms which express the police [officer’s] position as a member of a group which feels keenly its pariah status”, to which the late Professor James Q. Wilson eloquently drew attention. The code of the informal, but inevitable, internal “system”, based on rules and authority internal to the group, distributes its own rewards and penalties according to how well a member conforms to the expectations of the group in response to the realities of policing at the sharp end. This is a much more sophisticated description of what is sometimes called “the police canteen culture”. The exacerbation of an “us” (with our feet on the ground) and “them” (the direct entrant professional standard bearers) problem is the last thing that the police service needs. I take this position as a former graduate beneficiary of the Bramshill Police Staff College scholarship scheme.
Keith E. Hunter
(Commander, Metropolitan Police 1981-87)
Ilkley, W Yorks
Sir, The Winsor report could be the beginning of what many serving and former police officers have dreamt of: a truly professional service that will hold its own, in the public eye, alongside the other services. Let us hope that training throughout the rank structure will measure up to what is required; since the Trenchard days, police training has been a poor second to that provided at Sandhurst and the other service academies.
At last the police will be able to contemplate attracting recruits from right across the community it serves, including the bright young things so evidently missing in the junior ranks. Now let’s get on with the “job”.
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Geoffrey Bourne-taylor
(Former Inspector, Metropolitan Police)
Bridport, Dorset
Sir, The proposals in the Winsor Report rang a loud bell with me. I had a close friend in the Royal Marines. When he left school he joined the Metropolitan Police. The Second World War soon arrived, and he volunteered for the Royal Marines and started as a marine. When the war ended he had reached the rank of captain. When he was demobilised he went back to the Metropolitan Police as a constable and found himself assigned to the same beat that he had left five years before. He asked if his Royal Marines career counted for anything. He was told that it didn’t and that he would have to start again. He asked the Royal Marines whether he could rejoin them with a regular commission. They were delighted to have him back and he eventually retired as a Major-General.
I have always thought of the loss to the police and am sad that it has taken more than 60 years for the Winsor proposal to sort it out. The police can ill afford to lose men with intelligence and leadership skills.
Vice-admiral Sir John Lea
Hayling Island, Hants