Matt Lloyd-Rose sounds like an idealistic young man with a well-developed social conscience. A former primary school teacher, he has a deep interest in the workings of communities, the marginalised and excluded. Wanting to get closer to the frontline of social problems, he became a volunteer police officer in Brixton and Streatham.
His experiences patrolling this ethnically diverse and far from tranquil sector of south London are what he recounts in Into the Night, a compelling snapshot of modern-day policing. About halfway through the book, after countless stops and searches, arrests for minor drug offences, visits to domestic violence incidents, drunks urinating in the street, casual sexism and misogyny, slightly more guarded racism, robberies, stabbings and adrenaline-pumping pursuits, the author observes: “Unlike teaching, I found policing a difficult role in which to live my values.”
What took him so long to reach that obvious conclusion? After all, his values seem to be impeccably liberal, open-minded and sensitive to social injustice. But that’s just the kind of armchair cynicism above which he seeks to rise.
The police perform a vital community role, not just in tackling crime but also in dealing with the kinds of knotted circumstances – people with mental health problems, the homeless, those in care, children susceptible to gangs – from which all too often society turns away. In a sense they are emergency social workers, though, as Lloyd-Rose realises, this is the role that is least wanted or respected by most officers.
They want to be chasing the bad guys and nicking people, to be the defenders of the law-abiding and enemies of the law-breaking. That’s understandable because that is the way the job is invariably presented – an image continually reinforced by cop shows and procedural dramas. But Lloyd-Rose wonders if all of us, and in particular the police themselves, are not missing the wood for the trees. He is convinced that crime-fighting is not the most effective way to fight crime.
Intrigued as to how policing came to take this near universal form, he reads widely on the issue and is impressed by an American criminologist called Egon Bittner. Bittner writes: “Fearing the role of the nurse or, worse yet, the role of the social worker, the policeman combines resentment of what he has to do day-in-day-out with the necessity of doing it. And in the course of it he misses his true vocation.”
Lloyd-Rose comes to believe (though I suspect he always had) that a war on crime ultimately serves only to deepen the conflict it seeks to end. “There is little time for the patient work of care when there is a war to fight,” he writes. To which a reasonable response might be that the mugger, the rapist and the gangster do require an urgent response, and if the police are too busy caring for everyone, then criminals will run free. But the author isn’t asking for police to abandon crime prevention or solving. It’s just that he’s more interested in the social conditions that provide the motivation and opportunity for criminality to thrive. “Care sounds like the antithesis of crime fighting,” he writes. “But it is the only true way to fight crime. Anything else is crime control.”
His volunteering stint took place five years ago, before the current crisis of confidence in the Met triggered by the appalling crimes of serving officers Wayne Couzens and David Carrick. But the endemic sexism and tolerance for misogynistic language that came to light in those cases is all too evident in these pages, as male officers talk openly about which female members of the public they’d like to have sex with.
This is a book that is difficult to read and come away from with a sense of optimism. Instead, the impression Lloyd-Rose vividly conveys is of an organisation as locked into the cycle of crime as the criminals it pursues. As they seldom have the chance or permission to step back and see the wider picture, they are like doctors whose only means of intervention is the surgeon’s knife. Perhaps if they were encouraged to engage with communities in a less trouble-seeking manner, the social pathologies could be stopped at an earlier stage.
That, of course, is easier said than done. But credit to Lloyd-Rose for experiencing what police do with their time before saying it.
