BEAT POLICING MYTH AND THE DANGERS OF RECEPTIVE PUNTERS

How were Professor's Ron Clarke and Mike Hough able to convince the entire criminological, political and policing community with their spurious model that sought - successfully - to convince us all that only once every eight years would a beat police officer come within 100 yards of a burglary in progress and even then may be unaware?

The answer is probably that the fallacy of their model - which assumes beat police officers walk around 100 per cent randomly like blind and deaf zombies - had a very receptive audience:

• The Home Office was looking for new and cheaper alternatives to crime control and crime reduction.


• Many police officers wanted, desperately, to be professionals.


• The advent of mobile radio systems did away with the old "Dr Who" police boxes that had been used by beat officers in the past to check in with the station to show that they were doing their job and all was well - or to call for back-up.


• Those first two-way mobile radios were far too big and heavy to be carried by police personnel on foot so had to be in patrol cars, which meant a lot of beat bobbies became motorised patrol and fast response police officers.


• Who would not prefer to be in a warm modern car when the alternative is pounding the beat with rain dripping down the back of your neck?


• Crime was rising from the 1960's with the post war baby boom, rehousing, and the explosion in consumerism, motor car ownership and empty homes as more women went to work - it must have seemed as if something modern was needed for this modern phenomenon.


• Zombie outbreaks are infectious in real life as well as in the movies, it seems. Because the Zombie Cop model aped similar claptrap produced in the US for the President's Commission on Law enforcement regarding street robberies and beat police officers.


• Astonishingly, the Zombie Cop model was published by two erudite Home Office crack-researchers, who ooze a perfectly well deserved aura of uncontainable integrity and respectability - in the most respected of first-rate research publications - a peer reviewed Home Office Research Study.

Given such a fortunate combination of forces to facilitate easy punterization it is perhaps not so amazing after all that the Clarke and Hough zombie cop myth was swallowed hook line and sinker and purported to be accurate in scholarly publications written by some of the most influential British Criminologists in the world. A trusted source told me only yesterday that his research is ongoing into the full reach of the myth and that it is even greater than has been reported to date. Those who are currently known to have believed the myth and helped spread it in print include Professor Tim Newburn, Professor Robert Reiner, Professor Adam Crawford, Professor David Dixon and Professor Trever Bennett to name but a few. More exist outside the field of criminology including Harvard professors of business Di Tella and Schargrodsky.

How, we might wonder will these people and professors Hough and Clarke and these other zombie cop believers deal with their cognitive dissonance? Will they publish their mistake in their future publications? Will they keep quiet and hope no one will notice? Or will they go defensive and offensive? Will they claim that "mistakes were made but not by me? Will they try to claim that the impact of the fallacious model was in fact small (despite the fact that it has for decades been promoted as orthodox knowledge and used to justify policing policy by the Home Office). Will they claim that beat policing is in fact ineffective anyway- despite the fact that much of the earlier evidence suggests it can be effective? Will they become aggressive in their own defense, club together and threaten to sue with a nuisance law suit? If all of these ways to resolve cognitive dissonance seem far fetched then you have not yet read about what "respectable" recovered-memory "experts" got up once their pseudo scholarship was bust wide open.

Those who are able to look within themselves and search for honest answers might wish to turn their scholarly attention to ask why is it that some myths are so of their time that they take hold so that they are braced by academics like themselves who credulously, and with the most exquisitely painful toe curling irony, use them as examples of the need to be skeptical.

BS