Written interview with Chris Daw KC

In this interview, republished with the kind permission of Chris Daw KC, Will Barber-Taylor spoke to Chris Daw KC about the criminal justice system and the police force. The full interview can be found below.

Will Barber-Taylor: The first question that I would like to ask is, in terms of your experience as a lawyer, how do you think budget cuts to the police have affected cases that you have been involved with?

Chris Daw KC: Well, there has been a huge impact over the last, particularly the last 11 or 12 years, of police budget cuts in several areas that filter through into the criminal justice process and the trial process, if you like. The most obvious result has been a massive reduction in the number of cases coming into the criminal justice system at the very bottom end. And that is as a result of, particularly during lockdown periods, trials simply not occurring. It is also a result of the huge cuts in police numbers over the last decade or so, which are still nowhere near recovered to the levels they were before those cuts took place.

But what we are seeing is that the individual police officers just have far too many cases to deal with in each category. So, just to give you an example of cases in which I have a significant involvement, take the crime of rape. So, as you are probably aware, rape complaints have massively increased in recent years. That is no doubt partly the result of publicity around some of these cases, and a result of perhaps more of a willingness to have people who have been the victims of these crimes to try and see some formal justice process take place. We have seen a huge increase in numbers. But on the police side, what we have seen is a fall in the number of specialist officers who have the training to speak to victims of cases of that kind, sometimes young children, of course, involved in very serious sexual offending, and also all of the other resources that go alongside investigative resource time, and so on. So, what I am seeing is the results of that, and I advise on both sides of the fence, so I advise those who are accused of rape and other serious sexual crimes, but also those who have been victims of them and who come to me for legal advice. They are so desperate. They are not getting information from the police because they do not have confidence that the system is taking them seriously. And they want someone like me to give them some explanation as to how the system works, and then guide them towards maybe trying to get some justice for the complaints that they made that they do not feel are being taken seriously.

So, I am looking at it from both sides. And what I am seeing is that police officers simply do not have the time, even to do the basics of an investigation. So, I have a case at the moment of a young man, for whom I am acting, who was accused of, and indeed arrested for, rape. I think it was about nine months ago, and he has not even been interviewed yet. So, he has put his life on hold while he waits for the police investigation to follow through. And then you have the young woman who complained against him and accused him of rape, or basically, it was an event that she claimed to have taken place some time ago. But she, too, is seeing nothing at all. And the only reason given by the police is that there are other cases, other priorities, and they just have not got around to it yet.

Now, that is against the backdrop of only about 1.6% of all rape complaints ever being prosecuted and taken to court at all. And you can see why that has happened. The consequence of all of that is that there are several different consequences. But they all come back to that one issue, which is a complete under-resourcing at the police level, with the right number of officers with the right training. And the other resources, I say, take another example in rape cases, which is incredibly common, and which I have seen happen in one of my cases, in just the last few months, where there is an issue around communication. So, who sent what messages after an incident where there was an alleged rape or before and so on? That requires a Police Digital Forensics Officer to download the content of the mobile device and to have the right software to analyse and perhaps do searches and search parameters. It also requires the time for an investigator to read the messages and work out how they fit into the timeline, how they may impact a statement made by a witness, who says they were unhappy with the defendant on this day, and they may have sent a message on the same day saying I think everything is great. You can see how the timeline of what is on the digital devices, emails, messages, WhatsApp, the whole thing is really, really important.

But what we have seen is an enormous decrease in the resources available for digital forensic analysis specialists, at the same time as a massive increase in the number of devices being seized, including for police investigations. What has then happened is you often have the same scenario, not just in rape cases, but a whole range of other crimes, where the device is seized – there is a major hold-up. It may be downloaded at the police station, so they have a copy of what was on the phone, the tablet or whatever. It might be ready to be looked at, but no one ever gets around to looking at it for three or four or five months or longer. Therefore, the case just stalls. And once again, usually the suspect is out on bail, they may, if they are guilty, they may go and commit another rape or another serious crime because the system is ground to a halt. But I can tell you, speaking to victims, particularly victims of sexual violence and to a degree, domestic violence as well, the harm that it causes. Because these cases are massively under-resourced, many of the victims, if not most of them, want to give up at some point along the way. And many, many of them do just that. They simply say to the police, It has gone on too long. Now, I just want this to be over; I want to live my life again. And the consequence of that is that you may have someone who is committed to quite serious violent crime, or sexual violent crime, who gets away with it completely. And given the nature of those crimes, may well go on to reoffend. And you have someone who feels no sense of protection from the system, no sense of justice, and has to live for the rest of their life with the knowledge that they were the victim of a very serious crime, and no one did anything about it. What must they be thinking? So those are the sorts of real-world consequences for real people of a lack of resources.

To balance it out, you have people who may be under suspicion of these things. And that suspicion may continue and destroy their whole education only for eventually, after a year, or two or even more, to be told we are not going to bring the charges all over, but it is not all over for them either, because they have still got that deep trauma from having been accused of something, maybe arrested, and then nothing ever happens. So, all of these kinds of problems exist in a system that does not function properly.

In these very serious cases, where there is a serious impact on the victim, there is also a serious risk to the public from some of these people. All of these problems could be solved with adequate resourcing of police officers to investigate welfare and support officers, psychological welfare services being in place, and, of course, a court structure that was not suffering from these backlogs of many months. And in some cases, rape cases are taking two years to get to trial. But what these are are relatively straightforward, factual cases. An allegation is made, the defendant denies it, and the trial would last three days, maybe at the most. But what we were not getting is that those cases are not coming to trial in anything like the time we need them to.

Will Barber-Taylor: Do you think as well, because this is something that I have noticed, that in specific circumstances dealing with particular types of crimes, it is not perhaps the understanding from those who are providing the resources and the budgets as to what they specifically need. I mean, you touched on that with the police forensic officers in particular cases. So, for example, in Lincolnshire, where there is a great deal of rural crime, whether that be the vandalism of farm equipment, or whether that be hare causing, etc., etc. There is not enough funding, it seems, or there is not enough realisation for those who are setting the budgets, that specific actions need to be taken and specific officers need to deal with it in a way that will work best in resolving that particular criminal activity, for example, in hare coursing. In Lincolnshire, there was an announcement of a new task force to deal with hare coursing, which was made up of about nine officers but was to cover all of Lincolnshire. And of course, that is realistically not going to do’ the best job in terms of capturing people who are potentially responsible for hare coursing. So do you think that part of the issue in terms of budgets is the failure to realise that you need targeted budgeting for certain policing activities, using particular police officers?

Chris Daw KC: I advise senior police officers, and a large part of my life is spent in the world of policing. I am well aware of the dynamic that goes on in policing. I think operational police officers, up to and including chief constables, are very much aware of what the resource requirements are for different forms of investigation. The problem is that they do not have the budget for it, and they do not have the money for it.

So, what has happened over the last few years is that we have just ended up with a crisis management situation, sometimes driven by performance targets and the need to continually justify crime rates, particularly to Police and Crime Commissioners, in many areas. So I think within policing, there are two factors at play. One, as I say, is a lack of resources, and the other is the constant competing demands from Police and Crime Commissioners and the government as to what the priority of the day is. If you have only one point, something per cent of rape cases being taken to court, and only 5% of burglaries, as another statistic released last week, those are two crimes that are considered to be very, very serious indeed.

Anyone who has been burgled and there is a real sense that those crimes really should be a police priority. But if we cannot prioritise those crimes, then there is a serious issue going on. I think there has been a complete misunderstanding about specialised officers and the time that is required to conduct specialist investigations. I think the truth of it is that this is all being budget-driven. And so the only thing that matters from a political point of view has become crime rates overall, even though they have been massively massaged as a result of the unwillingness to include fraud. That has been the focus, and I do not think we even get down to the granular detail at all. We do not get down to that level of detail.

I think as a society, there is a choice to be made, as there always is, as there is in the NHS, as there is in education or any other area of publicly funded activity. What do we want from our police forces? And what do we want from our criminal justice system? Do we want nine officers to be involved in hare coursing? If we do, then those nine officers are not investigating burglaries or dealing with rape cases, or dealing with other cases that perhaps 99% of the population will consider more important?

We have got the same principle applying to PartyGate, We have got a crack team of Metropolitan Police officers, who are now engaged, no doubt spending hundreds of man-hours on an investigation into breaches of the COVID regulations, when’ people in London are calling the police to say that a house has been burgled, and someone is’ defiled my living room and left my house a complete mess. And they said, Well, we cannot come for a week. We will give you a number, and you can claim on your insurance. And that mismatch between what almost is in the public interest and what is in the public eye in the headlines, what suddenly becomes the flavour of the month.

I think that is why the grown-up policy has got to be about being honest and saying, okay, even if we double the rate of clear-up for rape and burglary, it is still going to be only 10% and three and a bit per cent. That is going to cost us 100 million quid to do that. So just think about how much it would cost to go further. And I am extrapolating that out to the lawyers that would be needed to deal with double the number of cases, the courtrooms, judges, etc. I think on a policy level, I would like to see a bit of honesty. This is what we, the public, deserve. Both parties should make it clear that this is what we are going to try to achieve in our criminal justice system. And this is what it is going to cost. And this is what it will look like. I think you would need a lot more specialist officers, and I am afraid you would have to invest an awful lot in it. Because fraud, which is becoming an epidemic, is another choice to be made. Do we as a society want to invest in the investigation and potential prosecution of fraud, when it is incredibly difficult to do so, when much of it is committed from overseas and is almost impossible to track down and attack? And even if you do eventually track someone down, recovering the proceeds of the fraud is virtually impossible. Do we want to invest the billions it would take to pursue all of those fraud allegations and investigations, or would it be better off saying, well, okay, we are just going to have a compensation scheme instead?

And we will just accept that we need to focus on technological ways to reduce fraud, particularly bank fraud and so on. And I think it is important to just be realistic; we are not going to prosecute people for fraud anymore. Or if we do, it is going to be more blatant cases of very large fraud. Apart from that, we just accept that fraud is not like pollution; it is a social issue that everyone has to deal with, and the government has to do their best to reduce it. These are some of the big, big idea things that we have to deal with, and it comes down to how we fund those promises and which efficiencies are there to be had.

I have no doubt whatsoever. I see an awful lot of inefficiency in the way that criminal case investigations are managed, and that is particularly galling when you realise the backlog of investigations, the backlog of complaints, and the backlog of trials. When you do see hearings taking place for no reason, the same thing is being done twice or three times by different officers, and neither of them is doing it right. Fundamentally, the driver of success is the training of police officers and the number of police officers, the manpower and the time that they have available. And you cannot do tinkering at the edges with technology to get away from that basic fact.

Will Barber-Taylor: One thing that I think is important is the experiences of call handlers and their ability to deal with urgent concerns, especially 999 calls. How much pressure do you think they are under, and how effective do you think they can be in handling calls when they face such demand?

Chris Daw KC: Some areas are under more pressure than others. But the truth is that the same applies wherever you go up and down the country. I would be amazed if you spoke to a police call handler, particularly someone taking 999 calls, who said anything different. I have family members who are patrol officers, frontline police officers who are in the police vehicles and are called out to sometimes very violent incidents, very dangerous incidents. The idea of a police officer turning up after you have just been burgled, or even if you have just seen the person jump over the backside fence and run away, is what you want, but because of the pressure on the system, they probably still will not turn oup This is because the triage system is focused on immediate risk to life and limb; it is not focused on resolving crimes that have taken place and have happened in the past, unless, once again, they involve serious injury and serious harm.

It is difficult to think of something more serious in terms of harmful impact on the individual than rape, and even rape, the investigations are slow and just do not respond to the needs of the victim at all. And that places the public at risk because many people are out walking about who actually should, at the very least, be subjected to some form of control on bail, rather than simply be at liberty to be wherever they wish and to do whatever they wish.

Because the slower the response times, particularly to crimes that potentially could be solved, the less likely they ever will be. Even just basic things like crime scene examiners, we have a severe shortage of crime examiners. There was a time when it was fairly routine to take fingerprints from the scenes of burglaries and other crimes, whether it was a break-in or property damage. It is almost non-existent now. Because those crime scene examiners are so busy, the scenes of murders and other very, very serious violent crimes, which they plainly and rightly perhaps say are a priority, but we just do not have anywhere near enough crime scene examiners. One suspects that the very large number of burglaries, for example, will be solved if we had an effective and efficient crime scene examination process.

Another example is whether you, I, or anyone walk down the street these days, we are picked up by CCTV every few seconds, if not almost constantly. CCTV is the key to solving 80% of crimes that take place, and the time it takes to access and review material and footage is considerable. There is no substitute, although there is artificial intelligence that can be used to analyse and look at it more quickly in facial recognition; there are all sorts of other tools like that, but we just do not have any of that. And where we do have it, there are no officers to actually engage with those processes. So when you have angry callers saying I have been attacked in the street or my house has been burgled and nobody comes, it could be much more easily resolved if we had officers able to review CCTV, take fingerprints much more regularly than they currently can.

The degree of trauma, the collective psychological societal trauma that comes from that happening day in, day out, 1000s of times, is immense. And of course, then the extra pressure it creates every time a call handler is speaking to an angry person who is ringing back for the fifth time. That call handler cannot speak to someone who is just in the middle of being attacked or is the victim of a violent crime and needs urgent, immediate assistance. At every single step, the system is creating inefficiencies of its own making; you cannot blame people for calling back. And it is hardly surprising people call back. But when they do, they block the lines, and the cumulative effect, of course, is once again breaking the system down and preventing officers from acting more immediately, and it makes it even worse.

I think there is an argument to be had about whether we want 999, just to be for, like, urgent emergency life-threatening situations, from the police perspective, rather than burglaries or some other thing. What is the point of having people ring 999? When, as night follows day, in respect of a large category of reports to 999, the police are going to do nothing at all. Do we tell the public not to ring 999 anymore? Unless you have been stabbed or raped? Or you have come across someone who has been murdered, a very, very serious crime, would they ring 999 or another number?

And what do we do about fraud? Action Fraud is a completely failed organisation. An utter farce, a complete joke of a system, untrained, unqualified, inexperienced people answering the phone, they do not know anything about anything, and nothing happens. Do we look to streamline the way that financial crime is dealt with more efficiently? Do you look at, for example, placing the responsibility for dealing with fraud onto financial institutions and completely outsourcing the responsibility for financial crime, away from the police and away from the public prosecution authorities, and certainly away from the victim? That is not necessarily a bad idea, particularly from a centre-left perspective. If you are going to outsource something, then you want it to be a crime where there are large, deep-pocketed organisations that, frankly, do not do enough to protect their customers.

Will Barber-Taylor: It is funny that you mentioned Action Fraud because I wrote a piece for the Young Fabians a bit back about Action Fraud. And it is one of those organisations that when you are researching it, when you are writing about it, you just think, why on earth has this been allowed to happen? Because it is a failure, isn’t it?

Chris Daw, KC: I will give you a policy idea about that. One of the reasons it was created was a good one. But the execution was appalling. But one of the reasons was that, as it stands, you have the SFO that sits above all of the regional police forces and local police forces to investigate only the very largest, usually corporate fraud cases, in the 10 and hundreds of millions. And they are a law unto themselves. I mean, they are completely ineffective and almost nothing to protect the public. I wrote a piece for the FT about the failing SFO. It is just a tiny number of people who ever get successfully prosecuted and end up in prison as a result. But you have got the SFO, and they deal with almost nothing in terms of numbers. Very, very little.

But then all other kinds of fraud cases are dealt with by regional police forces. They are dealt with by the Met, Greater Manchester Police or whatever. And each of those forces has its own economic crime team. Now, the City of London has a slightly more developed team because they are the lead force for bank fraud and anything to do with the banking sector. And every slightly larger, more developed team, but that seems fairly small. Merseyside also deals with cases, as they have a handful of Office Specialist economic crime officers. To me, fraud is very rarely local; very rarely is fraud founded on any particular local geographical area. So you can well understand why you investigate burglaries using a local police force, because they have local knowledge of the area, they perhaps might even know some potential suspects around and where to go to potentially look for people. But when it comes to fraud, much of it is driven through financial institutions, the internet and all sorts of other activity, which has no geographical connection to the area where the victim may live. So the idea is that you report any fraud to Action Fraud and then they allocate it to one of the regional police forces. And, to me, that just does not make any sense whatsoever. If you think about it from two perspectives, firstly, from an operational efficiency point of view, it makes more sense that fraud should be investigated by a National Fraud Agency of some kind. Not at the level of the SFO, but every single fraud of every kind comes through not to Action Fraud, which is just a call centre, but comes into a National Fraud Agency, and they have all of the fraud officers from the whole country, all based in one place – it does not have to be one place necessarily. They may have two or three regional centres or whatever, but they are a single organisation whose computer systems are all linked up. And thereby patterns of fraud, for example, can be much more readily identified than they currently are using Action Fraud and regional police forces.

It gets away from the thinking that fraud is just like shoplifting. And basically, it is a local thing; it happens locally, you get a lone officer to go along and deal with it. Let us just get real. And let us bring in human systems involving officers and investigators and analysts and technicians, and all of those kinds of jobs, because large regional police forces do not have the resources for that investigation, what might be worldwide financial irregularity, fraud, money laundering, going between different countries and involving companies registered in different jurisdictions. They just do not have the resources for that, and they do not need it. And what they do have is inadequate resources that are duplicated 43 times around the country, in all the different places.

What should happen is we get rid of what we now have, we set up a National Fraud Agency, we have a head of agency, and we have specially trained fraud officers, who can be based regionally rather than in all 43 forces. Probably with northern, Midlands and southern-based regional hubs. You want to do it in terms of setup, depending on where the activity was mostly focused, and where the evidence was focused, because that is what matters. If you are investigating a fraud case, you need to go to where the evidence is, not to where the victim is; it does not matter where the victim is. And I suspect most victims would rather speak to an officer in a regional fraud investigation sector on video than not see any officer. Starting to use technology is a proactive and sensible way. That is the idea we need. The main issue is a systemic one; we are wedded to this idea of local police forces, and in fraud that makes no sense in acquisition, or in the purchasing of equipment. That also does not make any sense. Why have you got 43 fraud teams? I know some of them do get together in groups of two and three to buy their cars or to buy their uniform, whatever it is, from particular suppliers. But once again, why have we got 43 Chief Constables? Why have we got all of these ranks and all of these layers and all of these layers of administration and management all over the country? When are we so desperate for police officers to actually do investigations and take things forward? We need a better reformed police service, perhaps something similar to what Sir Tom Winsor proposed, nine regional forces rather than 43 different forces. Scotland had one uniformed force, and although that covers a smaller population, it is still responsible for a large geographic area. I just think there needs to be radical thinking in an age of limited resources. In an age when the resources in policing have come under so much pressure, and the police have been so starved of resources and numbers, if we can do anything to free up resources from structure and process and put them into investigation and action, I think that to me is going to make a big difference. And it just wastes so much money not to do something radical like that.

Will Barber-Taylor: I mean, you mentioned bureaucracy there in terms of the issues within internal bureaucracy in terms of costing money. Do you think, then, it would be better if you stripped away that bureaucracy and then reinvested it in the local community so that there was greater access to a local police station? Because one of the things that I noticed is that half of all front-counter police stations have gone since 2010. Do you think it would be better if we got rid of the bureaucracy and funded it back into maybe reopening some of those physical police stations?

Chris Daw, KC: I am not sure that people are overly bothered about going into a police station. I do not necessarily think having public-facing police stations is the answer. But having officers who are based locally, whether they be literally small micro-community type officers, very small places, or whether they be covering a larger town, but they can deploy quickly to where they are needed, might be a better answer. And boots on the ground when those boots are needed.

I have been in a lot of police stations, and the problem for me was that we have too many police stations. I have been in many places for various professional reasons, and lots of the space is wasted; many of the buildings have poor insulation, are very expensive to run and maintain, and actually would make much more sense to have modern facilities where officers with the right equipment or facilities can be occupied with something useful. But they are also available to deploy to when people have been burgled and genuinely need some immediate support. I think it is important to have certain police officers who are accessible locally, but reopening Victorian police stations, I think, is a mistake because those buildings were not fit for purpose for a very long time. And many of them are just unsuitable either for public access or working environments.

I think it is vital that the police can use modern facilities and have police who are available and accessible to the public. I think if you reduce the costs in city centres and town centres in these very large old buildings, this would ideally free up resources for more mobile police officers, more patrols, particularly more double patrols, and so on. I do not think having more of the old style of police stations, up and down the country, most of which, as I say, have been in many of them, are 80% of the time empty, there is nobody there, or the offices are all empty. That is not a good use of public resources. It does not make sense when you can have a hot desking system in a much more modern facility where officers coming off shift can immediately sit down in a comfortable environment to do their work, have access to it and all the other stuff they need to do. So much of the job is technical, so much involves the use of technology and computers. And so having good IT and having facilities in which officers can work effectively, but also ensuring that when they are off duty, or when they are on breaks and so on, they have adequate spaces to recover from, maybe through physical trauma or other things. I think having those facilities to make sure the officers are looked after is incredibly important.

Because one of the major issues in policing is the number of officers who are off sick. Now, set aside COVID, which of course, is even before COVID, the level of sick leave was very high because of a lack of availability of good occupational health, physio, stuff like that, because police officers are in physically dangerous situations so regularly. So, just looking at holistically, how do we get the most out of each officer? How do we give them the best training? How do we give them the best resources so that they can deliver the service to the public that the public actually wants? And as I said, I do not know many people that say I wish there was a PC at a walk-in station because I would like to go to the counter and talk to somebody, that is just not what people want nowadays, people want to be able to WhatsApp the police or they want to be able to FaceTime, if necessary, all of those kinds of things. There are, of course, people who want to see an officer face-to-face. And that needs to be a possibility, particularly for those who may be older and more vulnerable and not too comfortable with technology. And I think it is very, very different considerations in’ Scunthorpe, or some of these sorts of older towns with different problems than there are in urban London or other places. I think once again, that is something that needs joined-up thinking.

I think there are a range of ways in which you could certainly reduce fixed overheads, reduce wasted costs, empty police buildings, and find a way to make the service much more efficient. And officers do want to do a good job; they just feel, as I speak to police officers, both professionally and also because I have family who are in the police. They are just utterly frustrated by the system being so broken and fractured, lacking resources. I had a Chief Superintendent telling me, “ I have been refused funding; we have not got funding to do any more forensics work this year.” But I have got a murder case where I need to run stuff, and I just cannot do it. Everything is budgeted down to non-existent levels. And at the same time, you could have the same resources to get 50,000 square feet of office space. It just does not make any sense. I think the entire police service needs an efficiency review. You do not have to have it this way, operate these police forces that are set up in the 1900s or the late 1800s in the way they were run decades ago. We do not have to do it that way anymore. We can do it however we want.