The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Mark Rowley has penned an article in this morning’s Sunday Times, entitled –
“Police exist to protect the public, we are not social workers.”
The “social work” trope in policing is the laziest of them all. I’ve always argued in the past it merely shows the person deploying it doesn’t really understand social work and, by implication, policing. Inevitably, I caused myself to think this through again given it’s now being rolled out by the most senior police officer in the United Kingdom running the biggest force in the country. I couldn’t avoid the same conclusion because the article is problematic, albeit chiming after the need for a national political debate about policing which is needed.
First things first: what do we think social workers are attempting to do in their work? – protect the public, quite obviously.
Its like an open goal, that one – because the police do not have a monopoly on protecting the public. Almost all public services are trying to protect the public in their different various ways and this article lists no examples of tasks belonging to social workers – at all.
POLICING
“We must shed the distractions and the bureaucracy that take us away from crime-fighting.”
It’s a easy and fashionable idea to think of policing as crime fighting – all the films and TV dramas are about crime. I can’t recall episodes of Inspector Morse or Lewis where they spent huge amounts of their shift up a cherry-picker negotiating with a young man on a bridge who implied he would jump because of his ongoing mental health problems. Yet approximately 80% of the demand faced by the police is nothing related to crime. Even setting aside nonsense 999 calls for a pizza delivery numbers, there are a huge number of calls which can’t easily be ignored because the police would prefer to be “crime fighting”.
Missing children may need searching for because they are at risk – of committing crime, being victimised or of coming to self-inflicted harm. Now, no-one is saying there couldn’t be more done between the police, local authorities and care homes to try and reduce the number of missing children and that most of that would have to be funded and then led by other agencies – of course, there could. But you’re never going to reduce that number to zero for a range of reasons and searching for missing children at risk is in any event “protecting the public”. Those children are the public and if them being missing means they are robbing people or being robbed, it would be a good move for the police to find them and return them (accepting there is then a debate about the extent to which parents or children’s homes could or should lock those kids up to stop them going missing again).
Perhaps Mr Rowley is from the Theresa May school of crime-thinking where actions taken to prevent crime (of the kind missing children may become involved in) still count as crime-fighting? I’d would have to assume not, given he cites the 80,000 occasions last year when children went missing and he even acknowledges they are “often exploited by gangs and lured in to crime” so in what way is searching for them not “crime-fighting”?! I don’t get it.
SOCIAL WORK
I’ve said to those I know whose profession is social work – who all find this trope somewhat infuriating – that it must just show officers don’t understand what social work actually is if they are characterising their functions under that banner. And the tricky thing is, Mr Rowley doesn’t give any examples – not really. “Too often officers in effect take on the role of social workers.” His example of missing children doesn’t make sense to me – it’s his example of a distraction, but he recognises the obvious potential of missing children to be “lured in to crime”.
It’s always been a problem that officers spend time sitting around in police buildings with kids waiting for social workers and whilst that doesn’t make it right, it is reflective of another public service running on a shoestring. I completely agree with him, that missing kids should either be received back by their care home or attended at police stations by social workers within an hour or so of being found. But you’re going to need an awful lot more social workers to give effect to that and you’ll be handing over to them in the full and certain knowledge Parliament has given those professionals absolutely no powers whatsoever to keep that child safely detained – nothing prevents them just going missing again and anyone who has been a 24/7 police officer will likely have an example of exactly that. Gone again within an hour or so of being returned – either that or first thing the next morning.
I was surprised to find no mention in Sir Mark’s piece about mental health because he has used that before as the example of distraction work which drains police resources and requires other agencies to step up. Indeed, I thought he would mention the “Right Care, Right Person” initiative to reduce police attendance at mental health incidents because six months after implementation he linked RCRP to improvements in the Met’s response to robbery and there are plenty of examples within mental health on which we could draw to make the “distraction” point. But even where people make those claims, I tend to end up reminding them the police actually under-perform on crime involving those of us who are mentally ill – attrition rates for vulnerable victims are higher, prosecution for vulnerable suspects is, paradoxically, both higher and lower.
Less “social work” so we can focus on crime is all too often ironic.
PLENTY THAT’S WRONG
There is an awful lot wrong with policing, of course there is. The latter part of the article is about the potential reduction in the number of police forces, various things about making national efficiencies through major re-organisation – Sir Mark put his name to a letter in 2019 for a Royal Commission in to policing which many officers have long-since argued is necessary, including because of the “mission creep” which is perceived in to mental health and social work. None of that is particularly contentious.
In addition, he’s quite right to imply difficulties caused by the inability and underfunding of other agencies, but first things first: we need to understand the reality of what police work is and it’s always been more than “crime-fighting” regardless of the recruitment materials, fiction and drama which suggest otherwise.
But once all that is stripped away, the police in every country is doing plenty of things because there just aren’t others available to do them. This isn’t social work, just because it’s not crime-fighting. Seminal US police scholar Egon Bittner once said two things that wrap up this whole discussion for me –
Policing is what happens “when something’s happening which ought not to be happening about which somebody had better do something now!”
… and …
“No human problem exists, or is imaginable, about which it could be said with finality that this certainly could not become the proper business of the police.”
It could hardly be otherwise, could it?
Awarded the President’s Medal, by the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
Winner of the Mind Digital Media Award
All opinions expressed are my own – they do not represent the views of any organisation.
(c) Michael Brown, 2025
I am not a police officer.
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