Full-life tariffs are not the whole answer
Nigel Williams, 16 May 2013
On Wednesday 15th May, Theresa May addressed the Police Federation to offer longer prison terms for anyone killing a police officer. It’s not an unreasonable idea. Officers are obliged to run towards trouble when the rest of the world is running away so a degree of extra deterrence makes sense.
There are alternatives. There are branches of opinion that would prefer the police to be fully resourced. If the police have the personnel and funding to keep on top of serious crime, so that they have the intelligence before an incident occurs and can respond in force when it happens, then the deterrence works at a more productive level.
Already, murder of a police officer is subject to a high level of deterrence in that it is the crime with a very high clear-up rate. Homicides are a traditional high priority, to which can be added the natural human impulse to protect their own group. In the absence of readily available detection rates specifically for murders of police officers, figures from the last two years for ‘sanction detection rate’ show 1,052 solved homicides out of 1,168 (89 per cent). (See Table 1). In the same measure, assault without injury generally was cleared up in a only third of cases but if on a constable it was 92 per cent. Admittedly, the evidence is easier to collect when the it is a policeman that is assaulted.
When an officer is murdered, a life sentence on conviction is combined with a low probability of getting away with it. However, police and prison officers are not the only groups facing trouble in the cause of justice. Gaining a conviction also requires courage from witnesses, juries, lawyers and court officials. It is over twenty years since the murders of Sicilian magistrates Paolo Borsellino and Giovanni Falcone and several policemen protecting them, all working against organised crime.
The tactic of putting pressure on witnesses or even resorting to violence is a an especially damaging means of escaping justice and deserves the full weight of resources and sentencing. If killing a police officer deserves certain detection and a full-life tariff, so do does killing a witness.
Witnesses seldom chose to be in the position of having first-hand knowledge of a crime. Where they are also victims, giving testimony requires them to re-live experiences ranging from unpleasant to deeply traumatic. We require that testimony to be properly validated so that convicitons are genuine and sound but even that process of validation adds to the trauma of victims in the witness box. Society depends on their testimony to convict criminals and to protect future victims from similar experiences. It is right to offer protection to police in the execution of their duty, but we owe the same protection and a great debt of admiration to everyone, like the young women from Oxford that saw their abusers convicted on Tuesday, prepared to stand in court and testify.