Almost everything in the world is better than it was when I was born, other than the climate. Computers are faster. People live longer. Across most of the world, violent crime is at historic lows. Closer to home, in London, today’s children are much better educated, crime numbers are falling and the restaurants are vastly improved.
But the Metropolitan Police are still no better at stop and search. Fifteen per cent of stop and searches resulted in an arrest the year I was born, and 14 per cent of them resulted in an arrest last year. Whether it is in New York or London, we talk a lot about the racial disparity in those the police stop and search. But we talk a lot less about a linked but just as important fact: that most of these interventions are a waste of time and energy for everybody involved.
In the same 33 years since my birth, the number of people leaving school with good GCSEs has gone from 37 per cent to 73 per cent. I’m open to the argument that “not searching innocent people” is a harder task than “ensuring that schoolchildren leave with five good GCSEs”. But is it really so much harder that today’s police force is just as ineffective as that of three decades ago, while today’s teachers have improved so dramatically?
Does all this really matter, some might ask? Yes, it’s bad and annoying that people who haven’t done anything wrong are stopped and searched by the police, but it doesn’t happen very often. Black Britons are seven times more likely to be stopped and searched than white ones, despite being neither seven times more likely to commit crimes or to be the victims of crime. This is obviously iniquitous, but the actual chances of being stopped if you are black are still quite low: it happens to just 52.6 out of every thousand people. A similar pattern holds elsewhere — in New York, even at its peak, the number of people being stopped and frisked was relatively low in absolute terms.
So one view is to say that, because the numbers are so small, neither the racial disparity in stop and search nor the fact that the overwhelming majority of them do not result in any criminal proceedings is worth worrying about. Me being delayed on my journey into work by a police officer is annoying, but it isn’t as big a societal problem as if I had left school without decent GCSEs.
I don’t think this is wholly wrong. Literacy and numeracy are core to the function of a good education. But I do think it is a bit of a false dichotomy. While we don’t have a reliable measurement, I am pretty confident that the rising number of children who leave school with good GCSEs has gone hand-in-hand with teachers becoming less prejudiced. (Given that the children of immigrants do better in the UK compared with much of the OECD, this feels like a safe bet.)
But I am dubious that police who are prone to stopping and searching the innocent New Yorker or Londoner are actually really good at catching criminals, avoiding corruption, stopping burglaries or recruiting decent people to join them. In fact, in London, we have a huge amount of really good — and seemingly endlessly emerging evidence — that they are bad at almost all of these things.
I think there are two big lessons we can draw here. The first is that organisations should sweat the small stuff. High-quality leadership of institutions, whether private or public, tends to produce good results across the board. Schools that are good at turning out literate and numerate pupils also tend to be better at teaching, say, music or drama than schools which aren’t able to get five good GCSEs.
Although I have known some dysfunctional businesses with high-performing teams, they have tended to be reliant on one effective leader or one talented individual. When those people leave or are poached, they rapidly fall backwards in quality.
The myth of “secret competence” — sure, the Met aren’t very good at stop and search, but the big stuff, they do well — is just that, a myth. Despite what home secretary Suella Braverman appears to believe, the racial disparity in stop and search isn’t just an unfortunate side issue — it has implications for their ability to get anything right.
But the second lesson is as important: organisations and states should care about things they can reliably measure, because they are good heuristics for many things they can’t. Things like life expectancy or whether your recruitment is geographically, economically, racially and sexually diverse, or literacy and numeracy. While it is possible to run organisations well and do these things badly, it is not easy. Making sure organisations do the measurable stuff well is a good way of knowing they are getting the big stuff right too.
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