Mike Craik: The North's Crimebuster

Aug 21 2009 By Alastair Gilmour, The Journal

WE ALL have days when we could do with some inspiration. Sometimes we just need to talk – no answers, no advice, simply talk.

When Mike Craik, chief constable of Northumbria Police, has one of those spells, he turns to a framed photograph on his office wall. It’s his grandfather Nick, like himself a police officer, as was Mike’s father David. He talks, he sorts things out and gets on with his day.

Mike Craik has been chief constable since April 2005, since when he has instigated numerous important initiatives and revolutionary ideas with the prime intention of reducing crime and disorder while building trust and confidence in the communities. Northumbria is one of the country’s largest police forces and is the top-performing one although it has a huge area to cover – more than 2,000 square miles from the Scottish border to County Durham and from the Pennines across to the North East coast. It also serves 1.5m people, so the responsibility is enormous.

"It’s trust and confidence and reducing crime and disorder," says Newcastle-born Mike. "We put it that way round on purpose. People expect us to reduce crime, but I’ve always taken the view that you don’t automatically get public confidence, it doesn’t come for nothing. You have to build it and build it every day, otherwise it will erode, corrode and disappear. It’s a slightly different philosophy.

"We’re a big, strong capable organisation and we run what we think is a very good business model. In plain speak, we catch 40% of all offenders right across the force. When I came here 10 years ago that was about 25%. If you’re fortunate enough to live in North Tyneside, the average there is just over 50%, so the message to criminals is you’re more likely to be caught than not, for the first time ever. I’ve never been able to say that at any time in my police career."

Mike Craik joined the Metropolitan Police in London in 1977 where he spent the next 23 years moving through the ranks, leading 22 major inquiries and eventually running the murder squad. In his last 12 months before leaving the capital in 2000 for the North East, he was crime commander for North London, overseeing the investigation of 120 murders.

"We’ve brought big changes in recently," he says. "We’re the professionals, we know the answers, we know what the problems are, this is what we deal with. It’s getting people geared up to say, you live there, it’s your street, your neighbourhood, your business – what are the problems you’re facing and what are your priorities for dealing with it? It’s a big cultural change.

"It’s why we built the neighbourhood model, six big police stations and 37 neighbourhoods. They are there to listen to local people and to give them the help they need, not what we think they should have. It’s part of us being much more successful."

This is the Total Policing Task Force at work – successfully at work, as it happens. Crime in Northumbria continued to fall in the first quarter of the financial year, with Home Office statistics showing police satisfaction levels in the region are higher than the national average. The force’s latest figures show crime is continuing to fall, with overall crime between April and June dropping by almost 11% compared to the same period last year, down to 24,672 offences from 27,673 offences.

Violent crime is down more than 9% to 4,946 offences compared to 5,457 for the first quarter of last year. Detectives have also recovered record hauls of drugs, weapons and luxury items in the crime crackdown.

Mike Craik says: "The trick there is not to wait until something happens then respond to it, but actually anticipating things and putting tactics in place. We’ve been doing this since last September – trying to stop things from getting worse and trying to prevent things happening.

"We’ve brought all the big crime teams together – those who do the surveillance, the big drugs busts – with the uniformed groups and instead of dealing with two or three major drug dealers at a time, taking six months or a year to catch them, we’ve identified 49 organised criminal groups and we’re doing something to all of them every day.

"It might just be stopping them getting off a plane with a load of tabs, or it might be arresting them with five-and-a-half kilos of cocaine, or it could be doing 27 cannabis farms all in two days. We’re always doing something to them all the time, not letting 47 of them go back about their business while we concentrate on the other two. It’s about disruption and intervention; it’s what we’ve always been good at."

Northumbria has around 4,100 police officers, 2,500 police staff, special constables and community support officers, a combined figure that Mike Craik believes is the highest they’ve ever been and probably the highest they’ll ever get. The general public, however, needs constant reassurance.

Mike says: "One of the problems I’m struggling with now is we can tell the public all the facts and figures, but people don’t remember facts and figures, they remember stories. The perception of crime and disorder doesn’t match the reality.

"For the first time ever we’ll have under 100,000 crimes in Northumbria and you can go back to the days when quarter of a million was normal, but it’s not what the public feels. You’re more influenced by stories you hear – if your neighbour has had his car tyres slashed, everybody in your street knows. Hearing four of these stories a year, psychologists tell us, sets your mind at what the level of criminality is. Stories are much more powerful than statistics – people don’t believe statistics anyway.

"One of the things we’re trying to do now is in marketing and communications, we want to tell the story. We do that through the media and through our website and something we’ve just started in Gateshead and North Tyneside called Advocacy – it’s the Obamafication of communication.

"You’ll remember Barack Obama with his network of people which turned into 18m in a year-and-a-half through networking on the internet and through texts. We’re doing that with those communities; we want to know what you want from policing today where you live and we’ll tell you what we’re going to do on a continuous rolling basis. We have a network of councillors, Business Watch members, Pub Watch members, the Church, schools – anybody who’s got access to the internet or mobile phone – and we keep up a constant dialogue with them rather than arranging a survey and three months later taking some action then doing another survey three months later to see if it worked."

And the Northumbria force is taking more of an active role in the wider North East community, a deliberate shift from its normal crime-focused role.

Mike says: "We joined the board of Newcastle Gateshead Initiative because if your business is to bring people to the area in tourism, for study and business, or you want to bring your family to start a new life here, what matters apart from schools is safety. There’s a real opportunity to paint a really positive picture to attract inward investment, business talent and academics.

"Statistics tell us this is one of the safest places in the country to live. Northumbria Police has in the past tended to sit outside that, but we realise we can be an ambassador for the North East as well."