When talking about the actions of politicians, government departments and agencies such as the police, I often emphasise the deliberate harm they do and the deliberate lies they tell. Such examples are so thick on the ground that it is easy to forget another marker of officialdom – incompetence. A recent story brought this to mind.

It turns out that more than 400,000 crime records have gone missing from the police computer. The police were in the middle of one of their weekly “weeding” sessions, during which they “expunge” data they think they won’t need any more, when – whoops! –  they accidentally expunged the wrong data – essential data they would continue to need if they were to bring criminals to justice.

But there’s more: the accident doesn’t seem to have been contained at all well and The Guardian reports that high-ranking police officers are worried that “the chaos may cause them to hold data they should have legally deleted.”

Once news of this incompetent weeding got “into the public domain”, the usual efforts by the usual suspects were made to lessen its impact on public confidence. The Home Office declared it was “working with police to assess the impact of the error”. Policing minister Kit Malthouse dug deeper into his guide to Home Office jargon, telling us his department was working “very quickly” with “policing partners” to “try and recover the data and assess the full extent of the problem”. Malthouse has shown a bit of inventiveness here: the usual phrase is “working very hard”, as in “We are working very hard to reduce the backlog” of whatever the current backlog is; or “We are working very hard to improve the effectiveness of our test and trace system”. Changing it to “very quickly”, however, may have been unwise in the context of this data loss from the police computer, as it is likely to increase anxiety that yet another “accident” could take place. On “policing partners”, I haven’t come across this phrase before, but it does suggest a dance of some kind – which may not be quite the picture that officials wanted to paint.

Next up comes a statement by the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC). A spokesperson said: “We are aware of an issue with the police national computer and are working closely with the government to understand the potential operational impacts” – which being interpreted means “Are we buggered for the future?”

Exactly. It seems we all are, at least potentially. It’s not only that we may not be protected from criminal activity after this “accident”. It also seems that if the police have mistaken or false information about us they can’t delete it, so we’re not safe from them either.

We might be partly reassured by what at first sight looks like a bit of straight talking from Shadow Home Secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds:

“This is an extraordinarily serious security breach that presents huge dangers for public safety. The incompetence of this shambolic government cannot be allowed to put people at risk, let criminals go free and deny victims justice.”

Unfortunately for Nick, however, he’s a bit hamstrung by his party’s record. For example John Reid, one of Nick’s predecessors (who was actually Labour Home Secretary, not just a shadow), said in 2006 that the large chunk of the Home Office that was causing him trouble at the time – the Immigration Directorate – was “not fit for purpose”. In full:

“Our system is not fit for purpose. It is inadequate in terms of its scope, it is inadequate in terms of its information technology, leadership, management systems and processes.”

Still, that’s not Nick’s fault, is it? Sounds like it’s systemic to me. Perhaps that’s the difference between incompetence and deliberate harm: incompetence is systemic; deliberate harm is systematic. It’s to be hoped that, if Nick ever sheds his shadow and becomes Home Secretary, he will show more of the milk of human kindness than Reid ever showed. Reid’s complaint was that the department wasn’t deporting enough people and therefore couldn’t even cause deliberate harm competently. That’s what he wanted to fix. Personally, I think they’re quite efficient at causing deliberate, malicious harm. But that’s a story for another time.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jan/15/priti-patel-under-fire-as-150000-police-records-accidentally-lost