Prison overcrowding in Scotland may in part be due to the number of criminals Graeme Pearson has put away over a 40 year career. Steven Raeburn caught up with a real enforcer as he launches his memoirs and settles into his new life, devising courses and tutoring the next generation of crimewatchers.

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Graeme Pearson has taken an unusual route into academia. The forty year veteran of west of Scotland policing had seen and taken action against most forms of crime, all the way from those encountered on the beat in Glasgow, through to the serious crimes tackled whilst with the CID, before taking on more strategic roles overseeing community safety, tutoring the FBI at Quantico, and latterly as director general of the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency.  He has seen it and been around it all, and has taken the unusual step of parlaying his experience into a new unit at Glasgow University, where he now sits as Professor. He is now dedicated to the study of organised crime, and a lecturer in public law, human rights and covert policing. His police service placed him at the heart of some of Scotland’s most notorious organised crime investigations, and he is well placed to pass the lessons learned to the next generation of enforcers. “We can only hope the Scottish establishment see the value of such a unit and plug into it,” he says. 

For all our sakes, it is hard to disagree. Street crime, puppeteered by the hidden hands of the serious organised crime barons, is something Pearson describes as a production line, fed by the particular social economic make up of Scottish cities.

“There won’t be many weekends in the west of Scotland where there isn’t some form of serious crime to be investigated. Any big city in the UK would face the same. What is so individual in Glasgow is the existence for a long time of deprivation and poverty, which seems almost to be beyond solution. We still seem to have large areas of Glasgow that live almost a Dickensian lifestyle, and the majority are oblivious to that. I became used to houses that no electricity, unless it was illegally connected to the main streetlight. No food in the kitchen. Where generations of people had no experience of work. 

“In broad terms, the population of prison today have the same characteristics as the prison population 100 years ago; the failure to be able to read and write and lack of numeracy was recorded by Victorians and identified as a real problem. It’s the same problem today. In those circumstances, these young people are incapable of filling in application forms and obtaining employment. So they become the fodder for crime. Their role models are ‘successful criminals’, particularly those engaged in organised crime, who seem to live a good lifestyle.”

The temptations that slide youngsters down the first twists of the slippery slope seem obvious to identify, but they are harder to prevent. Pearson acknowledges that as a young policeman, he did not initially connect the dots of the social matrix that leads some into the criminal production line, until a stint in community safety helped him realise that  bigger forces are at play.

“It made me realise that the police didn’t have the solutions. We were an emergency response to the effects. If we are really going to improve the quality of life for everyone in our communities, how does one deal with the health needs of certain groups? What they tell you is that they lost their way in first year at secondary school. There is the key to how one intervenes.  It is partly about trying to take the pressure off these communities from the role models.”

The outcome of taking an overview was a coalescence of effort, to combine the work of the education system with the health service, social work services and prisons, aiming for the shared outcome of bringing people back to employment. Such approaches are more standardised now, but the initiative was novel when Pearson introduced it.

Pearson has recently published a memoir in which he explores his work tackling kingpin Arthur Thompson, the XYY mob, the Chinese Triad extortion group and the UVF, amongst others. Whilst retaining the indelible carriage of the police, he cuts an incongruous figure, whose eloquence and academic refinement seem out of place with the work he has achieved.  His priority nowadays is to apply the lessons learned over his career to contemporary and future policing.

“Organised crime has all the advantages and no rules to play by. They’ll use anything, any tactic; fear, intimidation, corruption.  That’s why we need to organise our systems of investigation much better. We need to do surveillance a good deal more cleverly. It is about gathering accurate intelligence, focusing on informants, using covert techniques to good effect and producing solid evidence.

“What we had to do was identify those who were actually the key players, and begin to build a case against them, no matter how hard it was or how expensive it was. That was the one significant change I introduced to that top tier of investigation. If you aim for the key player, you destroy that role model effect.”

The process itself is, Pearson says, expensive and bureaucratic, and requires rebalancing. One thing he is keen to see tackled is the ethos and culture within the police force itself which sees the service as a managerial task, and it therefore attracts people who want to be managers, and want to do performance management, he observes.

“I would like to try and encourage people who have a genuine empathy and want to provide a service. On many occasions, I delivered a police ‘force’, because it was necessary on those occasions, but equally you have to provide a police ‘service’. That ability to mix and match allows the public to give you consent to police.  If every time you come out that van you have all the gear on and are kicking a door down, you are actually an army of occupation, not a police service.  In the 1820s when the police were first created as night watchmen, they were about serving the needs of the city of Glasgow. They weren’t anything to be feared unless you were a criminal.”

He is critical of the evolution of modern policing, which in his forty years has evolved to a considerable extent away from the benevolent organisation it was once perceived as, into something more remote and hostile, taking public perception with it.
“The police were citizens who happen to wear a uniform to represent the public. That is the way I see it and that is the police I joined.  On occasions I chased after someone, on others I stood on a corner and saw kids safely across the street. That mix is healthy. Nowadays, presence is maintained substantially on wheels. There is very little opportunity to converse with police now, because they are not standing or walking on the streets.  It reduces interaction with the public, and perhaps creates a culture within a police officers mind about where the limits of the duty extends. It then becomes largely about enforcement, and not engagement with the community. Cultural engagement with the public is less evident now,” he says.

Pearson says that the key attribute that is lacking most in modern policing methods -and indeed police officers- is empathy. He says that an officer attending any call should be genuinely interested, respectful and have the objective of “putting a persons life back together,” none of which he says sit well with a management culture that seeks performance indicators that can be measured.  It was this which in part led to his decision to go public and publish his memoirs.

“I wanted to record some of the changes I’ve seen over the 40 years, and that shift towards a more scientific, clinical approach to policing. I wanted to make some comment about the frustrations I faced at the end, where there was a dislocation in policy and implementation.”

Taking on a post at the University, and tutoring in the lessons to be learned from organised crime is a step he believes is necessary, and that it is a subject, like any social science, whose workings can be explained and understood.

“Although a lot is said about organised crime, it is very little understood. Look at Italy, Mexico, Bulgaria and the former Russian states. Look at the way organised crime can become the power, a form of government. You see elements of that in the UK, the level to which organised crime can be seen on the streets. The public won’t complain because they see local politicians as being part of the problem.  The perception of corruption becomes overwhelming.”
Pearson is now in demand and undertakes speaking engagements in pursuit of a wider understanding of his post police goals.  If perception is a barrier, one man is doing his bit to break through it.