One of my favourite paintings by Salvador DalÍ is The Average Bureaucrat. It depicts a man’s head denuded of any individuality with only a mouth and one eye and no ears. DalÍ’s father was a bureaucrat so he had an intimate acquaintance with the species, which explains how he identified so well the manner in which those working for the State expect us to listen when they speak, but not when we do.

I have made many hundred freedom of information requests and very often find a great disparity in the resources allotted by a public body to spinning the news compared with providing the empirical data needed to answer questions we actually ask. This disparity is best illustrated by comparing the resources a public body puts into public relations as opposed to freedom of information.

The police are spending increasingly large amounts of their budget on PR even as their overall budgets are suffering. Many forces now see it as their business not just to cut crime but to manage the public’s perception of crime. This is wrong. The police are paid to do one job: enforce the law. They have no business being in the PR racket.

PR is the business of information control. It is an instrument of power, not democracy. Rather than provide a free flow of information it exists to control the flow by suppression or deception, often for politically motivated goals. If the police really wanted to inform the public, they would put their money into freedom of information rather than PR. After all, FoI deals with the questions citizens actually ask, rather than PR for the police to tell us what they want us to know.

Instead, FoI departments of police forces – as in all public bodies – are woefully underfunded and underresourced. Only 19 of 53 forces responded to our FoI requests on time. All the rest broke the law. They had a variety of explanations, though some offered none at all. The Police Service of Northern Ireland had the most novel excuse – their FoI officer was on an advanced driver training course.

It is not the business of police to manage their reputation or that of their area. This can lead to crime figures being suppressed or spun to give residents a false picture. In short, it puts people in danger and it hinders detection.

The single most effective thing that the police could do if they truly wanted to inform the citizenry about crime would be to publish all criminal incidents broken down by street level or the first section of postcode. Then we would all know with certainty how safe or endangered we are. This information is available, but only to a privileged few. It should be available to everyone. Heather Brooke is author of Your Right to Know: a Citizen’s Guide to the Freedom of Information Act

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