Big internet companies are frustrating police attempts to catch terrorists and serious criminals, and the case for new laws to force them to hand over information is getting stronger, the senior police watchdog has said.
Sir Tom Winsor, Her Majesty’s chief inspector of constabulary, said technologies such as encryption should be breakable if law enforcement obtained a warrant.
In his annual state of policing report, he said public patience with platforms such as Facebook, Telegram and WhatsApp was running out.
Pressed on whether he could give examples from Britain where tech companies had disobeyed law enforcement requests, Winsor said he could not, though he could cite one from overseas.
“If the giants of that world continue to devise ways to frustrate law enforcement then public opinion will not tolerate it,” he said. “They have a diminishing opportunity to do today what the public need them to be able to do. If they fail in that respect, the case for compulsion will be ever stronger.”
He added: “There is a handful of very large companies with a highly dominant influence over how the internet is used. In too many respects, their record is poor and their reputation tarnished.
“The steps they take to make sure their services cannot be abused by terrorists, paedophiles and organised criminals are inadequate; the commitment they show and their willingness to be held to account are questionable.
“It should come as no surprise if this leads to the establishment and ever-tightening of internet regulation, to compel responsible and proportionate actions which these companies could voluntarily take today.”
Last month the home secretary, Sajid Javid, appeared to accept police may have too little money to meet demand as violent crime rises.
Winsor said: “There is undoubtedly a relationship between [police numbers] and violence.” But he said it was a “complex relationship” and merely increasing officer numbers would not necessarily lead to a fall in crime.
He said police leaders in England and Wales were failing to plan for demand and putting public safety at risk. The work of frontline officers who were “relied on to get the job done” was masking failures by police chiefs to reform.
“The inspections HMICFRS [Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services] has carried out during the past year showed that the effectiveness and efficiency of the police service is, on the whole, improving against a backdrop of financial austerity and the rise of crime, especially complex crime. This is to the credit of those who were completing,” he said.
“However, many of the points in this report are issues we have raised before and often. Increasingly these issues are becoming more and more urgent. The principal of these is the failure to plan properly, compromising public safety and relying on frontline officers desire to ‘get the job done’.”
He said this meant that the scale of change had been “too slow and too modest”. He said there were “no excuses for the shortcomings I routinely see” and these “would not be acceptable in many other organisations”.
His report also said thousands of emergency calls were being held in queues because there were not enough officers to respond to them.
Winsor was appointed as chief inspector of constabulary by Theresa May in 2012, when she was home secretary.