No-deal Brexit seen hampering UK policing

A no-deal Brexit will slow down the work of British police and make it more difficult for them to capture criminals from the European continent, a senior Metropolitan Police officer has told a parliamentary committee.

Speaking to the House of Commons' European Union future relationship select committee, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Richard Martin, the Met's lead on Brexit, warned that the alternative arrangements likely to be deployed in the event of leaving the EU without a deal were "not as quick, or as effective" as the EU-wide databases, known as SIS2, currently in operation.

"It's at your fingertips, it's live time, it's immediate. If we lose that capability, we will revert to Interpol notices which are slightly different. They don't have the full capability of SIS2," he told the committee.

"Our use of the European arrest warrant combined with SIS2 means that my officer, who may be in uniform stopping a car on the streets of London, can identify somebody immediately if they are maybe wanted for murder in France. Or one of our other member states can immediately arrest them and put them through the extradition process."

Aside from the numerous trade agreements that need to be resolved for any agreement to be reached by the end of the year, the field of police and judicial cooperation is also proving to be an awkward issue in discussions between the United Kingdom and the EU.

Britain's unwillingness to provide written assurances that it will continue to abide by the European Convention on Human Rights means there is no guarantee that the rights of European citizens will be respected.

More chance to evade

Martin said that the slower, more cumbersome alternative to the current system gave criminals more chance to evade arrest.

"The worst-case scenario is my officer is left in an ambiguous position where (if) they do stop a car, they do stop somebody that's wanted for a very serious offense," he continued.

"And if there are no other grounds to arrest that person there and then, they've got to run off to Westminster magistrates court, which is the only court in the land that can issue the warrant. So, yes, there's a big risk that they could have absconded or disappear."

According to The Guardian newspaper, in 2018, British police officers used the SIS2 database, to which they have had access for more than a decade, 539 million times. That capability would be "switched off overnight" in the case of a no-deal Brexit, Martin said.

As long ago as February 2019, he warned about how much slower policing would become in a no-deal environment.

"If something takes two or three times as long as when you were doing it before, that's probably another couple of hours maybe you are not back on the streets," he said. "It will have an impact on the frontline."