“Dangerous” criminals could dodge arrest as police struggle to access European warrants following a no-deal Brexit, prompting a crime-fighting slowdown, parliament heard.
Officers could be forced to fill out time-consuming paperwork which takes them away from the frontline duties if Britain leaves the EU without a mutually agreed plan, a top police chief warned.
Systems like the European Arrest Warrant may not be automatically available to PCs on the beat, requiring them to travel back to police stations to check out a suspected criminal’s details.
Scotland Yard’s deputy assistant commissioner, Richard Martin, told a House of Lords committee that fears over delays to everyday policing tasks could see officers off the streets for hours during a typical shift.
“From a frontline policing point of view, our mission when we are dealing with incidents is to get our staff back out and on the ground,” Martin said.
“If you start putting slowdowns in the system, for instance, let’s say the officer has to come back, fill out a long notice to put onto an Interpol system to show someone is missing or wanted, that is another 50 or 60 minutes they are not patrolling on the ground.”
“It is hard to quantify because until we go through that process we don’t know what tools we’ll have left.”
Martin said experts believed the average time taken to obtain full details of a person’s overseas offending would soar from around six days at the moment to around 66 days in the event of no-deal.
At the same hearing, Stephen Rodhouse, the director general of operations at the National Crime Agency (NCA), said almost all of his organisation’s investigations could grind to a halt in the event of no-deal.
He said the NCA’s investigations make use of tools that would be unavailable if Britain leaves the EU without a mutual deal.
“I do assess a significant challenge in maintaining that workload over a no-deal exit. In simple terms, international cases will take longer,” he said.
“There is a risk that, in the absence of being in a system that puts timescales, UK enquiries will potentially go to the bottom of the pile and may take longer.”
Figures from the Home Office cited during the hearing showed that Britain has extradited some 10,000 suspected foreign criminals from the UK since 2009.
Rodhouse added that EU member states benefit from cooperation on criminal investigations, as identifying suspected offenders allows them to be detained more quickly.
But if a no-deal Brexit ends such cooperation, Rodhouse warned: “There will be dangerous people who could be apprehended in circulation.”
Both Martin and Rodhouse said that plans to liaise directly with EU member states post-Brexit were underway which could see UK officers based in European countries in future.