A no-deal Brexit poses a substantial risk to public safety, with police officers instantly losing vital access to cross-border investigative powers and databases, reports the Guardian. In a leaked letter, the national body of police and crime commissioners urge Home Secretary Sajid Javid to immediately draft contingency plans, warning that officers faced “a significant loss of operational capacity” should the UK crash out of the European Union in March. They say that they are becoming “increasingly concerned that such a loss of capacity could pose significant risks to our local communities.” The letter from the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners (APCC) nonpartisan Brexit working group expresses alarm that the government does not appear ready for such a crisis.
The European commission’s Brexit preparedness unit, operating under its German secretary general, Martin Selmayr, has already said it would “switch off the databases” if a deal was not struck in the coming months. The APCC letter says British police make regular use of 32 different law enforcement and national security measures that depend on EU membership. These include the European arrest warrant – under which 1,735 arrests were made in the UK last year and more than 10,000 people were extradited since 2004 – and the Schengen information system (SIS), a vast database used by police to search for terrorist suspects, missing people and to check vehicle registrations and passport details. The SIS was checked 539 million times by British officers in 2017. UK courts depend on the European criminal records information system to establish the history of foreign offenders.