Sir Kenneth Newman obituary

Few police chiefs have had a greater impact on the way policing is conducted in the UK than Sir Kenneth Newman, who has died aged 90. As the head of the Royal Ulster Constabulary during some of the bloodiest years of the Troubles and as commissioner of the Metropolitan police at the time of the Broadwater Farm riots, he was no stranger to controversy but also managed to introduce radical reforms to the service.

Although he never enjoyed the high profile of his predecessor Sir Robert Mark, Newman introduced many concepts of policing that were controversial at the time but are now taken for granted. A cerebral, sometimes reticent man, he believed in the notion of policing by consent and of working with other agencies. His arrival in the top job at Scotland Yard in 1982 coincided with the publication of two damning assessments of policing: the Scarman report, produced in the wake of the Brixton riots, which called for more sensitive attitudes in minority areas, and the Policy Studies Institute’s lengthy analysis of the Met that was highly critical of a “canteen culture” and the macho and racist behaviour of some officers. Newman’s response was to break up the more entrenched departments and encourage decentralisation and local decision-making.

Born in Hackney, east London, the son of a builder, John, and his wife, Florence, he grew up in the village of North Bersted, West Sussex. Three days after his 16th birthday, at the height of the second world war in 1942, he enlisted in the RAF as an apprentice and served in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), India, Burma (Myanmar) and Singapore. After being demobbed in 1946 and unimpressed by the chilly British winter, he spotted an advertisement for the Palestine police that showed an officer in shorts under a palm tree, signed up, and had his first experience of politically charged policing. When the British mandate ended in 1948, he joined the Metropolitan police as a constable.

Always of a thoughtful and intellectual bent, he studied part-time and gained a law degree from London University in 1971. He advanced through the ranks and became commander in charge of community policing, a concept still in its early stages. When in 1973 an advertisement appeared in Police Review for the post of deputy chief constable of the RUC, he decided that this might be a way of putting some of his theories into practice. “What kind of a nut would put in for that?” asked his wife when he showed her the ad. “Well, this nut just has,” was his reply.

Known in Belfast as “the wee man” – he only just passed the old height requirements for the job when he joined in the 1940s – he served as deputy to the late Sir Jamie Flanagan and took the top post in 1976 with a mission to institute the “primacy of the police”, rather than the army, in dealing with murders and bombings. The then Guardian correspondent, Anne McHardy, recalled that “he came in as the liberal, thinking policeman who would stand above the sectarian horrors and bring some civilised rule of law to Northern Ireland”.

During his time in charge, there were allegations of violent interrogation techniques being used by some RUC officers at Castlereagh barracks to obtain confessions. While Newman dismissed the claims as “propaganda”, substantial evidence of their use was later confirmed in separate reports by Amnesty International and by the judge Harry Bennett.

Knighted in 1978, Newman returned to Britain the following year as Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary and commandant of the police staff college in Bramshill, where he taught new, intelligence-led ways of responding to both terrorism and civil disturbance. Appointed in 1982 to the top post in the Met after the departure of the more traditional Sir David McNee, he was regarded by some colleagues as inspirational and visionary, while others objected to what they saw as his “management-speak”; he was the first commissioner to seek the advice of management consultants.

In 1985, he outlined his beliefs in The Principles of Policing and Guidance for Professional Behaviour, known by some colleagues as “the little blue book”. A passage on freemasonry noted delicately that “the discerning officer will probably consider it wise to forgo the prospect of pleasure and social advantage in freemasonry so as to enjoy the unreserved regard of all those around him”. The freemasons in the Met responded defiantly by setting up a new lodge, the Manor of St James.

He also encountered a hostile reaction over a remark attributed to him by an American police magazine that people of Jamaican origin were “constitutionally disposed to be anti-authority”. A firm believer in the Neighbourhood Watch scheme, which arrived in Britain in the early 1980s, he was also a keen supporter of the formation in 1988 of Crimestoppers – then known as the Community Action Trust – the charity that encourages members of the public to pass on information about crime.

His time as commissioner was punctuated by major incidents. In 1983, when Stephen Waldorf was shot in his car on a London street after being mistaken for an armed robber, Newman responded by revising the rules for the use of weapons. But his greatest test came in 1985, when PC Keith Blakelock was murdered on the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham, north London, in riots that followed a police raid on the home of Cynthia Jarrett, who suffered a fatal heart attack. “The police can properly expect some righteous anger,” he said in the wake of the riot, “but the ferocity of the attack … was senseless and beyond belief.” He warned that plastic bullets and CS gas might have to be used in future in response to such violence.

On his retirement in 1987, he took directorships with the security consultant Control Risks, Automated Security Holdings and the Automobile Association. He played tennis into his 70s, continued to read avidly, and walked his two collies in the New Forest. He is survived by Eileen (nee Freeman), whom he knew from childhood and married in 1948, their son, Laurence, daughter, Melanie, and three grandsons.

• Kenneth Leslie Newman, police officer, born 15 August 1926; died 4 February 2017