Sep 2007 07

Police chief calls for the abolition of targets2

Ian Johnston, the president of the Police Superintendents Association, is denouncing Whitehall crime-fighting targets as a "shambles":

"He maintains that performance targets set in
Whitehall are preventing senior officers from giving the public the
policing they want.

They have no credibility within the police and do nothing to improve the public’s perception of crime, he will argue.

Senior
officers say they should be given more discretion to set their own
priorities based on the needs and wishes of local people."

Does anyone still seriously believe that the complex problem of controlling crime can be understood from desks in Whitehall?  So long as local forces have to respond to the priorities of a central government that can only understand what is going on with clumsy targets that miss the true picture of crime and then analyses it from a perspective not shared by most of the population.

The only way to improve things is to give senior officers more discretion and then make sure they have to listen to local people through elected police chiefs.

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  • Graeme Pirie

    Every now and again we have a Chief Constable whinging about paperwork, but for most of the time they just tell us how well their doing and that of course crime is reducing..
    Now I’m not saying paperwork isn’t a problem – it obviously is given the VERY low percentage of the time bobbies are on the beat. 10 – 15% if I recall correctly.
    The point I make is that Chief Constables are the senior managers of the police force and have to take a lot of the responsibilty themselves for the current state of policing. Perhaps they should be more concerned with making the public happy rather than the politicians.

  • http://thepurplescorpion.blogspot.com Purple Scorpion

    I did an interesting exercise a while back for our local community.
    The police can tell you how much council tax they are getting from a given area (I had to accept the boundaries they use), and what proportion that is of the total council tax they receive.
    Then I got them to tell me what proportion of their funding they get from central government, and worked the total funding they were getting attributable to our area.
    Comparing that to the small police coverage we were getting was mind boggling.