Top police boycott official paperwork

[SO19]

Top police boycott official paperwork

Sean O’Neill, Crime Editor

The country’s most successful police force is leading a revolt against Home Office targets that it says stifle officers with form-filling bureaucracy.

Surrey Police will be joined this weekend by the Staffordshire, Leicestershire and West Midlands forces in returning to what they call “commonsense policing”.

The forces will abandon government performance measurements that require them to record playground fights as criminal offences. Instead, their chiefs have told The Times, they will give the bobby on the beat the discretion to treat minor offences as minor offences.

A child who accidentally damages a neighbour’s greenhouse with his football is now more likely to be given a telling-off than a conviction for criminal damage.

The red-tape rebellion reflects a growing frustration across police ranks with Whitehall demands that they count every incident that occurs, every action they take and the details of every person spoken to. Senior officers fear that the fixation on “sanction detection” and “crime recording standards” is driving talented officers out of the service.

Mark Rowley, acting chief constable of Surrey – which was joint top of the police performance tables last year – said that his aim was to increase public confidence in policing. “Quite simply, local people’s safety, confidence in police and their satisfaction when they call us for help are more important than misleading targets.”

Mr Rowley said the changes would inevitably mean that his force would fall from its perch at the top of the league tables. “We will get fewer ticks in boxes for bringing offenders to justice – but those figures include issuing penalty notices and cautions when it has not always been sensible to do so.

“Do we really want every teenager who does something stupid to get a criminal record? We know we are going back on the direction the Police Service has been going in for many years but we are restoring common sense and discretion. This is not about being soft on crime; it’s about giving our officers discretion. Where a minor incident is the tip of the iceberg, then it will be dealt with through the full weight of the law. But in many situations the right response might be to tell people who have got out of bed on the wrong side to calm down or to grow up and behave themselves.”

Chris Sims, Chief Constable of Staffordshire, said that he had been alarmed by the large gap between his force’s high ranking in government tables and the public’s disappointment with street-level policing.

“We had reached the point in policing where targets had become an end in themselves,” he said. “Yes, performance is important but the pendulum had swung a bit too far and we became obsessed with numbers rather than delivering good policing.

“I expect to drop down the league tables because I am no longer chasing every one of the dozens of performance measurements. But the only league table that really counts is what the people in my area think of their police force.”

The Public First project is an attempt to put into practice a key recommendation of Sir Ronnie Flanagan’s review of policing published this year. Sir Ronnie, HM Inspector of Constabulary, recommended that forces seek to achieve the “dual goal of public trust and confidence in crime statistics by ensuring all incidents and crimes are recorded and proportionately responded to”.

Mr Rowley insisted that the move did not put the forces at odds with the Home Office. “The Home Office have endorsed the Flanagan report and we have spoken to them about what we are doing. They are already changing their performance targets to reflect public satisfaction with police.”

Paul McKeever, the chairman of the Police Federation, welcomed the experiment. “Officers are struggling to bring some common sense to the increased demands of a target-driven culture, which is all too often resulting in arrests to boost the statistics we are judged upon, rather than to do what is right for the public,” he said.

“This vicious circle of chasing targets then further alienates us from the majority of law-abiding people. Action must be urgently taken to stop the erosion of the independent and impartial office of constable by this Government, and allow police officers to act with discretion, accountability and the consent of the public we serve.”

A spokesman for the Home Office said that it was pleased at the four forces’ initiative but argued that they would have to continue to adhere to current practice in recording crimes. “The aim is to reduce unnecessary bureaucracy, with the agreed principle that all allegations of crime will be recorded to ensure compliance with the National Crime Recording Standards to ensure transparency, integrity and public confidence in the process,” he said.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/u ... 036339.ece