Targets

In recent years, governments have been keen to give the public sector all sorts of targets to chase - league tables for schools, the Ambulance service's ORCON target and, until recently, detection rates for the police.

While I completely accept the need to measure how well a police force is doing, we don't seem to have ever got it quite right.  The problem with measuring detections is that it's too easy to massage the figures - if an officer is told that he doesn't have enough detections this month, he'll suddenly start volunteering to take all the poxy stupid "death-threats by text message/Facebook" jobs that officers normally prefer to avoid.  The victim knows who the offender is, so it's a detection in the bag.  Does this make our streets safer for the general public?  No - it just makes some idiot who's too stupid to de-friend someone on Facebook, or change their mobile number, feel like they've had a bit of attention.  We should be helping real victims of crime, not pandering to these people.

So, the latest scheme to hit policing is the Single Measure of Public Confidence.  A few forces are piloting this and it looks set to become the national standard: no more targets, no more chasing the figures, we're all about public confidence now.  It's measured by someone from the Customer Service team ringing up a victim and asking if they were happy with the calltaker, the initial response, the investigation ad infinitum.

I see three problems with this.

First of all, it's completely and utterly unscientific.  The public at large don't have a clue what we do (much as I don't have a clue what makes a really effective teacher) and don't really know if we're being effective or not.  It's completely and utterly subjective.  Someone might respond to the survey and say they were completely happy with the whole process just because they fancied the response officer who turned up to take initial details - whether we actually caught their burglar or not.

At the other end of the spectrum, I recall talking to a lady who had reported a group of youths kicking a football about and being noisy on the green opposite her house.  As it happened, it was a quiet shift and we had a unit less than a mile away, so we got there in less than the 15 minute Grade 1 response time.  Unfortunately the youths had chosen that very moment to go home, so it fell to me to phone the lady back and report ASNT.  She was furious - "This has been going on and on for months, and the police do nothing, I pay your wages" and on and on and on.  She would be totally dissatisfied with us - despite the fact that we'd given better-than-mandated service.

Secondly, public opinion is too easily swayed.  The press seem to enjoy giving the police a kicking - a big front-page article in the Daily Hate Mail, and suddenly all the surveys would be negative.

Finally, it ignores all the behind-the-scenes work.  An enormous amount of intelligence work goes into preventative policing, and we get some great results from intelligence gathered by our own officers, and the intel people who look at all the call logs from the public.  The obvious example to use here is cannabis factories - we might find one and bust it on the basis of something suspicious that a PCSO notices when out on his beat, thereby removing a lot of criminal activity and the comings-and-going of some seriously nasty people from what's usually a fairly innocuous suburban street.  You might never know a thing about it, apart from vaguely wondering why you were woken up in the night with a bang as we bashed the door in, but we've just made your street a whole lot safer and more pleasant.

I don't have an answer to this, I don't know what the best way to measure police performance is.  But I can see that it must be measured, and relying on unscientific polls of what the public think is not the way to do it.