The Thin Blue Line

WE NEED A ROYAL COMMISSION ON POLICING FAST!

2011-06-02T04:59:00.000-07:00

We need a Royal Commission!

The service is now facing its biggest overhaul in decades, after more than 40 years of piecemeal reform. Jon Gilbin, Chairman of the Sergeants' Central Committee, explains why a Royal Commission into policing is now needed more than ever.

The Police Federation of England and Wales has been calling for a wholesale root and branch review of policing for over ten years, as a consequence of the piecemeal and disparate approaches to reform that have characterised these past decades.

These changes have invariably created more problems than they have solved. We are long overdue a review of the way England and Wales are policed.

The last such review took place in 1962 and a lot has changed since then. Now, nearly 50 years on, the climate is such that there has never been a better time to undertake a fundamental and holistic review, by way of a Royal Commission, into all aspects of policing in England and Wales.

"The Hutton review on police pensions, the Winsor review on police pay and conditions, the Neyroud review of leadership and training – are all indicative of this piecemeal, disjointed and reactionary approach that addresses only part of the problem".

The Hutton review on police pensions, the Winsor review on police pay and conditions, the Neyroud review of leadership and training – these are all indicative of the piecemeal, disjointed and reactionary approach that addresses only part of the problem, not the whole problem.

The Police Reform Act 2002 set the scene and prepared the way for a myriad of inquiries, reports and reviews into the way Britain should be policed at the commencement of the 21st century. At its heart was a complete re-engineering of policing, with the focus being on increased performance, efficiency, flexibility and citizen-focused policing of diverse neighbourhoods, but there was to be no Royal Commission.

To contact your MP, go to www.polfed.org/mediacenter/get_involved.asp and insert your postcode in the box provided.

However, no one appears to be providing the level of detailed, independent and objective assessment of what the police service and community really need. The lack of recognition of the role and skills of a police officer, and in particular the uniqueness of the office of constable, is deeply disturbing and worrying.

While administrative tasks have increasingly been undertaken by non-sworn staff, more and more operational roles are now being carried out by them too. Little or no consideration appears to have been given to the impact this will have on policing as we know it in the medium to long term.

"We are witnessing a fragmentation of the police service, characterised by a lack of standardisation, consistency and clarity of roles and responsibilities. This has been compounded by increased financial pressures for forces and concerns around resources, capacity and resilience".

We are now witnessing a fragmentation of the police service, characterised by a lack of standardisation, consistency and clarity of roles and responsibilities. This has been compounded by increased financial pressures for forces and concerns around resources, capacity and resilience. Quite understandably this has raised concerns as to the confused and dysfunctional nature of the current state of policing as a consequence of political interference.

A Royal Commission, much along the same lines of that of 1962, is desperately needed.

So, why was there a Royal Commission in 1962 and how did it come to manifest itself in the Police Act 1964? The early 1960s were years of uncertainty for the police service and for the organs of central and local government which administered it.

For the first time since the ‘new Police’ were created in 1829, a Royal Commission was appointed in January 1960 with terms of reference sufficiently wide ranging to require it to examine afresh the fundamental principles on which the service relied.

At the same time the Commission was asked to review the principles governing police pay. It was also to inquire into relations between the police and the public and the manner in which complaints were dealt with. As a result 111 recommendations were drawn up by the Commission and the final report was published in May 1962. The estimated expenditure of the Commission was £49,370. Not surprisingly, it discovered a great deal that was out of date. Many of those original recommendations remain today, including the role of the constable, HMIC, and police authorities. The Bill received Royal Assent in June 1964.

Fifty years have elapsed since the last Royal Commission. I would argue that just as in 1962 we are at a pivotal point in our history, that society has changed immeasurably since the 1960s and the police service must change with it. The only way that can be achieved is through a far-reaching independent approach – a Royal Commission.

If a Royal Commission were to examine the police service today, I have no doubt that it would reveal that its current structures and practices are out of date. It is time to be bold.

FEDERATION AND ACPO SLUG IT OUT

2011-05-30T18:10:00.000-07:00

As regular visitors to these pages will know, the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) have, by their arrogance and prior actions, provided plenty of negative fodder for the media machine. To see our previous articles simply type ACPO in the search box above. It will not surprise many to hear that the ACPO articles are the most read on these pages.

Following in the wake of the police federation conference, ACPO have yet again missed a vital opportunity to forge closer bonds with the rank and file officers they are meant to lead. In these difficult times, one would ave thought that common sense and the desire to protect the service as a whole would have been in evidence from the illustrious leaders. Sadly, yet again, they have shown what a self serving, arrogant bunch they are. No slight is intended against any individual chief, no doubt many perform a valuable function for their respective forces. Ask them to comment or contribute as a group and it all goes pear shaped.

Such is the rank and file anger and discontent with ACPO, that a no confidence motion was tabled at the conference, spearheaded by the Metropolitan Police Federation.

An open letter has been sent to Sir Hugh Orde, the President of ACPO, to express concern at his non-attendance at the Police Federation Conference in Bournemouth, passing the opportunity to listen and respond to officers and representatives of the government.

Conference passed an emergency motion instructing the Joint Central Committee of the Police Federation of England and Wales to write this letter to the Association of Chief Police Officers stating that the Police Federation of England and Wales has no confidence in ACPO acting in the best interests of British Policing.

An open letter to the professional body from Fed Chairman Paul McKeever and General Secretary Ian Rennie said members were disappointed by the President's (Sir Hugh Orde) lack of show – particularly at such a tough time for policing.

The letter, which followed a motion of no confidence in ACPO from conference delegates, also accuses the professional body of being "in thrall to the government".

And it adds that certain ACPO members seemed unwilling to directly challenge ministerial assertions that 20 per cent cuts to policing are manageable.

In pressing home their attack in the letter, the senior Fed officials said there had been "dissatisfaction and anger" in the Federated ranks during the conference.

The letter added: "It was clear that officers believe that ACPO is in thrall to this government and certain members appear unwilling to endanger their future prospects of employment by challenging the government's contention that 20 per cent cuts in the policing budget are perfectly manageable.

"Disappointingly, ACPO seem intent on supporting the reduction in police officers' pay and conditions which has provided them with the most flexible workforce in the country.

"We currently have the perfect storm in policing resulting from Winsor's attack on pay and conditions, Neyroud's proposals on promotion and leadership and Lord Hutton's proposals on pensions. Policing and Crime Commissioners will potentially change the political dynamics in the Service and there is a move to remove police officers from the protection of health and safety legislation.

"Regrettably, it is being left to the Police Federation to voice the concerns that should be raised by senior officers in the Service and, in particular, by you as the President of ACPO."

http://www.polfed.org/Open_letter_to_SirHughOrde_240511.pdf

The response from Sir Hugh will have disappointed the Federation and their rank and file membership for its arrogance and lack of real empathy for the plight of the junior ranks.

27 May 2010

Paul McKeever
Chairman
Police Federation
Federation House
Highbury Drive
Leatherhead
Surrey
KT22 7UY

Dear Paul and Ian,

The strength of ACPO lies in the collective knowledge, experience and endeavour of the leadership of the police service, across all forces in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Your role is to represent your members – ours is to lead. I can say with absolute certainty that every chief officer team is working tirelessly within their force, bearing in mind the very difficult financial situation we are presented with, to cut budgets while preserving the critical service we deliver to the public.

The reality is that this is extremely challenging: and a number of forces have had to take drastic action to balance budgets. We must be entirely clear about this with our public, with government and with all those who work within the service. Each force is impacted in different ways and many chiefs have articulated this both in public and in private. Without question, the service overall will suffer and reduce. As chief officers our job is to lead policing through these difficult times, remaining focussed on keeping communities safe from harm.

We all share a passion for the British model of policing, admired and imitated across the world; it is a model you and I seek to preserve. With this in mind we continue to inform and engage during the passage through Parliament of the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill. In our professional view, clear and strong checks and balances are a crucial element of any reform, in order to preserve impartiality, the freedom to deliver policing without political interference, and the Office of Constable which we consider so precious.

We are mindful always of the painful impact of budget cuts on our workforce. The Winsor, Neyroud and Hutton recommendations are all subject to consultation and we are determined that the outcomes of these processes should recognise and reward officers fairly for the difficult, dangerous and critical job that they do. I feel we can best do this by recognising our different roles but more importantly reinforcing our desire to serve our communities.

ACPO was very strongly represented at your conference by Peter Fahy, Mick Creedon, Adrian Lee, Phil Gormley, Francis Habgood and Nick Gargan on the agenda and many others in attendance. In our many conversations beforehand, in response to my question, you clearly indicated that my own unavailability was not of particular concern to you. Having had the privilege to stand toe to toe with the outstanding members of the Service I led in Northern Ireland, I find some of your personal comments disappointing and unnecessary. As President, I have never declined an invitation when possible to meet and engage with you and your members, and I restated that commitment in my letter to you of 12 May, which I requested that you share with your members.

I therefore repeat the suggestion I made then of an early meeting, with you and as many of your colleagues as you would like to be present.

I have shared this letter with chiefs and commissioners across England, Wales and Northern Ireland, who have elected to add their signatures. We speak with one voice, and will continue to lead this great institution with huge pride.

Yours sincerely

Sir Hugh Orde OBE, QPM

President of ACPO

http://www.acpo.police.uk/documents/Hugh's%20Speeches/Letter%20to%20the%20Fed__Final%201.pdf

Signatories to Sir Hughs' ACPO Response

"The strength of ACPO lies in the collective knowledge, experience and endeavour of the leadership of the police service, across all forces in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Your role is to represent your members – ours is to lead".

Am I the only one who thinks this sounds condescending and patronising? An unwarranted slap-down even? Your role etc etc ... completely ignores the comments made by Paul voicing the concerns of the members. Yes, I'm pretty sure Paul is fully aware what his role is, it would just make a nice pleasant change, for once to receive a reply that even hints at the ACPO oligarchy being genuinely albeit slightly interested in the rank and file, their fears and concerns at this difficult time.

The remainder of the letter comes across as insincere platitudes. Only yesterday, we posted an atricle about how Whitehall Civil Servants have created a tangled web of self protecting, self serving policies, procedures and contrary edicts that obfuscate and obstruct well intended ministers from achieving much needed reforms as well as forging a culture of selfish protectionsim.

ACPO as an organisation seems cast from the same mould as these manipulative Whitehall departments. One only has to remind ourselves of a few of the Yes Minister favourite scripts to put us in mind of how the ACPO oligarchy has in itself become a vast political animal. As Paul Mckeever rightly put it: "Officers believe that ACPO is in thrall to this government and certain members appear unwilling to endanger their future prospects of employment by challenging the government's contention that 20 per cent cuts in the policing budget are perfectly manageable".

References to "Politician" have been exchanged for "Chief Officers" , "ACPO" or policing equivalents. See how well the substitution works wihout distorting any of the original meaning....

"ACPO speeches are not written for the audience to which they are delivered. Delivering the speech is merely the formality that has to be gone through in order to get the press release into the newspapers."

"It is axiomatic in policing that hornets' nests should be left unstirred, cans of worms should remain unopened, and cats should be left firmly in bags and not set among the pigeons. Chief Offficers should also leave boats unrocked, nettles ungrasped, refrain from taking bulls by the horns, and resolutely turn their backs to the music."

"Policing is about principles. And the principle is, never act on principle."

"A Chief Officers dilemma. He must obviously follow his conscience, but he must also know where he's going. So he can't follow his conscience, because it may not be going the same way that he is."

"Police strategic management could be defined: Manipulation, Intrigue, Wire-pulling, Evasion, Rabble-rousing, Graft."

"Wearing two hats is not difficult for those who are in two minds. Or have two faces."

"The history of the world is the history of the triumph of the heartless over the mindless."

"We dare not allow politicians to establish the principle that senior police officers can be removed for incompetence. We could loose dozens of our chaps. Hundreds maybe. Even thousands."

Asking Police Chiefs to abandon Bureaucracy and obfuscation will be like asking a mother to abandon its child.

ACPO as an organization is in on the ropes, both financially and in terms of its integrity as a so called professional body. The rank and file have lost all confidence in them. The public and media mistrust them. Accusations of scurrilous disloyal conduct have been too many and too visible to ignore. The Coalition merely tolerate them. The Conservative Shadow cabinet under David Camerons direction accused ACPO of giving “political cover to the Labour Government repeatedly and consistently” and engaging in “gratuitous photocalls” with Gordon Brown and other ministers. It went on to say it “showed almost no criticism of the current Government”.

ACPO ARE SELF SERVING, DECEITFUL, SECRETIVE AND DISLOYAL TO THE ROOT AND BRANCH OFFICERS THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO LEAD WITH HONOUR. IT IS HIGH TIME THIS BOYS CLUB WAS DISBANDED SO THAT CHIEF OFFICERS CAN RETURN TO WHAT THEY ARE PAID FOR, WHAT THE PUBLIC EXPECTS OF THEM, TO LEAD THEIR OFFICERS AT FORCE LEVEL, FROM THE FRONT, WITH HONESTY, RESPECT, INTEGRITY AND LOYALTY, QUALITIES THAT HAVE BEEN SADLY LACKING.

It should not be down to the Federation to be the only voice of sense in this malaise. Whilst ACPO is allowed to continue, despite their weak protestations to the contrary, the "Us and Them" culture will pervade. Many times this has been evidenced in the private sector, where powerful Governing bodies have been able to "divide and conquer" opposing views from organisations. The police service is no different. Whilst ACPO play the political game, (yet all the time insisting they want to rid the service of politicisation), every Government will use the division between the ranks as a lever to extract what THEY want from the situation. Only when the division no longer exists and the service is once again united, will it regain its strength and bargaining power.

Other popular ACPO articles:

http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2010/12/come-in-acpo-your-time-is-up.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2010/11/top-cop-pay-bonus-scandal-chiefs-still.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2010/09/should-federation-have-parity-with-acpo.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2010/08/case-against-acpo.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2010/08/disgraceful-acpo-betray-frontline.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2010/06/20-things-you-wont-hear-at-acpo-this.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2010/05/too-many-chiefs-part-3-full-report.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2010/04/criminal-justice-uk-police-part-2.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2010/02/chief-police-officers-and-home-office.html

WAITING FOR REAL POLICE REFORM? - DON'T HOLD YOUR BREATH

2011-05-30T03:06:00.000-07:00

It is over a year now since the Coalition came to power. Police Reform was high on the Conservative Party pre election agenda. On these pages and others that write frequently about policing and criminal justice matters, we frequently look at the initial stated aims of politicians, measuring them against what they actually achieve.

With thanks to the "All Copped Out" blog which served as inspiration, in this article we look at the often negative effect of Whitehall and the Civil Servants on achieving much needed reforms.

Home Secretaries of all political colours through the years have battled with the bureaucracy and hidden agendas of the Whitehall brigade. It will be interesting to see if Theresa May proves any more effective than her predecessors in driving reforms through.

SOMETIMES, fiction is the best guide to reality. Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister accurately depicts the real life warped relationship between a politicians and servants, who spend much of their time thwarting well intended plans and turning reforming politicos into pathetic creatures of the establishment.

Yet what is astonishing is that whilst the series’ ran between 1980 and 1988, the themes and issues remain incredibly contemporary. History is repeating itself; the coalition has learnt nothing from the failures of previous governments. But it is not all as it was in the 1980s. The series’ fictional permanent secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby, was a brilliant man. The fact that Appleby spent all of his time sabotaging reform, openness and his minister Jim Hacker’s political goals – Appleby is the real boss, with Hacker tolerated as a passing nuisance – didn’t detract from his competence. The problem was one of incentives – bureaucratic empire building was the primary objective, not improving the country – not ability.

While the incentive mismatch remains a lethal issue today, an added tragedy is that the quality of the civil service has also deteriorated, as testified by the fact that so much government legislation is riddled with errors, internal inconsistencies and other problems. The bureaucracy has lost much of its competence. The “Rolls-Royce” (yet deeply flawed) civil service of yore no longer exists. The situation is even worse in quangos; the biggest problem is a lack of managerial ability among senior people. Few of those in positions of power have real, private sector operational knowledge.

Many intelligent, altruistic and principled people work for the state. But the average competence of civil servants is in decline. Our antiquated and over-centralised system now resembles a cross between Yes, Minister and the Thick of It, a modern-day, coarser and horribly plausible satire developed by Armando Iannucci, where the political-spin-doctor-civil service establishment is depicted as idiotic, gutless, incompetent and power-hungry.

One problem is that so much power has been transferred to the European Union. The last thing clever graduates want to spend their time doing is to become implementers of somebody else’s legislation. Another force halting reform is that government decisions are now all constantly subject to litigation and judicial review. Civil servants routinely take lawyers into meetings with ministers; their first reaction to any proposed change is that it is illegal. Often, this has to do with European legislation or human rights. There is also a fresh dimension: the Labour-imposed requirement to perform Equality Impact Assessments on all policies, with any deemed to discriminate against a “disadvantaged” group automatically open to legal action. These EIAs are a complete disaster and have given officials as well as pressure groups carte blanche to kill off all change – including the entirety of the austerity programme. Unless the coalition acts fast, it will be soon be overwhelmed.

Some of the best bits from YM and YPM say it all really . . . .

Jim Hacker takes office - In the first ever episode, Jim Hacker is made Minister for Administrative Affairs and meets his Principal Private Secretary, Bernard Woolley, and Permanent Secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby.

Bernard shows the Minister round his office: “It used to be said there were two kinds of chairs to go with two kinds of ministers: one sort that folds up instantly and the other sort that goes round and round in circles.”

Political animals - Hacker meets animal rights protesters. Activist: “There is nothing special about man, Mr Hacker. We’re not above nature. We’re all part of it. Men are animals too, you know.” Hacker: “I know that, I’ve just come from the House of Commons.”

Negative discrimination - Inspired by his wife, the Minister decides to do something about the number of women in the Civil Service.

Sir Humphrey: “Surely there aren’t all that many?”
Bernard: “The Minister thinks we need more.”
Sir Humphrey: “But we’re up to quota on typists, cleaners and tea ladies.”
Hacker: “I’m talking about senior civil servants. We need female mandarins.”
Bernard: “Sort of satsumas?”

Drinks Cabinet - The Home Secretary is arrested for drink-driving after causing a lorry loaded with nuclear waste to crash.
Hacker: “He’ll have to resign.”
Sir Humphrey: “Alas, yes.”
Hacker: “What on earth will happen to him?”
Sir Humphrey: “Well, I gather he was as drunk as a lord, so after a discreet interval, they’ll probably make him one.”

A matter of honours - Bernard explains the abbreviations for various Foreign Office honours.
Bernard: “Of course, in the service, CMG stands for Call Me God. And KCMG for Kindly Call Me God.”
Hacker: “What about GCMG?”
Bernard: “God Calls Me God.”

Lies, damned lies…
The Minister is interviewed by the BBC.
Hacker: “This government believes in reducing bureaucracy.”
Ludovic Kennedy: “Well, figures that I have here say that your department’s staff has risen by 10 per cent.”
Hacker: “Certainly not. I believe the figure is much more like 9.97.”
Kennedy: “How are you going to meet the challenge of reform?”
Hacker: “It’s far too early to give detailed proposals. After all, I have just come here direct from Number 10.”
Kennedy: “From Number 9.97, perhaps?”

Briefs encounter - Hacker is about to face a Select Committee hearing. Sir Humphrey has prepared copious briefing notes for him.
Hacker: “Why can’t ministers go anywhere without briefs?”
Bernard: “It’s in case they get caught with their trousers down.”

Industrial language - Sir Humphrey secretly encourages health workers to go on strike.
Union official: “But what about the Minister?”
Sir Humphrey: “The Minister doesn’t know his ACAS from his NALGO.”

Better out-tray than in-tray - When the Minister is inundated with correspondence, Bernard offers to take it off his hands by sending “official replies”.
Bernard: “I’ll just say, ‘The Minister has asked me to thank you for your letter’ and something like ‘The matter is under consideration’, or even ‘under active consideration’.”
Hacker: “What’s the difference?”
Bernard: “Well, ‘under consideration’ means we’ve lost the file, ‘under active consideration’ means we’re trying to find it.”

The Euro-sausage - The Minister has been in talks with the European Commissioner about standardising the names of foodstuffs.
Bernard: “They can’t stop us eating the British sausage, can they?”
Hacker: “No, but they can stop us calling it a sausage. Apparently it’s got to be called the Emulsified High-Fat Offal Tube.”
Bernard: “And you swallowed it?”

OPEN GOVERNMENT - "If people don't know what you're doing, they don't know what you're doing wrong."
"It is sometimes difficult to explain to Ministers that open government can sometimes mean informing their Cabinet colleagues as well as their friends in Fleet Street."
"Minister's language: 'We have decided to be more flexible in our application of this principle' means 'We are dropping this policy but we don't want to admit it publicly'. "

OFFICIAL VISIT - "A career in politics is no preparation for government."

ECONOMY DRIVE - "Asking a town hall to slim down its staff is like asking an alcoholic to blow up a distillery."
"Politicians must be allowed to panic. They need activity. It is their substitute for achievement."
"The argument that we must do everything a Minister demands because he has been 'democratically chosen' does not stand up to close inspection. MPs are not chosen by 'the people' - they are chosen by their local constituency parties: thirty-five men in grubby raincoats or thirty-five women in silly hats. The further 'selection' process is equally a nonsense: there are only 630 MPs and a party with just over 300 MPs forms a government and of these 300, 100 are too old and too silly to be ministers and 100 too young and too callow. Therefore there are about 100 MPs to fill 100 government posts. Effectively no choice at all."

"Seven ways of explaining away the fact that North-West region has saved £32 million while your department overspent:

1. They have changed their accounting system in the North-West.
2. Redrawn the boundaries, so that this year's figures are not comparable.
3. The money was compensation for special extra expenditure of £16 million a year over the last two years, which has now stopped.
4. It is only a paper bag saving, so it will have to be spent next year.
5. A major expenditure is late in completion and therefore the region will be correspondingly over budget next year. (Known technically as phasing - Ed)
6. There has been an unforeseen but important shift in personnel and industries to other regions whose expenditure rose accordingly.
7. Some large projects were cancelled for reasons of economy early in the accounting period with the result that the expenditure was not incurred but the budget had already been allocated."

"There has to be a nuclear bunker in Whitehall. Government doesn't stop merely because the country has been destroyed. Annihilation is bad enough. Without anarchy to make it even worse."

"The press described the Prime Minster as 'overwrought' today. In fact he was overwrought as a newt."

BIG BROTHER - "Stalling Cabinet Ministers: the 5-stage formula

1. The administration is in its early months and there's an awful lot to do at once.
2. Something ought to be done but is this the right way to achieve it?
3. The idea is good but the time is not ripe.
4. The proposal has run into technical, logistic and legal difficulties which are being sorted out.
5. Never refer to the matter or reply to the Minister's notes. By the time he taxes you with it face to face you should be able to say it looks unlikely if anything can be done until after the election."

"The Opposition aren't really the opposition. They are only the Government in exile. The Civil Service are the opposition in residence. "

WRITING ON THE WALL - "Civil Service language: 'Sometimes one is forced to consider the possibility that affairs are being conducted in a manner which, all things being considered and making all possible allowances is, not to put too fine a point on it, perhaps not entirely straightforward.

Translation: 'You are lying'."

"The Prime Minister doesn't want the truth, he wants something he can tell Parliament."

THE RIGHT TO KNOW - "Almost anything can be attacked as a failure, but almost anything can be defended as not a significant failure. Politicians do not appreciate the significance of 'significant'. "

"The emotions of the environmentalist lobby are rooted more in Thoreau than in anger."

"If Civil Servants did not fight for the budgets of their departments they could end up with departments so small that even the Ministers could run them."

"Private Secretaries have divided loyalties - to their Minister and to the Civil Service. Whose side are they on when the chips are down? It is their job to see the chips stay up."

JOBS FOR THE BOYS - "The Official Secrets Act is not to protect secrets, it is to protect officials."

The perfect representative on a government committee is a disabled black Welsh woman trades unionist."

"Conjurors offer the audience any card in the pack and always get them to take the one they want. This is the way we in the Civil Service get Ministers to take decisions."

"It is my job to protect the Prime Minister from the great tide of irrelevant information that beats against the walls of 10 Downing Street every day."

THE COMPASSIONATE SOCIETY - "People do not want to know how welfare money has actually been spent. Nobody asks the priest what happen to the ritual offering after the ceremony."

"Why should we close a hospital because it has no patients? We don't disband the Army just because there isn't a war."

DOING THE HONOURS - "'This would create a dangerous precedent'. Translation: 'If we do the right thing now, we might have to do the right thing again next time'."

"Avoiding precedents does not mean nothing should ever be done. It only means that nothing should ever be done for the first time."

"The Letters JB in capitals are one of the highest Commonwealth honours. They stand for Jailed by the British. The order includes Gandhi, Nkrumah, Makarios, Ben Gurion, Kenyatta, Nheru, Mugabe and many other world leaders."

"No one really understands the true nature of fawning servility until he sees an academic who has glimpsed the prospect of money or personal publicity."

"The surprising things about academics is not that they have their price, but how low that price is."

THE DEATH LIST - "Ministers have an enviable intellectual suppleness and moral manoeuvrability. Translation: You can't trust them further than you can throw them."

THE GREASY POLE - "It is only totalitarian governments that suppress facts. In this country we simply take a democratic decision not to publish them."
"How to discredit an unwelcome report:

Stage One: Refuse to publish in the public interest saying
1. There are security considerations.
2. The findings could be misinterpreted.
3. You are waiting for the results of a wider and more detailed report which is still in preparation. (If there isn't one, commission it; this gives you even more time).

Stage Two: Discredit the evidence you are not publishing, saying
1. It leaves important questions unanswered.
2. Much of the evidence is inconclusive.
3. The figures are open to other interpretations.
4. Certain findings are contradictory.
5. Some of the main conclusions have been questioned. (If they haven't, question them yourself; then they have).

Stage Three: Undermine the recommendations. Suggested phrases:
1. 'Not really a basis for long term decisions'.
2. 'Not sufficient information on which to base a valid assessment'.
3. 'No reason for any fundamental rethink of existing policy'.
4. 'Broadly speaking, it endorses current practice'.

Stage Four: Discredit the person who produced the report. Explain (off the record) that
1. He is harbouring a grudge against the Department.
2. He is a publicity seeker.
3. He is trying to get a Knighthood/Chair/Vice Chancellorship.
4. He used to be a consultant to a multinational.
5. He wants to be a consultant to a multinational."

"To suppress an internal government report, rewrite it as official advice to the Minister. Then it is against the rules to publish it, so you can leak the bits you want to friendly journalists."

"Going from Commons to the Lords is like being moved the animals to the vegetables."

THE DEVIL YOU KNOW - "The Common Market: We went into it to screw the French by splitting them off from the Germans. The French went in to protect their inefficient farmers from commercial competition. The Germans went in to purge themselves of genocide and apply for readmission to the human race."

THE QUALITY OF LIFE - "If you are not happy with Minister's decision there is no need to argue him out of it. Accept it warmly, and then suggested he leaves it to you to work out the details."

A QUESTION OF LOYALTY - "A good political speech is not one in which you can prove that the man is telling the truth; it is one where no one else can prove he is lying."

"Politicians speeches are not written for the audience to which they are delivered. Delivering the speech is merely the formality that has to be gone through in order to get the press release into the newspapers."

"Ministers do not believe they exist unless they are reading about themselves in the newspapers."

"It is our job to tell Select Committees the truth and nothing but the truth. But it would be profoundly inappropriate and grossly irresponsible to tell them the whole truth."

"Ministers must never go anywhere without their briefs, in case they get caught with their trousers down."

PREFACE - "Any statement in a politician's memoirs can represent one of six different levels of reality:

a. What happened.
b. What he believed happened.
c. What he would have liked to have happened.
d. What he wants to believe happened.
e. What he wants other people to believe happened.
f. What he wants other people to believe he believed happened."

"Civil Servants need great flexibility. They have to be constantly prepared to change horses in mid stream, as politicians change what they are pleased to call their minds."

"The Civil Service must always have the right to appoint the best man for the job, regardless of sex."

"Too much Civil Service work consists of circulating information that isn't relevant about subjects that don't matter to people who aren't interested."

THE MORAL DIMENSION - "Terms for describing bribes when drawing up contracts:

1. Below £100,000
- Retainers
- Personal donations
- Special discounts
- Miscellaneous outgoings
2. £100,000 to £500,000
- Managerial surcharge
- Operating costs
- Ex-gratia payments
- Agents' fees
- Political contributions
- Extra-contractual payments
3. £500,000 +
- Introduction fees
- Commission fees
- Managements' expenses
- Administrative overheads
- Advance against profit sharing"

"Politicians' language:
- Special development areas = marginal constituencies.
- Assistance to areas of economic hardship = pouring money into marginal constituencies.
- Descentralisation of government = moving government offices into marginal constituencies."

BED OF NAILS - "All governments departments are lobbies for the pressure groups they deal with. The Department of Education lobbies the government on behalf of teachers, the Department of Health lobbies for the doctors and hospital unions, the Department of Energy lobbies for oil companies and so on. Each department of State is actually controlled by the people it is supposed to be controlling."

"The Civil Service is neither right wing nor left wing. Political bias varies from department to department. Defence, whose clients are military, is right wing, where as Health, dealing with health unions and social workers, is left wing. Industry, dealing with employers, is right wing; Employment, dealing with unions, is left wing. The Home Office - police, prison warders, immigration officers - is right wing. Education - teachers and lecturers - is left wing. The result is a perfectly balanced and neutral Civil Service."

"Leak enquiries are for setting up, not for conducting."

THE WHISKEY PRIEST - "Reorganizing the Civil Service is like drawing a knife through a bowl of marbles."

"Government is not about morality, it is about stability; keeping things going, preventing anarchy, stopping society falling to bits. Still being here tomorrow."

"It is axiomatic in government that hornets' nests should be left unstirred, cans of worms should remain unopened, and cats should be left firmly in bags and not set among the pigeons. Ministers should also leave boats unrocked, nettles ungrasped, refrain from taking bulls by the horns, and resolutely turn their backs to the music."

"A minister who finds out that the government is doing something illegal does not have to tell the Prime Minister. Just because he's caught something nasty, he doesn't have to go round breathing over everyone."

"Government is about principles. And the principle is, never act on principle."

"A Politician's dilemma. He must obviously follow his conscience, but he must also know where he's going. So he can't follow his conscience, because it may not be going the same way that he is."

MIDDLE CLASS RIP OFF - "Politics, as defined by Roget's Thesaurus: Manipulation, Intrigue, Wire-pulling, Evasion, Rabble-rousing, Graft."

SKELETON IN THE CUPBOARD - "Administration is about means, not ends. The only ends in administration are loose ends."

"The three most unreliable things in public life: Political Memoirs, Official Denials and Manifesto Promises."
"It is possible to remove everything of significance from a file released under the 30-year rule by saying that it is complete except for:
a. A small number of secret documents.
b. A few documents which are part of still active files.
c. Some correspondence lost in the floods of 1967.
d. Some records which went astray in the move to London.
e. Other records which went astray when the Department was reorganized.
f. The normal withdrawal of papers whose publication could give grounds for an action for libel of breach of confidence or cause embarrassment to friendly governments."

PARTY GAMES - "To watch a Cabinet Minister in action is to watch the endless subordination of important long-term issues to the demands of urgent trivia."

"As long as there is anything to be gained by saying nothing, it is always better to say nothing than anything."

"The first rule of politics: never believe anything until it's been officially denied."

"'The Government's position' means 'the best explanation of past events that cannot be disproved by available facts'."

"If asked if he wants to be Prime Minister, the generally acceptable answer for a politician is that while he does not seek the office, he has pledged himself to the service of his country, and that should his colleagues persuade him that that is the best way he can serve, he might reluctantly have to accept the responsibility, whatever his personal wishes might be."

"Solved problems aren't news. Tell the press a story in two halves - the problem first and the solution later. Then they get a disaster story one day and triumph story the next."

"If any sentence in a television broadcast has more than twenty words, when it gets to the end most people have forgotten how it began. Including the person speaking it."

"Things don't happen just because Prime Ministers are keen on them. Neville Chamberlain was keen on peace."

"If a job's worth doing, it's worth delegating."

"Politician's logic:
We must do something.
This is something.
Therefore we must do it."

"The problem of the Ministry of Defence is that in peace time the three armed forces have no one on whom to vent their warlike instincts except the cabinet or each other."

"If we cannot refute the arguments in a paper, we simply discredit the person who wrote it. This is called playing the man and not the ball."

THE KEY - "It is important to put political advisors in rooms as far away as possible from the Prime Minister. Influence diminishes with distance."

"Our job is to see that the PM is not confused. Politicians are simple people; they like simple people; they like simple choices and clear guidance."

"We do not have to accept a political advisor just because the PM likes her. Samson liked Delilah."

A REAL PARTNERSHIP - "In government, many people have the power to stop things happening but almost nobody has the power to make things happen. The system has the engine of a lawn mower and the brakes of a Rolls Royce."

"When anybody says 'It's not the money, it's the principle' they mean it's the money."

"Being an MP is a vast subsidized ego-trip. It's a job that needs no qualifications, it has no compulsory hours of work, no performance standards, and provides a warm room, a telephone and subsidized meals to a bunch of self-important windbags and busybodies who suddenly find people taking them seriously because they've go the letters 'MP' after the their name."

"The Prime Minister is much more worried by discontent among back-benchers than among nurses and teachers. Nurses and teachers can't vote against him until the next election. Back-benchers can vote against him at 10 o'clock tonight."

"The Prime Minister wants Cabinet papers circulated earlier. But there are grave problems about circulating papers before they are written."

"Wearing two hats is not difficult for those who are in two minds. Or have two faces."

"A Civil Service computer strike would bring government to a standstill if it were not for the fact that it is already."

"Since Cabinet Ministers are incapable of understanding a paper more than three pages long, we put a one-page summary on the front. The Janet and John bit."

"If you do not want Cabinet to spend too long discussing something, make it last on the agenda before lunch."

"It is unthinkable that politicians should be allowed to remove civil servants on grounds of incompetence. Of course some civil servants are incompetent but not incompetent enough for a politician to notice. And if civil servants could remove politicians on grounds of incompetence it would empty the House of Commons, remove the Cabinet, and be the end of democracy and the beginning of responsible government."

"Foreign policy is made in the Foreign Office. Therefore the Cabinet cannot pursue it's own foreign policy unilaterally. The country cannot have two foreign policies."

"There was nothing wrong with appeasement. All that World War Two achieved after six years was to leave Eastern Europe under a Communist dictatorship instead of a Fascist dictatorship. That's what comes of not listening to the Foreign Office."

"Britain should always be on the side of law and justice, so long as we don't allow it to affect our foreign policy."

"It was a good idea to partition countries like India and Cyprus and Palestine and Ireland as a part of their independence. It keeps them busy fighting each other so we don't' have to have a policy about them."

"Diplomacy is about surviving to the next century. Politics is about surviving until Friday afternoon."

"The public aren't interested in foreign affairs. All they want to know is who are the goodies and who are the baddies."

"Foreign policy must be made in the Foreign office. It cannot be left to fools like Fleet Street editors, back-bench MPs and Cabinet Ministers."

"Ministers are ignorant not because we do not give them the right answers but because they do not ask us the right questions."

"It is well known that in the Foreign Office an order from the Prime Minister becomes a request from the Foreign Secretary, then a recommendation from the Minister of State, finally just a suggestion from the Ambassador. If it ever gets that far."

"Press statements are not delivered under oath."

"The Foreign Office is a hotbed of cold feet."

"A somewhat unorthox procedure means The act of a gibbering idiot."

THE SMOKE SCREEN - "Politicians are like children; you can't just give them what they want - it only encourages them."

"Any unwelcome initiative from a minister can be delayed until after the next election by the Civil Service 12-stage delaying process:
1. Informal discussions
2. Draft proposal
3. Preliminary study
4. Discussion document
5. In-depth study
6. Revised proposal
7. Policy statement
8. Strategy proposal
9. Discussion of strategy
10. Implementation plan circulated
11. Revised implementation plans
12. Cabinet agreement"

"The Treasury does not work out what it needs and then think how to raise the money. It pitches for as much as it can get away with and then thinks how to spend it."

"Government is not a team. It is a loose confederation of warring tribes."

"There is a moral principle involved in the government's attitude to smoking. But when four billion pounds of tax revenue is at stake, we have to consider very seriously how far we are entitled to indulge ourselves in the rather selfish luxury of pursuing moral principles."

"The history of the world is the history of the triumph of the heartless over the mindless."

"Pontius Pilate would have made very good Civil Servant."

"You can't put the nation's interest at risk just because of some silly sentimentality about justice."

"The Foreign Office never expect the Cabinet to agree with any of their policies. That is why they never explain them. All they require is that the Cabinet acquiesce in their decisions after they have been taken."

"The Foreign Office are not spineless. It takes a great deal of strength to do nothing all the time."

THE BISHOP'S GAMBIT - "Getting the PM to choose the right bishop is like a conjuror getting a member of the audience to choose a card. With the Church of England the choice is usually between a knave and a queen."

"The bench of bishops should have a proper balance between those who believe in God and those who don't."

"Bishops tend to live a long time, perhaps because the Almighty is not all that keen for them to join him."

"In Arab countries women get stoned when they commit adultery. In Britain, they commit adultery when they get stoned."

"We cannot leave the appointment of Bishops to the Holy Ghost, because no one is confident that the Holy Ghost would understand what makes a good Church of England bishop."

"An atheist clergyman could not continue to draw his stipend, so when they stop believing in God they call themselves 'modernists'."

"The Church of England is primarily a social organization not a religious one."

"Nowadays bishops only wear gaiters at significant religious events like the royal garden party."

"The plans for a new church in South London had places for dispensing orange juice, family planning, and organizing demos, but nowhere to celebrate Holy Communion."

"Theology is a device for helping agnostics to stay within the Church of England."

"The Queen is inseparable from the Church of England. God is an optional extra."

"The Foreign Office aren't there to do things. They're there to explain why things can't be done."

"People have said a lot of unpleasant things about the Foreign Office, but no one has ever accused them of patriotism."

ONE OF US - "Irregular verbs:

I have an independent mind
You are an eccentric
He is round the twist"

"If you believe the security of the realm is at risk you don't hold a security enquiry, you call in the Special Branch. Government security enquiries are only used for killing press stories."

"Giving information to Moscow is serious. Giving information to anyone is serious. Some information would do Britain less harm if given to the Kremlin than if given to the Cabinet."

"We dare not allow politicians to establish the principle that senior civil servants can be removed for incompetence. We could loose dozens of our chaps. Hundreds maybe. Even thousands."

The last one just about sums it up!

Asking Whitehall to abandon Bureaucracy and obfuscation will be like asking a mother to abandon its child.

Best of luck Theresa. If you can cut through the crap of Whitehall, ignore the self serving proposals of ACPO, believe more of what you hear from the rank and file and show REAL support and concern for those that matter most and side step the deflections from outside agencies, perhaps, just perhaps, the service may see some improvements during your term in office. As the title suggests, we won't be holding our breath.

TOP COPS SPURN THERESA MAY AND NCA TOP JOB

2011-05-27T02:26:00.000-07:00

WHEN CRIME DOESN'T PAY ENOUGH

Appointment of the boss of the National Crime Agency has been put on hold - because the £140,000 salary isn't enought to tempt applicants away from their existing Chief Officer roles.

Top candidates for the post have been put off by the massive pay cut they would have to take.

The NCA replaces the Serious Organised Crime Agency next year with a salary cap placed on the Chief Executive's job. This is to ensure he or she is not paid more that prime minister David Cameron who earns £142,500 a year.

Home Secretary Theresa May was expected to announce the appointment on Monday but, after the wrangle over the salary, the decision has been postponed.

The main candidates for the job are all paid salaries of at least £150,000. They are thought to be Sara Thornton, the £150k-a-year Chief Constable of Thames Valley, Cressida Dick, Assistant Commissioner in the Metropolitan Police on at least £180,000 and Bernard Hogan-Howe the HM Inspector of Constabulary who is believed to earn more than £150,000.

Police minister Nick Herbert apologised for the delay in a speech to the Serious Organised Crime forum last week. He said an announcement about who was to occupy the post was 'imminent'.

The people in the running already earn more than £140,000, so obviously this is a sticking point. It has been said that anyone willing to take a pay cut for that kind of pressure would need their heads examining.

As well as organised crime, the NCA will be responsible for some aspects of border policing and protecting children from exploitation.

In a previous article, http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2010/09/top-10-highest-paid-cops-are-they.html we asked the question whether the top 10 highest paid Chiefs were worth their salary and revealed that:

* 14 Chief Officers are paid a basic of £150,000+

* 6 Chief Officers are paid between £140 to £150,000 per annum
* 26 Chief Officers (inc Met Deputies) are paid between £130 and £140,000 per annum.

When the Government started applying the fiscal scalpel to policing, they should have started at the top.

THERE ARE TOO MANY CHIEFS. MANY OF THEM ARE PAID TOO MUCH.

THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH INDIANS AT THE FRONTLINE OF POLICING.

THESE ARE FUNDAMENTAL BASICS. THE GOVERNMENT MUST REVERSE THIS PROFLIGATE TREND IF THERE IS TO BE ANY HOPE OF RESTORING FAITH IN THE SERVICE, MORALE IN THE TROOPS AND CONFIDENCE IN THE LEADERSHIP OF THE SERVICE.

What's the betting the NCA boss won't come from this little lot either . . . . .

So, Home Secretary, we wonder if there is a suitable candidate among the remainder . . .

Rank and file officers feel justified in venting their anger at ACPO after feeling "badly let down" by the senior officers' body.

Peter Smyth, Chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, said that members felt the Association had failed to address key issues and had not put its case strongly enough to government.

He maintained that decision of his branch to bring an emergency motion at the Federation annual conference, tabling a vote of no confidence in ACPO, showed the true depth of feeling.

Following endorsement of the motion by members, an angry open letter has been sent and is expected to land on the desk of President Sir Hugh Orde imminently.

Mr Smyth told PoliceOracle.com: "We feel that ACPO has let us down by failing to fight our corner strongly enough with the Comprehensive Spending Review. The leaders of the Armed Forces and the National Health Service, in comparison, were quite vociferous and they managed to put their position across. We also felt that ACPO submissions about the Winsor Report were damaging."

Meanwhile the ACPO President Sir Hugh Orde has come under fire again for failing to attend the Police Federation conference in Bournemouth – and heading to an event in Canada instead.

An open letter to the professional body from Federation Chairman Paul McKeever and General Secretary Ian Rennie said members were disappointed by the President's lack of show – particularly at such a tough time for policing.

The letter, which followed a motion of no confidence in ACPO from conference delegates, also accuses the professional body of being "in thrall to the government".

And it adds that certain ACPO members seemed unwilling to directly challenge ministerial assertions that 20 per cent cuts to policing are manageable.

In pressing home their attack in the letter, the senior Federation officials said there had been "dissatisfaction and anger" in the Federated ranks during the conference. The letter added: "It was clear that officers believe that ACPO is in thrall to this government and certain members appear unwilling to endanger their future prospects of employment by challenging the government's contention that 20 per cent cuts in the policing budget are perfectly manageable.

"Disappointingly, ACPO seem intent on supporting the reduction in police officers' pay and conditions which has provided them with the most flexible workforce in the country.

"We currently have the perfect storm in policing resulting from Winsor's attack on pay and conditions, Neyroud's proposals on promotion and leadership and Lord Hutton's proposals on pensions. Policing and Crime Commissioners will potentially change the political dynamics in the Service and there is a move to remove police officers from the protection of health and safety legislation.

"Regrettably, it is being left to the Police Federation to voice the concerns that should be raised by senior officers in the Service and, in particular, by you as the President of ACPO."

With all this going on, it may be that Chief Officers have decided to "stay put and keep their heads down" choosing to avoid the critical spotlight and protect their already fat salaries and perks.

How the service has changed. It used to be that officers rose to the highest ranks for the honour, privilege and responsibility of such a prestigious role. In yet another example, the Chiefs have shown that honour has been surplanted by sheer GREED.

GUEST POST - INSPECTOR SIMON GUILFOYLE - WEST MIDLANDS POLICE

2011-05-22T09:43:00.000-07:00

As regular visitors will know, I have almost completed the latest Thin Blue Line analysis on police detections. Before uploading the report to the site, I would like to take this opportunity to welcome Inspector Simon Guilfoyle of West Midlands Police to the world of blogging.

Simon has recently launched his own blog which can be viewed here. I will let Simon introduce himself . . . . . .

"I am a West Midlands Police Inspector, in charge of seven neighbourhood policing teams and a proactive team covering the North East area of Wolverhampton, West Midlands. The areas covered are: Wednesfield, Heathtown, Fallings Park, Low Hill, Bushbury, Pendeford and Oxley.

I am a practical, fair and upfront person. I care deeply about the area I am responsible for and am passionate about policing and doing the right thing. I have a big problem with unnecessary bureaucracy, numerical targets and anything else that stops my officers from providing the best service they can.

I joined West Midlands Police in 1995 and with the exception of 15 months at headquarters I have always been a frontline uniformed officer. This is the job I joined to do and I am proud of it. Even my 15 months at HQ was spent implementing new working practices designed to make frontline policing more ‘common sense’ orientated for my colleagues out there.

Most of my time is spent running my sector, but I also provide Duty Inspector cover for the shift on 24/7 duties and am a public order trained officer (PSU Commander) so I get to work a lot of football, demonstrations, large events etc.

I’ve recently figured out how to use Twitter and am doing my best to embrace social media, hence this blog. I consider myself to be a systems thinker and try to apply this philosophy to real world policing. I also like catching the bad guys".

Simon has written an excellent article about police recorded crime and detections, "Crime In Progress: The Impact Of Targets On Police Service Delivery", the content of which is so relevant to the report I am compiling, he has given kind permission for it to be reproduced here. You can read his report here, or continue to scroll down this page.

Over to you Simon . . .

A Very Brief Intro

This article looks at the effect of numerical targets in public services, with a particular focus on the police in the UK. For those of you who do not wish to read over 6,000 words, the article can be summarised as follows:

■Priorities are important.
■Performance measurement (when done properly) is useful.
■Numerical targets are bad.

Simon Guilfoyle,

April 2011

What is ‘Good’ Police Performance?

Good police performance means different things to different people. From the perspective of a victim of crime, good performance might mean a prompt police response and competent investigation. A police manager may judge good performance by counting the number of arrests or detected offences recorded by individual officers. A local politician may consider that a reduction in the overall crime rate indicates good performance. Others may have different interpretations.

So what is ‘good performance’ and how should it be measured? A helpful definition of good performance is:

“A combination of doing the right things (priorities), doing them well (quality) and doing the right amount (quantity)”. (Home Office, 2008a)

If we take these three elements of good performance as a starting point, it becomes apparent how difficult it is to quantify ‘quality’. Numerical data relating to response times, arrest figures and crime rates is comparatively easy to measure, and in the absence of scientifically robust qualitative measures, it is argued that the police service has become heavily dependent on quantitative measures to assess performance.

From the outset it is appropriate to make the distinction between priorities and targets. Aims such as catching criminals and working to prevent crime are clearly appropriate priorities for a police force. ‘Priorities’ is one of the three features of the Home Office’s definition of good performance, and it would be difficult to argue that the police should not strive to prevent crime or prosecute offenders. The rub comes where a priority is fixed to a numerical target.

Before embarking on attempting to deconstruct the argument that numerical targets can ever be appropriate or useful, it is also necessary to voice strong support for the proper application of performance measurement – as long as it is used proportionately, the data is interpreted intelligently, and most of all, numerical targets are never a feature, performance measurement can be a valuable tool for understanding the system and improving service delivery.

Performance measurement can assist managers in recognising areas that require improvement and provides a solid evidence base for identifying weaknesses in the system. This enables action to be taken to make systemic adjustments, redirect resources, or address poor performance. Managers can interpret the data obtained from the performance measurement system to understand how the organisation is performing and monitor improvement or deterioration over time. The transparency achieved through effective performance management also has the benefit of enhancing accountability. This is particularly important in the public services arena.

There are, however, a number of caveats. Bouckaert and van Dooren (2003) argue that “…performance measurement is only useful if it improves policy or management” (2003, p.135), and this is the test that should be applied when determining whether a particular performance measurement system is necessary or appropriate.

Numbers, Numbers, Numbers

Reliance on numerical outputs as a measure of performance can be traced back to Taylor’s Theory of Scientific Management. (1911) This involved measuring relatively simple inputs and outputs, such as time taken to complete a unit of work, or the number of items produced. The methodology was originally intended for application in work environments such as in factories; units produced per hour would be measured and this would act as a benchmark for all the workers. Taylor’s approach resulted in the standardisation of working practices, and in the right conditions increased efficiency, but is limited to those environments where it is easy to measure performance by using numerical performance indicators. His methodology does not easily translate into more complex performance environments such as policing, where it is often difficult to accurately measure activity.

As numerical performance measurement systems are incapable of recognising quality, there is the danger that if a large number of poor quality units were produced it would still give the appearance of good performance. This is despite resultant product failure, rework, additional cost and ultimately a reduction in efficiency. This would occur whilst achieving numerical output targets and under the veneer of apparently good performance.

A particular limitation associated with numerical performance data is that it is difficult to establish a causal link between the number of outputs and whether the job gets done well. This is particularly relevant where managers are forced to rely on a proxy measure of performance, for example measuring the number of potholes filled in a day. The intention would be to establish if a highway repair team was performing well, but variables such as the size and depth of potholes, amount of traffic management required at each site, and distance travelled between sites would all affect the number of repairs a team could complete within a given time. Aside from the quality argument, this system would be biased towards a crew who have a large number of small potholes to repair on quiet roads within a compact area.

In the public sector, accurate performance measurement is even more problematic. Pollitt (1999) argues that this is because many public service activities are geared towards dealing with variable circumstances that do not lend themselves to producing simple outputs. Caers et al (2006) also argue that unlike the private sector, it can be difficult to measure the outputs generated by public services. Furthermore, it is notoriously difficult to establish a causal link between a specific activity and an eventual outcome.

For example, in a policing context, the output measured may be the number of arrests made, but the intended outcome could be increased feelings of safety within the community. The number of arrests made does not necessarily equate to increased feelings of safety, and may even indicate that officers are being over-zealous, or that crime has increased. In either case, this could actually alarm the community and drive down perceptions of safety. It is therefore proposed that simply measuring the number of arrests is meaningless.

Since the 1990s, targets have proliferated within the public sector. A series of top-down targets introduced in 1997 marked the intensification of the target-driven performance culture within the police service. Over subsequent years, the focus has shifted between detection and reduction targets, crime types, to public satisfaction rates and others.

Such targets include:
■Reducing the overall levels of crime and disorder.
■Reducing the levels of specified offence types (e.g. vehicle crime).
■Reducing the fear of crime.
■Increasing the number of detections per officer.

Many of these targets include prescriptive numerical measures (e.g. 30% reduction in vehicle crime over 5 years). Comparative information on how police forces performed against the targets is publicly disseminated, and league tables have been published that attribute success or failure based entirely on numerical data.

Whilst the ever-growing list of targets pertains to much policing activity that one would rightly expect to be prioritised, it does not take into account the myriad of external factors that can affect data outputs. For example, the overall crime rate can be affected by economic cycles, unemployment and social issues such as deprivation, substance abuse or poor personal security. None of these factors are directly within the gift of the police to directly control.

Furthermore there has never been any obvious science behind why a target would be set at for example, 30% instead of 32%, 27%, or 80%. Some targets appear to have been set purely because they are slightly higher than whatever was achieved during the previous period. This is purely based on the unenlightened assumption that the last period’s performance must have been ‘normal’. In some cases, crime detection targets appear embarrassingly low; for example the target for robbery detections in one police force is 13%. Why? Would the public think that this was impressive? Would the average police officer try harder (or conversely, expend less effort in catching robbers) if the target was 12% or 14% or 47%? Of course not. What is wrong with trying one’s best to catch as many robbers as possible, or in other words, to strive to achieve 100% all of the time?

Naturally, because of various external factors (e.g. lack of forensic evidence or no identification by witnesses) it is obvious that every single robber will not be caught, but it is argued that there is absolutely no benefit in setting an arbitrary numerical target in these circumstances. There is even less sense in feeling a great sense of achievement if 13.1% of robberies are detected one month, or a sense of failure if 12.9% are detected during the next.

In both the public and private sectors, a further consideration relevant to performance measurement is the cost involved in setting up and maintaining the system. (Pidd, 2005) Both internal and external performance measurement systems involve additional processes, overheads and staff. This has the effect of building in additional cost to the original activity and risks generating a burdensome and disproportionate audit and inspection culture. Power (1996) observes that such regimes have proliferated to such an extent in recent years that he has coined the term ‘The Audit Explosion.’

Not only does audit and inspection increase costs in financial terms, but there is the very real consequence of human cost, in terms of damage to morale and strained relationships. Clarke (2003) for example, notes the effect on morale, pointing out that the “…high cost / low trust mix…” of a “…competitive, intrusive and interventionist mode of scrutiny creates potentially antagonistic relationships”. (2003, pp.153-154) Argyris (1964) warns that control through performance measurement can be counterproductive, especially in the case of those individuals who are predisposed to work hard, as it can adversely affect motivation and lower productivity. Western (2007), drawing on Weber (1930, 1947) also warns of the damage to morale and the dehumanizing effects of Taylorist methodology.

Control Freakery

It is argued here that the real danger with performance management systems is when they are used as a means of control, and specifically where numerical targets are introduced into the system. Deming (1986) exhorted against the use of numerical targets, arguing that they are often used as a poor substitute for leadership and proper understanding of the system. Amongst his set of fourteen key principles he urged: “Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals”. (1986, p.24)

As Simon Caulkin (2004) puts it, “Targets are only useful as long as you do not use them to manage by”. The danger of target-based performance measurement systems is that they not only measure performance, but they affect performance. The absolute pinnacle of inappropriate application of such regimes is within the public service environment. Here, the imposition of target-based performance management results in severe consequences, ranging from inefficiency, poor service delivery, and a demotivated workforce.

Goodhart’s Law warns that, “Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes”. (Goodhart, 1975) In other words, the activity being measured will be skewed towards meeting targets, which results in an inaccurate picture of what true performance looks like. If sanctions are likely to result from failure to meet targets, then workers will ‘cheat’ to meet them, and the greater the pressure to meet the target, the greater the risk of gaming or cheating. (Bevan and Hood, 2006; de Bruijn, 2007; Seddon, 2003, 2008)

Not only does inappropriate use of performance measurement result in the creation of perverse incentives and behaviours, but it also diverts effort away from the task in hand, as well as from other equally important activities that do not happen to be subject of performance targets. This is inherently inefficient, and also results in systemic failure, as some areas are ignored whilst others receive disproportionate attention. Furthermore, the inflexible, process-driven approach that results from target driven performance management restricts innovation, constrains professionalism, and turns the workforce into virtual automatons. (de Bruijn, 2007)

Bevan and Hood (2006) identify three main types of gaming that occur in target-based performance measurement systems:

■‘Ratcheting’ – where next year’s targets are based on the current year’s performance, and there is a perverse incentive for the manager to under-report current performance in order to secure a less demanding target for next year.
■‘Threshold effects’ – where performance across different functions is reported as a whole, thereby disguising departmental failure. In effect, the departments that exceed their targets vire their surplus across to the poorly performing sections. This also has the perverse incentive of encouraging those who exceed targets to allow their performance to deteriorate to the norm.
■‘Output distortions’ – where targets are achieved at the expense of important but unmeasured aspects of performance.

(Adapted from Bevan and Hood, 2006, p.9)

Other consequences of target-based performance measurement are:

■Tunnel vision – where managers select some targets (usually the easiest to achieve or measure) and ignore others.
■Sub-optimisation – where managers operate in such a way that serves their own operation but damages the performance of the overall system. (This concept is synonymous with Hardin’s ‘Tragedy of the Commons’. (1968)
■Myopia – where managers focus on achievable short-term goals at the expense of longer-term objectives.
■Ossification – where a performance indicator has become outdated yet has not been removed or revised, and energy is still directed towards achieving it.

(Adapted from Smith, 1990; Pidd, 2005)

It is argued that the pitfalls of target-based performance management are extensive and the consequences outlined above are practically guaranteed to occur when numerical targets are introduced into a performance measurement system. The result is that efficiency deteriorates, service delivery worsens, and operational effectiveness and morale are irrevocably damaged. In a private sector setting, this is bad; in a public services environment it is catastrophic.

The Folly of Total Reliance on Numerical Data

In the same way that Taylor was able to measure performance by assessing the input-output ratio of assembly line production, police performance systems count outputs such as the number of arrests per officer. The national key performance objectives set out for the police are only capable of recognising such outputs, and therefore neglect the quality aspects of policing that often have the greatest impact on people’s lives.

A serious limitation of using numerical data as a complete measure of good performance is in how the data is subsequently interpreted. Striking newspaper headlines such as “UK’s worst police forces named” (Daily Mail, 2006a) do nothing but to encourage public and media vilification, yet these judgements are based purely on published ‘league tables’ of performance against numerical criteria.

What is also worrying is the apparent inability of some managers to understand natural variation when interpreting statistical data. Seddon (2003) emphasises that any activity measured over a period of time will present varying results, and this is normal. Variation can also be attributed to external factors that are outside of the direct control of those working within the system. Furthermore, the overall capability of a system will naturally determine the parameters within which data should be anticipated, and that a degree of variation within these parameters is normal statistical activity. (Shewhart, 1939; Wheeler, 2000, 2003)

Setting a rigid point against this natural systemic variation and making it a ‘target’ will therefore have consequences. If the target is set above the upper control limit, it will not be achievable. If it is set between the upper and lower control limits (i.e. range of natural variation), then sometimes the target will be met and other times it won’t regardless of consistent effort. If the target is set below the lower control limit “there is no incentive for improvement; people slow down”. (Seddon, 2003, p.72)

Targets for police response times provide an appropriate example to illustrate this point:

Although now officially defunct, the 2009 Policing Pledge set a target for police response times. Such time-based limits remain, although they vary from force-to-force. The Policing Pledge target is as follows:

“Answer 999 calls within 10 seconds, deploying to emergencies immediately giving an estimated time of arrival, getting to you safely, and as quickly as possible. In urban areas, we will aim to get to you within 15 minutes and in rural areas within 20 minutes”. (Home Office, 2009a)

As with other high-level aims attached to targets, at first glance this appears to be an appropriate aspiration for the police to aim for, but let us consider the limitations and ambiguities within this target:

■How is an ‘urban area’ defined?
■Which time target applies if the route traverses rural and urban areas?
■When does the ‘clock’ start? Is it at the point 999 is dialled, when the call is answered, or once all pertinent information has been passed to the operator, and the police unit is actually despatched?

Now, let us consider the factors that could affect response times:

■Availability of resources.
■Driving grade of response driver and vehicle capability.
■Distance from the incident.
■Road conditions.
■Volume of traffic.
■Weather.
■Accuracy of information presented by the caller.

There are no measures of quality within this target. It is entirely possible that a call could be answered quickly, a police unit happened to be nearby, but the incident was dealt with badly. This would still meet the target. Conversely, a well-managed incident with a fast response time (albeit where the call was answered after 11 seconds), would fail against this rigid numerical measure. Even if it were possible to strategically position permanently available police response vehicles in such a manner that it was almost guaranteed the response times could be achieved, there will always be a degree of variation in the data; some would arrive in 10 minutes, others in 8, others in 13.

Targets within emergency call centres pose their own problems. It is not unusual for large LCD screens on the walls of such places to show in real time the volume of calls coming in, the amount of calls waiting, the speed with which calls are answered, and so on. These screens indicate whether every facet of call handling is on target or not, often with forbidding red text indicating ‘failure’. This can incentivise the call handlers to rush calls so they can get to the next one, resulting in them failing to obtain sufficient information required by the control room to effectively despatch a unit to the incident. The effect of this is that the control room staff then have to call the caller back to obtain the information they require, which represents avoidable rework, and which diverts them away from their primary function. This also causes delays, which can ultimately mean a slower or less effective response to the incident.

Meanwhile, the call handlers are able to move onto the next call, under the glare of the monitoring screen which warns them that three more calls are waiting. If any of these go unanswered, this will have a negative effect on the target that relates to ‘dropped calls’. Of course, this situation is not limited to the emergency services – the private sector often finds itself in a similar position, and there have been many examples of the perverse effects of such control through targets. This type of pressure can encourage gaming to meet the target; for example, answering the call quickly but then putting the caller on hold, passing the call to another department, or offering a call back. Some call centres simply place the caller on hold automatically, or the hapless victim has to negotiate their way through labyrinthine menus to reach a human being. In each case, the clock stops, the target is met, and the caller receives a sub-optimal service.

Where there are insufficient levels of staff in the first place, it will be impossible to meet these targets, regardless of effort. This is because, in effect, the capability of the system prevents it from performing to the levels demanded, and setting targets will not change the capacity of the system. Failure to meet the target will generate pressure from management, which demotivates the staff who are trying their best, which then affects performance (maybe one goes sick, reducing the workforce), which results in more failure to meet the targets, and so on. This downward cycle will intensify unless action is taken to improve the system, instead of setting arbitrary targets or browbeating the workers.

In the case of response time targets, there are other factors outside the control of either the call handler, control room operator or police driver that can affect whether the target is met. A 999 call will usually be routed to a central call-handling centre, and the operator will create an incident log whilst the caller is on the line, adding information to it as they speak. The log will then be routed to a local divisional control room for staff to despatch a unit. If the incident is particularly complex or there is a lot of information to be gleaned, it may be a few minutes before the log is sent to the local control room. Unfortunately, the clock beings to tick at the point the incident log is created, eating into the time limit permitted for an officer to arrive at the incident. This means that if the intial call handler has a large amount of information to enter onto the log, then by the time a unit is despatched it may be impossible to meet the response time target.

These circumstances mean that thorough information capture at the first point of contact actually adversely affects the likelihood of meeting the target. In addition to this, where the 999 operator does not initially grade an incident as urgent, but when upon receipt at the local control room a subsequent operator reassesses the severity of the incident and upgrades it, it will also often be too late to arrive at the incident in time to meet the target. This perverse situation means that someone who is doing the right thing and seeking to get a police officer to a caller as quickly as possible can actually increase the likelihood of that division failing to meet its response time target. It is easy to see how the temptation to leave the incident at its original grading could creep in.

Worse still, it is also possible to downgrade urgent incident logs, meaning that a less stringent response time target applies. Such activity would be wholly unethical, but when dealing with human beings who are under pressure, it is possible to see how the information contained within a particular incident log may be interpreted as slightly less serious than first believed. When this does occur, it is important to understand that this is not because the operators are bad people.

One UK police force recently changed its self-imposed response time target for urgent calls from 10 minutes to 15 minutes. The 10-minute target had been in place for over fifteen years and on average, was achieved between 80%-95% of the time. This would indicate that the system was stable and the 15% degree of variation (caused by the factors outlined above) was normal. Of course, divisional commanders would be held to account if their division was at the lower end of this scale during one month, but when (through natural systemic variation) the subsequent month showed an apparent ‘improvement’ they were able to comfort themselves in the knowledge that performance must have improved.

It is difficult to rationalise the reasoning behind changing one such target for another (especially when the system remains untouched), so one wonders what the benefit will be in reducing the response time target from 10 to 15 minutes. The only apparent advantage would be the anticipated exceptionally high proportion of incidents where the new less challenging response time target is achieved. Of course, nothing will have actually changed on the ground, and there is absolutely no perceivable benefit to the public whatsoever.

Certainly, getting to an urgent call as quickly and safely as possible is an appropriate priority for the police, so why have a target at all? One would hope that any police response driver would get to a burglary-in-progress as quickly as they could regardless of whether there is a time-based target or not. It is suggested that if a police force experimented with a different response time target every month for a year, there would not be a great deal of difference between the actual response times. The data would purely indicate what the capabilities of the system were.

The perversities around setting targets in this environment are truly frightening. It is entirely appropriate to prioritise incidents, but it is argued that there is no additional benefit in attaching a time-based response target to them once prioritised. It should be enough to aim to respond to an urgent incident as quickly and safely as possible.

As a colleague recently pointed out, “The public don’t grade incidents”.

Targets Can Seriously Damage Your Health

The introduction of performance targets in the public sector has had a significant impact, with examples of just about every one of the unintended consequences outlined above. Bevan and Hood (2006) expose examples of tampering with data in respect of ambulance response times, and delaying treatment at hospital to meet time-based targets. Seddon (2008) notes that, “…there have been many examples of police officers reclassifying offences in order to meet targets”. (2008, pp.124-125) In 2008 a Home Office Select Committee announced that the Government’s statutory performance indicators had generated a culture amongst officers of pursuing minor offences in order to meet numerical targets; some would “abandon their professional discretion as to how they might best deal with these incidents”. (Home Office, 2008b, p.13)

Ironically, the experience of a victim of crime who felt that they received a sympathetic and competent response to a distressing incident (e.g. sudden death in the family), would not register on the performance regime of a police force under the target system. In contrast, the arrest and cautioning of a 13-year-old child for committing an offence of Common Assault by throwing a water bomb at another child would count towards the sanction detection target. It is worth noting that a lengthy and complex investigation leading to an arrest and charge for murder, also counts as ‘one point’ in this system.

This type of example is one of the many symptoms of officers ‘hitting the target but missing the point’. Front line officers were sometimes given individual targets such as ‘to make three arrests per month’; as long as the officer achieved this target there was often little interest in what the arrests were for. This type of target-setting has resulted in otherwise law-abiding citizens being criminalised for extremely low-level or one-off offences. Often these ‘offences’ were little more than playground fights or name-calling between children. Under the target culture, these incidents provide rich opportunities for officers to achieve sanction detections for offences of Harassment, Public Order and Common Assault. Previously, these types of occurrences would have been dealt with by words of advice from a local officer.

Even when officers do not seek to meet targets by criminalising children, there has often been no choice. In 2002, the Government introduced the National Crime Recording Standards (NCRS), which were designed to ensure that crime was recorded ethically and corporately across all police forces. NCRS was supplemented by a prescriptive manual that set out exactly which crime should be recorded in which circumstances (Home Office Counting Rules, or HOCR), and another set of rules relating to how all incidents must be classified (National Standards of Incident Recording, or NSIR).

NCRS, HOCR and NSIR compliance is rigorously monitored by internal and external audit and inspection regimes. This has the effect of ensuring that compliance targets are achieved without necessarily adding any value to the service that the public receive. In some extreme examples, police forces have posted officers to a full-time role of retrospectively reviewing incident logs and changing classifications to ensure that they comply with the standard prior to audit. Again, this is not ‘value’ work and does nothing to enhance service delivery.

A further counter-productive effect of ‘ethical crime recording’ is the impression given of the levels of violent crime. Name-calling between 11-year-olds can be recorded as a criminal offence under Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986. A push by one child on another, even where there is no injury caused whatsoever is still Common Assault. Both these offences contribute to the Government’s ‘Violent Crime’ classification. This results in sensationalist headlines such as ‘Violent crime on the increase.’ (Daily Mail, 2006b) It also distorts the true picture of violent crime. (The Times, 2007a) Again, this does not enhance the public’s feelings of safety or decrease the overall fear of crime, which of course is another of the national key performance objectives!

The emphasis on technical compliance with standards rather than doing the right thing can lead to huge amounts of effort being focused toward activity that has no direct benefit to the public. For example, it became common practice to have a big push for detections at the end of each month (and especially in the last month of the performance year) in order to meet targets. This meant that investigations risked being rushed and minor crimes with ‘easy prisoners’ were prioritised over more pressing matters. Admin staff who usually worked until 4pm would be paid overtime until midnight to ensure that all detections were inputted into the system before the end of the performance year.

Localised police performance charts that count things such as the number of intelligence logs submitted also results in some of the consequences discussed earlier. If teams are pitted against each other to produce more intelligence logs, no one wants to be bottom of the league table, so invariably the volume increases. (What gets measured gets managed, after all). The problem is that the quality of the intelligence logs does not necessarily increase alongside the volume, and enterprising officers find new and innovative ways to avoid being the one in the spot light for apparent poor performance. Common tricks include:

■Submitting an intelligence log for the most mundane piece of information. (e.g. ‘The kids have been hanging around by the shops again’).
■ Breaking one piece of information into multiple pieces to enable the submission of several logs for the same piece of intelligence. (e.g. Log 1: “John Smith is associating with Frank Jones”. Log 2: “John Smith and Frank Jones stole a car, registration number ABC123 three days ago”. Log 3: “Vehicle registration number ABC123 was involved in a burglary two days ago”).
■ Duplicating information already captured by another process. (e.g. submitting an intelligence log as well as a stop / search form after conducting a search in the street).
■ Two officers working together both submitting an intelligence log about the same incident.

Of course, the result of this sort of activity is that the volume of intelligence logs increases, whilst the intelligence of real value risks being lost in the ‘noise’. The intelligence department will also struggle to process the increased volume of logs and have to wade through excessive amounts of submissions that are of limited or no use. This causes delays, clogs the system, and quality suffers.

‘Gaming’ in how crimes are recorded (or not recorded) is another danger. “There have been many examples of police officers reclassifying offences in order to meet targets – for example, reclassifying shop theft as burglary”. (Seddon, 2008, pp.124-125) Depending whether a target focuses on crime reduction or crime detection will determine whether officers are encouraged to under-record a particular offence type (where there is little chance of detecting it) or over-record it (where there is an easy arrest).

In extreme cases, by proactively targeting a particular offence type (e.g. prostitution or drug activity), this can have the undesirable consequence of increasing recorded crime. This paradox was recognised by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies in a report that noted,

“It is a moot point whether it made sense for the government to set a target to reduce police recorded robbery in the first place, given that increases might well reflect enhanced police action in this area. Ironically, the government’s target on street crime has risked creating a perverse incentive for police forces to avoid identifying and recording robbery offences”. (Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, 2007, p.33)

There is also the risk that as confidence in the police’s ability to deal with such offences increases, the public are more likely to report incidents that may not have been reported previously. Of course, this gives the impression that the crime rate is increasing, which damages public confidence (a policing target), increases the fear of crime (another target) and prevents crime reduction targets from being met.

Another example of targets dictating how officers on the ground respond to crime is how they are incentivised to make arrests for Section 5 Public Order instead of Drunk and Disorderly, as the former counts towards sanction detection targets. (The Times, 2007b) Of course, this works in reverse if the focus for a local commander is to reduce crime, as officers can be persuaded to deal with an identical disorder-related incident by arresting for Drunk and Disorderly, as this does not count as a crime…

When performance data is publicised, this too can have adverse consequences. Often, there is little interpretation of the data, and when accompanied by sensationalist headlines, it is easy to present a negative impression of any public service. The publication of league tables for schools, hospitals and the police serves little purpose but to galvanise negative sentiment towards those who are apparently ‘failing’. The irony is that the quality of healthcare, schooling or policing does not necessarily bear any correlation to a particular institution’s star rating or position in the league table.

The impact of targets is exacerbated when it is considered that police and CPS targets sometimes conflict with each other; for example, the police are under pressure to increase detections, whilst the CPS are judged on their ability to reduce failed prosecutions. (Home Office, 2008b, p.13) This causes the police to prefer charging a suspect in a borderline case, whilst the CPS are often unwilling to risk proceeding unless there is a very high likelihood of success at court. The only losers in this situation are victims of crime.

Conclusion

It is important to return to the assertion that performance measurement per se is not a bad thing. Indeed it is a valuable tool for enhancing accountability and encouraging continuous improvement. It enables managers to identify failing departments or organisations, and take action. Without it, genuine failings would not be exposed and sub-optimal performance would go unchallenged. A proportionate performance measurement system allows professionalism and innovation to flourish, whilst reminding the workforce that standards must be maintained in order to achieve organisational effectiveness and maximum efficiency. This is consistent with the systemic approach espoused by Deming (1986), Seddon (2003, 2008) and others.

It is also important to remember that this argument is against numerical targets and not priorities. Priorities such as for the police to detect crime, or for the NHS to promote health are entirely appropriate. These principles are embedded within these organisations, and form the bedrock of their raison d’être. Priorities should remain as organisational objectives, but without a numerical target being attached, as this obfuscates the original purpose and diverts activity away from it. The experience of recent years has demonstrated the toxic effect of performance measurement being used as a management tool in the public sector.

It is argued that arbitrary numerical targets should be abandoned, particularly in the public services arena. Targets generate perverse incentives and behaviours, and do not add value to the service that is delivered. It is better to strive for 100% all of the time and concentrate on doing the right thing, instead of worrying about whether current ‘performance’ is a fraction of a percent above or below an arbitrary target that was created with all the science of a ‘finger in the air moment’.

The public have a right to expect an effective and accountable police service, but also one that is flexible enough to respond to a variety of circumstances. The target culture has not delivered this goal. Numerical targets are the most destructive feature of performance measurement systems, and when imposed on a public service setting will guarantee inefficiency, additional cost, lower morale, and ironically, sub-optimal performance. Performance measurement is vital when implemented properly, priorities are crucial, but numerical targets must be eradicated.

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COMMENT

A courageous and superbly written article Simon, congratulations! A timely reminder that the spectre of performance targeting and its effects on police recorded crime and detections has yet to be exorcised from the service.

Look out for our forthcoming report on police detections.

IT'S OFFICIAL! POLICE CHIEFS ARE TO BLAME FOR BUREAUCRACY IN THE SERVICE

2011-05-09T08:48:00.000-07:00

Theresa May Home Secretary

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/8502708/Theresa-May-blames-police-chiefs-for-red-tape-burden.html

The Home Secretary said a “great deal” of bureaucracy faced by officers on a daily basis is generated by their own force. She suggested that even when some national forms and targets have been scrapped to ease the burden, forces still required the information at a local level.

She said police leaders must now do more to cut paperwork as she announced a series of measures to reduce red tape. It includes handing more charging decisions to the police, allowing some offenders to be charged through the post and giving officers more discretion in how they prioritise calls. The moves should free up to 2.5 million police hours a year.

In a speech in London on Monday, Mrs May said: "I have made a clear commitment today that the Government is determined to get rid of the unnecessary bureaucracy generated from the centre. But this commitment must be matched by police forces themselves. A great deal of the day-to-day bureaucracy that police officers encounter is actually generated by their own force".

"So I want police forces across the country to follow our lead. Every single senior police officer should be asking themselves what they personally are doing to rid their officers of red tape. If we've scrapped a form at national level, then there had better be a really good reason for keeping it at local level. If we've done away with a target nationally, then stop chasing it locally. If we've got rid of a national regulation, then don't bring in a local replacement."

The Home Secretary's speech is reprinted below.

The deal: one year on

Monday, 09 May 2011

This speech on police bureaucracy was delivered by Theresa May on 9 May 2011.

'Last year in my very first speech as Home Secretary, I offered the police a deal - more freedom to do your work; in exchange for greater accountability to local people. It is now one year since I made that pledge. Today, I want to update you on what we have done so far; and I want to talk about the next steps in fulfilling that deal.

Progress in Public Accountability

We have made good progress.

The legislation for Police and Crime Commissioners has passed through the House of Commons and will shortly enter committee stage in the House of Lords.

Police and Crime Commissioners will bring real public accountability to policing. Unlike invisible police authorities, your commissioner will be somebody you’ve heard of; somebody you’ve voted for; somebody you can hold to account; somebody you can vote out if they don’t help the police to cut crime. But they will in no way affect the operational independence of the police.

Commissioners will not manage police forces and they will not be permitted to interfere in the day-to-day work of police officers. A protocol setting out the relationship between Police and Crime Commissioners and Chief Constables will make this clear – we will publish a draft of the protocol to inform discussion of the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill during committee stage in the House of Lords.

Let me be clear - the duty and responsibility of managing a police force will fall squarely on the shoulders of the chief constable – as it always has done. Indeed, we are giving chiefs more power to appoint their top teams. If they are going to be the ones held to account for their force’s performance, then they should have genuine responsibility for their force.

The new model of democratic accountability for the police will begin in May next year. But for neighbourhood police officers we’re making this public accountability happen right now. We are mandating forces to hold regular neighbourhood beat meetings. These meetings will give local people the chance to scrutinise the work of their local police. People will be able to raise their concerns: what are local officers doing about the drug dealing in the local park? What’s happening about the pub where all the trouble is? And the police will have to respond. Beat meetings will make the new sense of public accountability a day to day reality for people up and down the country. And they’ll make public accountability a day to day reality for tens of thousands of police officers as well.

To make this accountability work, we have already given the public access to the country’s first-ever nationwide street-level crime maps. Armed with this information, people will really be able to hold their officers to account for their performance. Since launching in January, the police.uk website has received over 410 million hits. That just shows the enormous appetite the public have for information about policing and crime in their local area. And it shows just how desperately keen people are to play their part in keeping their communities safe.

These reforms add up to a massive transfer of power from the government, to the people.They will be in charge, and every police officer – from chief constables, to the officer on the street – will have to answer to them. For a public service, in a democracy, that is exactly how it should be.

Progress in slashing bureaucracy

But giving power to the people is only half of the deal. This new, democratic accountability means we can do away with the bureaucratic accountability of the past. So we will free the police to do their job. And we’ve made progress here too.

I have said loud and clear that the days of the bureaucrats controlling and managing the police from Whitehall are over. The Home Office will no longer scrutinise and supervise police performance and come up endlessly with new schemes and initiatives. So I've responded to incidents like the Cumbria and Northumbria shootings, not with a gun crime summit, or some hasty new legislation, but by respecting the operational independence of the police.

And I've responded to the violence at protests in London, not by criticising the police or coming up with some new draconian anti-protest Bill, but by letting the police get on and do their job. Indeed, the police do an excellent job, as we saw again during the Royal Wedding. I’ve also put in place plans to end the ring-fenced funding which restricts the police’s flexibility. From 2013, when police and crime commissioners will set their first budgets, I will end the ring-fencing of all of the central policing grants that we have not already stopped, save only for counter-terrorism.

And I’ve scrapped the Policing Pledge and confidence target, the PSA targets, the key performance indicators and the Local Area Agreements. I want police officers chasing criminals, not chasing targets. So I’ve given the police just one single objective – to cut crime.

After years of bureaucratic control from Whitehall, which wrapped the police up in red tape and undermined their professional judgement, the message to the police is clear – this government trusts you to fight crime.
That’s why we have already restored police discretion over certain charging decisions, saving up to 50,000 police hours per year.

That’s why we’ve scrapped the national requirement for the stop and account form, and cut the reporting requirements for stop and search, saving up to an estimated 800,000 police hours per year.

And that’s why we’ve issued new health and safety guidance that supports officers who do the right thing – when police officers put themselves at risk to protect the public, they shouldn’t be worrying about breaching the rules.

We’ve also given a clear signal to our partners across the Criminal Justice System – and this message is getting through.

So Sir Denis’s own organisation - Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary – will now focus on light touch monitoring and inspection and on incentivising local accountability and transparency. They will reduce the burden of inspection on forces by acting as a single gateway.

We’ve worked with the Independent Police Complaints Commission to implement a radical new approach to police complaints.

This will encourage front line supervising officers to deal with most complaints quickly and informally themselves, rather than relying on lengthy bureaucratic procedures that so often fail to satisfy the public. Most of the time people want a simple apology – not a lengthy form to fill in.

And we’ve also started a programme with the Ministry of Justice, the Crown Prosecution Service and the Courts to streamline the processes across the system that generate unnecessary paperwork and waste police time in the station and at court.

Commitment to go further

But this is just the start. I’m determined to go further and faster.

I want to get rid of even more of the grinding bureaucracy that wears officers down and stops them doing their important work. Dealing with a simple burglary can require 1000 process steps and 70 forms to be completed as a case goes through the Criminal Justice System. That can’t be right.

Today I can announce a raft of reforms that we estimate could save over 2.5 million police hours every year. That’s the equivalent of more than 1,200 police officer posts.

These reforms are a watershed moment in policing. They show that we really mean business in busting bureaucracy. First, we have restructured the police performance development review process. This move will not only save time, but will also improve police management. And it could save up to 1.5 million police hours per year.

This month we will launch an 'assumption of competence' model. This is based on the simple premise that most trained and experienced police officers and staff are competent and their line manager’s observation will therefore provide most of the management evidence needed.

This shorter and more straightforward PDR process will change a bureaucratic burden into a sharp and meaningful conversation about performance, development and skills.

If this is accepted by all forces we estimate it could cut the time spent on each officer or staff member’s PDR from 10 to 2 hours each year.

We’re also working with the police to streamline other aspects of their HR. For example, until January there were over 35,000 different role profiles – definitions of skills, standards and qualities – for officers and staff across the service. And the role profile for a constable alone could reach up to 70 pages.

The new Policing Professional Framework is drastically reducing the number of profiles and is also simplifying them so that now the role profile of a constable can fit on to one side of A4.

Second, risk management. We need to move away from the tick box, cover your back culture – where the response is rigidly prescribed according to the type of problem reported. And instead we need to adopt a more sensible way of managing risks to the public.

For example, more efficient call-handling, often by staff rather than police officers, and active assessment of risks could mean more effective grading of incidents.

This would see more officers dispatched to the genuine priority incidents; allowing less urgent matters to be resolved by phone, or by an officer attending at a later time. Of course, if something is urgent it should be treated as such, but we estimate that a more sophisticated approach to assessing and managing risk could save up to 860,000 hours of police time.

Third, we will champion a simplified crime recording process. As a starting point, this means challenging forces to simplify their own practices, but I don’t want to stop there. At my request, the National Statistician is currently reviewing crime statistics. I do not want to pre-empt her report, and indeed she is discussing her emerging findings with experts today, but I specifically want to look at reducing the number of crime categories and merging some similar crime types.

This would help officers when they come to fill out crime reports, saving them time and reducing the amount of data they have to collect for more minor crimes. We estimate that this could save up to 95,000 hours of police officer time each year.

I am clear that the public need to have transparent and trusted information on crime – and our crime maps have already helped with that – but we need to be smart about how we deliver it.

Fourth, Sara Thornton, the Chief Constable of my own local force Thames Valley, is leading work on behalf of ACPO to review the police service’s doctrine and guidance. This work, which will be completed by March 2012, is likely to reduce over 600 pieces of current guidance to an approved set of fewer than 100. This should lead to significant savings for officers as they will no longer have to read and learn all of this guidance.

But just as important, it will send a clear signal that the professional judgement of individual officers is valued and it is expected. This is a great example of a service led contribution to cutting police paperwork.

But let me make clear, individual forces must not respond to this valuable work by re-inventing 43 versions of the national guidance that has been scrapped – we are not removing these burdens only for them to be reintroduced at local level.

Fifth, we will pilot going even further in restoring charging decisions to police officers, a step we are taking because of the Crown Prosecution Service’s views of the positive and effective ways in which the police have responded to the reforms I announced last year.

Rising to the challenge, the CPS and the police have worked together to ensure that officers are properly supported and victims are properly protected as we cut back bureaucracy. And across the country, instead of waiting around in custody suites, officers are already saving time because of the changes we have made.

So now, following discussions with the CPS and the police, we will go further. We will pilot doubling the number of charges transferred to police officers, giving them responsibility for nearly 80% of charging decisions, including shoplifting cases. This will save even more officer time, stopping them from having to ring up the Crown Prosecution Service to make the decision for them, or having to bail the offender to come back at a later date. This dramatic shift would further enhance officers’ discretion and once again demonstrates the trust we put in our police officers.

If the pilot is successful and is rolled out fully, it could save up to an estimated 40,000 more hours of police officer time.

We are also looking at introducing a range of measure to provide a new, simpler and potentially quicker way of bringing a defendant to court for a prosecution. This includes postal charging and requisitioning.

For appropriate police bail cases, this will allow officers to send a written charge by post, requiring the defendant to attend court on a specific date to answer the charge, rather than calling the suspect back to the police station for charging. This could save up to another 40,000 police officer hours annually.

Finally, if we’re serious about tackling police bureaucracy, that will also mean looking at some difficult and sensitive areas. Let me be clear - I will always put public safety first. But some of the processes that have been allowed to grow up do not help the most vulnerable.

Domestic violence is one of my key priorities. That’s why in March we published an Action Plan on tackling Violence Against Women and Girls. That’s why we have provided over £28 million of stable Home Office funding until 2015 for local specialist services. That’s why we have provided £900,000 until 2015 to support national helplines. And that’s why we have implemented legislation for multi-agency Domestic Homicide Reviews after every domestic murder.

I am clear that domestic violence must be taken seriously. In recent years the police have made great strides in how they deal with these crimes, with expert teams of officers who do tremendous work.

But the bureaucratic burden of existing processes too often stop those experts from giving help to all of the victims of this awful crime. Too often officers have to spend time filling in forms which may not be necessary or double entering data that could and should have been captured just once. They can only do so much – they can only help so many victims – when there is so much duplication, double-entry and wider bureaucracy.

By ending these wasteful processes we can free officers to reinvest time and resources in safeguarding those who need help - including those, like domestic abuse victims who are under 18, who may have previously been neglected. This isn’t about saving money – it’s about delivering a better service to vulnerable people.

This sort of approach would enhance public protection, not lessen it; it would improve the police response to these crimes, not hamper it.

ACPO have initiated a review of police domestic abuse processes with other relevant organisations. We will work with them to ensure best practice is effectively shared and seized upon by forces. And we will of course be working with NGOs with expertise in this area.

The next step will be to pilot the proposals in a number of police forces. If the pilots are successful, and if these improved measures are then rolled out across the country, they could achieve significant benefits, allowing more police time to be re-invested in those most at risk.

Overall Package

The overall package of reforms I have outlined today is a radical leap forward for policing. I know Home Secretaries and Policing Ministers have talked about cutting bureaucracy in the past. But they have not followed it through, and the police have seen more bureaucracy, not less.

The progress we have made in the last year, and the detail of the measures I have announced today shows that we are serious about slashing bureaucracy. As I said, these measures could realise savings of over 2.5 million police hours – or more than 1,200 police officer posts - every year. They will make a real difference to real police officers in their real work.

Working with the Police

The reforms I have announced today have been developed in close partnership with police professionals. Many of the suggestions stem from work by HMIC and, of course, Jan Berry has previously made excellent suggestions in this area. Chris Sims, the Chief Constable of the West Midlands, is now leading for ACPO on the reducing bureaucracy agenda and he is doing an excellent job. Tomorrow, the Policing Minister Nick Herbert will be addressing a joint Home Office/ACPO conference, alongside Chris.

At that conference Nick will be discussing with police officers exactly how we can make these changes happen in every one of our 43 forces. Because it will be key for the reforms I have outlined to be carried through by individual forces and individual officers at the local level. The potential rewards for the police are enormous, but they must make them happen.

Nick will also be making further new announcements about the wider bureaucracy and efficiency savings we are planning across the Criminal Justice System as a whole. This is the great benefit of having a Minister who spans the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice – he can look strategically across the whole system to redesign the processes that waste so much officer time.

Challenge to Chiefs

I have made a clear commitment today that the government is determined to get rid of the unnecessary bureaucracy generated from the centre. But this commitment must be matched by police forces themselves.

I have instructed my officials to exhaustively check each and every requirement that the Home Office generates, so that I am satisfied that there is nothing – and I do mean nothing – that my department does which unnecessarily adds to the burden.

Any police officer that knows of government bureaucracy that we should get rid of should write to me or to Nick Herbert and we will make sure it is looked at.

But a great deal of the day to day bureaucracy that police officers encounter is actually generated by their own force.

So I want police forces across the country to follow our lead. Every single senior police officer should be asking themselves what they personally are doing to rid their officers of red tape. If we’ve scrapped a form at national level, then there had better be a really good reason for keeping it at local level. If we’ve done away with a target nationally, then stop chasing it locally. If we’ve got rid of a national regulation, then don’t bring in a local replacement.

That goes for police forces, but it will also apply to Police and Crime Commissioners, Community Safety Partnerships, the Courts, the Crown Prosecution Service, Probation and everyone else in the Criminal Justice System.

Particularly in these tough times, we need to cut out every possible cost and save every possible minute of wasted time. And that challenge extends beyond bureaucracy.

Because of the financial crisis left behind by the last government, police forces are having to make savings in their back and middle office functions to protect their frontline crime fighting capabilities. But this must be done intelligently – there’s no point in a police force cutting its HR function if that just means the burden falls on warranted officers instead – that is not a saving at all. Forces need to remove the burden altogether.

There are examples across the country of chief officers who are already making sensible savings to protect the frontline: in Avon and Somerset they are using outsourcing to make significant savings. Essex and Kent are sharing IT directors. Hampshire and Thames Valley Police are doing the same. These are all examples of chief officers using their professional judgement to best deploy their resources in the fight against crime. They didn’t wait for the Home Office to tell them what to do – they got on and did it. This is the challenge to chief officers. But it’s also an enormous opportunity.

Because they’ll no longer have the Home Office looking over their shoulder, they will be truly freed to show what they and their forces can do. Because there will be much less paperwork, they’ll be able to get their officers back on the fight against crime.

Changing the Culture

Dealing with police bureaucracy isn’t just about cutting out unnecessary forms – as important as that is. It’s also about redesigning whole systems and whole ways of doing things. That sort of transformative change can come from the bottom up – from forces themselves – as well as from the top down. But even more than this, it’s about changing the prevailing culture.

When the first response of the previous government to a tragedy was to change the law, have an inquiry, write more guidance, second guess the officers involved – it’s no wonder that we ended up with a tick-box, compliance culture in policing. Well times have changed.

I know that police officers can only ever judge a situation as they find it. When they confront a violent offender, when they go into a dangerous situation unarmed, when they put their lives on the line to protect the public, police officers have to make split second judgements under the most extreme pressure. If police officers do something wrong then they will always be responsible for their actions, but this government will always back officers who do the right thing.

The police are in the business of stopping tragedies before they happen. And it’s those successes that happen day in, day out that never get reported in the media. But unfortunately, despite the police’s best efforts, sometimes things do go wrong. I understand that and I will never blame the police for making decisions that they believed at the time were right.

We’ve stopped the weary cycle of over-reaction, inquiries, blame, legislation, codes and guidance, and blanket remedial training for all. We will take a different approach – we will trust the police.

Conclusion

So we’re delivering on the deal.

We’re keeping our promise to the police to get the government out of the way of policing, and we’re keeping our promise to the public to put them back in charge. We’ve done away with the diktats, we’ve scrapped the central targets, and we’re ripping up the red-tape.

We’re giving power back to the people through directly elected Police and Crime Commissioners, beat meetings and crime mapping. But this is not the end of the road, it’s just the beginning.

We won’t change cultures, attitudes and processes over night. Getting rid of the paperwork is as hard and grinding a task, as actually filling out the pointless forms in the first place. But I am absolutely determined to see this through.

I will lead, but police Chiefs need to lead too.

I want to see a police force trusted by the public, responsive to their needs; professional, respected and effective. I want officers out from behind their desks and back on the streets.

I want to see police officers with the discretion to do what they think is right; free from the interference of Whitehall, free to do their job, free to fight crime.

Thank you.'

COMMENT

It is the Chief Officers who must accept responsibility for the mess the service is in and Theresa May is handing them the means to put some of it right. Will they respond or defy her as so many have done already by clinging on to the pledge and performance targets as if they were the very source of life (which for many Chiefs, in receipt of thousands of pounds in performance related bonuses for many years, it was!).

Can we expect to see the rot removed from the recorded crime and detections process? We think that particular nut will prove harder to crack with so many Chief Officers out to protect themselves first and foremost.

That is the culture that must be reversed if real reform is to be delivered. Attention to all ACPO and Chief Officers that might read these pages. YOU must demonstrate loyalty to the troops above all else. These are the people that keep you in work, they deserve better than the disgraceful conduct and betrayals they have endured at your hands. You have many bridges to rebuild, start now before it's too late.

WOULD YOU RETIRE FROM THE POLICE SERVICE THEN RETURN AS AN UINPAID VOLUNTEER?

2011-05-04T07:41:00.000-07:00

http://www.birminghammail.net/news/top-stories/2011/05/04/west-midlands-police-ask-officers-forced-to-retire-to-return-as-volunteers-65233-28634863/

West Midlands Police ask officers forced to retire to return as volunteers

Hundreds of the country's most experienced police officers who were forced to retire under a legal loophole are being encouraged to return to West Midlands Police force as unpaid special constables.

Six retired officers, all with more than 30 years experience with West Midlands Police, said they had been sent letters asking them to return in similar roles but as volunteer special constables.

Martin Heard, who was forced to retire at the end of March after 32 years with the force, said he was shocked when he was asked to consider coming back to do the same job for free.

Two weeks after being forced to leave, he said: "I had a letter through the post from the police, my former employers, asking me if I'd consider coming back and doing the same role as a special constable, as a volunteer

"I was shocked. On one hand they're saying they don't need me, and then they're asking me to come back in the same role."

Mr Heard, whose work in the All Saints area of Wolverhampton earned him the "Copper's Copper" award last October, now plans to start work as a delivery driver for a catering company in his home town of Bromsgrove next week.

He said he was "devastated" at being forced to leave the force. "It was a bit of a kick in the teeth really," he said.

At least 13 police authorities have chosen to implement regulation A19, a power which says officers who have served 30 years or more can be "required to retire" if their retention would "not be in the general interests of efficiency".

But Britain's most senior police officer, Scotland Yard commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson, has said the controversial provision was a "horribly blunt tool" which he "hopes" not to use.

A total of 3,260 officers with 30 years experience or more could be affected by plans to implement regulation A19 of the Police Pensions Regulations 1987, according to figures released by Mrs May last November.

The police service needs to cut its wage bill after the Government said funding would fall by 20% over the next four years.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/may/04/forcibly-retired-police-officer-return-volunteers

Forcibly retired police officers invited to return as volunteers

Labour says police forces are forcing 2,100 of the most experienced officers into early retirement, some of whom are then being asked to rejoin on a voluntary basis.

Police officers with more than 30 years experience who have been forcibly retired because of budget cuts are being asked to return as part-time volunteers, Labour has disclosed.

The shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, said 13 police forces have so far confirmed plans to force more than 2,100 of the most experienced police officers in England and Wales into early retirement by 2015. A further nine forces are considering similar action.

Chief constables have no legal powers to make police officers redundant, but can forcibly retire those with more than 30 years service with 28 days notice under an obscure A19 provision of the police pension regulations on grounds of efficiency of the force.

A Labour survey of current police budgets reveals that 13 out of the 43 forces, including the West Midlands, North Yorkshire and Surrey, have already decided that 2,124 officers should be compulsorily retired using the A19 regulation by 2015 in order to make up for 20% cuts in Whitehall police funding.

The issue was raised at prime minister's questions by the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, who cited the case of PC Martin Heard, who is being forcibly retired after 32 years as a neighbourhood officer in Wolverhampton.

Heard received the "Copper's copper" award from the Police Federation last year, and some weeks after he was forced to retire, he got a letter asking him to rejoin the force as a special constable on a part-time unpaid basis.

He was among a group of experienced officers being retired under A19 due to meet the home secretary, Theresa May, today. Others included Detective Constable Tim Kennedy, a recognised specialist in serious acquisitive crime, Sergeant Dave Hewitt, who is 48, with 32 years service, and is one of the youngest officers in the country to be retired, and Inspector Mark Stokes, a leading specialist in crime prevention.

Cooper said Heard was not alone in being asked to rejoin on a voluntary basis, adding: "You couldn't make this up.

"Senior, experienced officers are being forced out by the pace and scale of the Tory-led government's cuts, then asked to come back and do the same job for free because everyone knows they are needed in the fight against crime."

In the Commons, Miliband claimed the policing cuts demonstrated that the prime minister had broken his pre-election promise to send any cabinet minister who came to him with proposals to cut frontline services packing.

Cameron told Miliband: "Decisions about police numbers will depend on the decisions made by individual chief constables in individual parts of the country.

"The point I would make is that we see, in case after case, that there are far too many police officers in back-office jobs doing paperwork and carrying out corporate development work who should be on the front line.

"Responsible chief constables are getting these police officers out on the front line to fight crime, and crime under this government is falling."

He accused Labour of "complete and utter hypocrisy" over police numbers, citing Alan Johnson's admission when he was home secretary before the general election that he could not guarantee numbers would not fall in the event of the party remaining in power.

"The question is not should the budget be reduced – of course the budget has to be reduced," said Cameron.

"The question is who is going to cut the paperwork, who is going to get rid of the bureaucracy, who is going to trust the local managers to make sure we get police on the front line? These are steps we are taking, and steps his government never took."

Blue Line Comment

Forcing some of our most valued and experienced officers to retire is bad enough. With all due respect being pad to the good work of the specials, asking officers who have put 30+ years of commitment and experience into the job to come back on an unpaid basis is a really insulting and disrespectful kick in the teeth. It is also a measure of the arrogance and ignorance of senior officers who would even consider such an insulting proposition. Seems like more of a political gesture than a serious operational suggestion to us.

WARNING! WARNING BULLSHIT ALERT! - Latest Crime Statistics Released

2011-04-21T14:04:00.000-07:00

The Bullshit Button!

Introducing the Bullshit Button. You will see a lot more of it over the coming months. Every time we see more bull$#@! appearing in the media about crime statistics going down, police detections improving, or some other patently fallacious content about policing, you will see the button.

Rank and file police officers up and down the country know the fact and fiction about policing.

If every officer could firmly strike a bullshit button connected to the Home Secretary, the media and the general public, every time they heard or witnessed another pile of fictitious nonsense being trotted out by 'they who must be obeyed', the continuous ringing would be heard across the country reminiscent of the WWII air raid sirens.

What has prompted us to create the bullshit button? The latest drivel of Crime Statistics, released earlier this week are a work of fantasy to make the brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson stand back in awe.

As usual, the media, clamouring for titbits of useless trivia, have their say :-

The Telegraph "300,000 fewer crimes last year as household burglary falls"
The Daily Mail "Crime down by 6%... but number of sex offences continues to soar"The Independent "Crime total down by 3%"
The Guardian "Recorded crime falls despite rise in sexual offences and knife-point robbery"The BBC "Recorded crime continues to fall in England and Wales"

The Police Superintendents Association have two bites of the cherry. The first release states ‘These are encouraging figures once again and show that our officers and staff are continuing to prove their dedication in driving down crime in our communities. Some critics often choose to question the validity of police recorded crime or even BCS statistics but trusted academic research figures released yesterday by Cardiff University show violent crime figures falling significantly and a clear picture is emerging of continuing falls in crime, particularly violence and antisocial behaviour. Public trust and confidence in the police remain strong, something we should celebrate. The public can have confidence that our commitment to protect and serve our communities remains as strong as ever.’

The second release went a stage further, attempting to pre-empt any crititism from outside quarters. Entitled "The Sound Of Silence" the piece asks us not to question the validity of the BCS and the police fifures, reminding us that the Home Office has such faith in the statistics that it has announced an independent review of how crime statistics are recorded!!

The release goes on to say that when a respected academic institution (Cardiff University) also published research this week that reveals that violent crime has fallen by almost 11%, there surely must be some confidence in the figures.

"The Lady Doth Protesteth Too Much Methinks" One can "insist so passionately" about something not being true that people suspect the opposite of what one is saying.

With due respect to the honoured fellows at Cardiff, they are not present on the front line of every shift of modern policing to witness how crime statistics are suppressed, manipulated and disguised to portray the picture the Chief Officers demand. It is unlikley that they will have had access to internal processes or honest communication with rank and file officers to verify their findings.

Having served as frontline uniform response, CID experience, supplemented with three years of detailed analystical research, supported by hundreds of comments from serving officers, I am of the opinion that the crime statistics review is long overdue if we are ever to see factual and ethical crime recording resulting in transparency and honesty.

The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it.

This is the 9th Principle of policing written by Sir Robert Peel, recognised as the founder of the British service. How Sir Robert must be spinning in his grave to witness how today's Chief Officers have chosen to interpret this principle in such a scandalous manner. Indeed they have perpetrated the "Crime of the Century" - "Cooking the books" of crime to convey the false impression that crime is falling and detections are adequate.

Crime Of The Century

Our detailed first report on police recorded crime exposes the scandal in detail. Supported with evidence from front line police officers, concerned that their integrity is being continually threatened by senior command strategies to suppress and disguise the true crime picture. There are literally hundreds of examples of how the practice of "Gaming" (manipulating, suppressing and mis-reporting crime) has become a woven part of the police procedural fabric.

Crime Of The Century II

Coming soon..... the scandal of police detections! Revealing how the 28% published detection rates are yet another reason for bashing the bullshit button! When the report is uploaded you will see the evidence for yourself. We hope that the When Crime Of The Century II - The Scandal of police Detections in England & Wales is uploaded, we hope the National Statistician takes note and is courageous enough to unearth the truth.

Here are just a few of the comments from police officers.....

"You can change crime figures because you can reallocate crimes to something that’s not measured. If it’s not measured then fantastic, you can rub your hands. That’s great as long as you do it within the rules but how close do you sail to the wind?"

"Say I have my bosses saying ‘look we have got too many robberies what can you do about it?’ So you start looking at these reports of robbery and suddenly they become a theft with an assault, not a robbery. There is pressure to reclassify crimes to fit statistics".

"The 24/7 response are pulled out with work yet our Local Policing Unit head, who is held accountable for crimes and sanction detections on his area, has dedicated a uniformed officer to look through the crimes to see if any can be reclassified. Doing nothing else than that...looking for burglary dwellings that can be classed as damage. There are other people looking at robberies that can be classed as theft persons because the stats are good for thefts".

The Home Secretary is concerned that public trust in crime statistics produced by the Home Office has declined to such an extent that it is no longer possible to have a debate about alternative criminal justice policies on the basis of agreed facts about trends in crime. Terms of reference for Smith review, November 2006

The regulatory bodies of HMIC, IPPC and the IOC have been fully aware of the corruptive influence of Gaming, but all have failed in the execution of their responsibilities and duty to expose the full extent of the problem to the public, evidenced by the lack of any individual or force being brought to account for the activities.

Mushroom Management (1)

Does this sound familiar?

Restrict employee access to information and decisions (keep them in the dark). When information is conveyed, it is incomplete, inaccurate, or full of marketing hyperbole (throw shit on them). Large, hierarchical, process-bound organizations are frequently guilty of the most egregious forms of "mushroom management."

A management philosophy prescribing to the theory that to best motivate your employees, you must at all times:
1. Keep them in the dark.
2. Feed them full of shit.

This form of management applies to every situation where management is involved. Be it passing on critical information to employees, or informing people of policy change and announcements. The entire purpose is to be as vague and unresponsive as possible. The ultimate culmination and success of this management style can be found when people draw comparisons to management and a black hole. Where resources and information go in and nothing comes out.

Mushroom Management (2)

Mushroom Management is an allusion to a company's staff being treated like mushrooms: kept in the dark, covered with dung, and, when grown big enough, canned (fired). The connotation is that the management is making decisions without consulting the staff affected by those decisions, and possibly not even informing the staff until well after such decisions are made.

This phenomenon is an anti-pattern most commonly found in organizations which have a strict hierarchy and barriers to cross-organizational communication (especially those with a stovepipe organization) but can be found in any organization.

The Mushroom Theory of Management - Keep them in the dark and feed them bullsh*t!

I make no apologies for the rant. It is time the truth came out about crime statistics and police detections. The rank and file are completely and utterly fed up with the lies and deceit that have been foisted upon them and the public. The Chief Officers are so far into this nonsense, they have even started believing their own spin.

The research into detections for our next report is even more damning than the suppression, fudging and manipulation of recorded crime. It details how the Chiefs would have us believe that they are detecting 28% of recorded crime. From our detailed investigation into the statistics and listening to officers comments, we can say here and now, that whilst there are some major successes and achievements within the detection numbers, 28% is . . . . .

Until then, if you see any reports about police detections from Senior Police Chiefs, we suggest you get ready to thump the button!

A career thug was shipped back to Britain from Australia, so why can't we do the same thing?

2011-04-20T02:43:00.000-07:00

Clifford Tucker arriving at Heathrow

Courtesy of :-
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1378728/Australian-career-thug-shipped-Britain-thing.html

On the other side of the world, a migrant convicted of the attempted murder of a police officer is deported, on the grounds he poses an ‘unacceptable risk’ to the native population.

Few would describe the Australian government’s decision as anything other than common sense.

After all Clifford Tucker, a British citizen, had abused Australia’s hospitality. By throwing him out, justice was undeniably done.

Consider, however, what would have happened if Tucker – a career criminal jailed for 12 years for shooting and seriously wounding a police officer – had been a foreigner committing crimes in Britain.

There is precisely zero chance that our courts – or the interfering judges in Strasbourg – would have agreed to his removal in the interests of protecting the British public.

Instead, they would have found that, because he moved here from his home country when he was young, Tucker had a ‘human right’ to a family life in his adopted nation. Since he had three children his hand would have been strengthened even further.

Depressingly, these are the rules we live by thanks to the European Convention on Human Rights and Labour’s Human Rights Act.

No matter whether a person is living here illegally, or what heinous crimes they commit, if they can evade the authorities for long enough, our courts will let them stay for ever. Housing, benefits and every other right enjoyed by law-abiding British citizens will inevitably follow.

In other words, compared to Australia, America and dozens of other countries, British justice is a soft touch.

Witness how, in a case with chilling similarities to that of Tucker, Learco Chindamo was permitted to remain in Britain despite killing London headmaster Philip Lawrence.

Instead of Chindamo being sent home to Italy once his sentence was served, an immigration tribunal ruled – to widespread horror – that because he had been here since he was a small child, he had a human right to remain here. The fact he posed a danger to the public was seemingly irrelevant.

Or consider the case of Aso Mohammed Ibrahim who knocked down a 12-year-old girl in his car in Darwen, Lancashire, and left her to die. Ibrahim, an Iraqi who had been refused asylum here, was driving while disqualified, and after Amy Houston’s death he committed a string of further offences.

However, an immigration tribunal ruled that because Ibrahim had children in Britain he had a right to a ‘family life’ in the UK.

Not a thought was given to the human rights of the family whose lives he had destroyed.

In a further shocking case, Rocky Gurung, a Nepalese who killed the son of a Gurkha war hero by throwing him into the Thames on a drunken night out, was permitted to stay here so his right to a ‘family life’ could be protected.

After prison, Gurung persuaded judges that it would breach his ‘right to family life’ if he was sent back to Nepal. This was despite the fact he was single and had no children.

Last year, a total of 200 foreign prisoners avoided deportation by claiming their human right to a ‘family life’ in Britain. The Home Office has confirmed that the ‘right to a family life’ is now the most popular claim used by criminals who successfully avoid deportation from the UK – overtaking the right to ‘protection from torture’ which they might face when returning home.

If faith in our legal and immigration systems are not to be fatally undermined, this has to stop. Britain must regain control of its own destiny in the same way that Australia does.

The fact that we are shackled to the European Convention on Human Rights of course makes this harder.

But the truth is that this is entirely possible. Under the Convention, unlike the rights to protection from torture or inhumane treatment, the right to a family life is not absolute.

It states that there can be no interference with the right to a family life ‘except as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security [or] public safety… for the prevention of disorder or crime’.

It is only Strasbourg’s judges and our own courts which slavishly follow their rulings who let foreign criminals claim the right to a ‘family life’ to stop being deported from Britain.

The question now is whether David Cameron, who promised to take the toughest possible line against foreign criminals, will take a stand against this judicial activism.

As Tory MP Dominic Raab says, it is one thing to argue against deporting an individual to a state which permits the use of torture but it makes a mockery of British justice to let hundreds of criminals and suspected terrorists claim a human right of family ties to avoid deportation.

‘This is merely a novel expansion of human rights by the UK courts and Europe,’ Mr Raab argues. ‘It is time they were put in their place.’

MPs could easily initiate legislation in the British Parliament to remove the contentious ‘right to a family life’ protection.

Inevitably, any new law would be challenged in Strasbourg where unelected judges would undoubtedly find against Britain.

But then what? Because the judges do not have the power to enforce their judgments (in a deliberate move to protect member states from abuse of power by Strasbourg, they can only huff and puff against countries who defy their rulings).

Admittedly, the Council of Europe could threaten to revoke the UK’s membership but it has consistently failed to expel Russia and Turkey who have been guilty of most flagrant abuses of human rights law.

So it is inconceivable that Britain would be sanctioned for deporting killers and rapists to their original countries – even if it does mean leaving behind a ‘family life’ in Britain.

The same is true of Europe’s ruling that UK prisoners should be entitled to vote – a judgment in clear defiance of the wishes of our own democratically-elected Parliament.

Indeed, there are currently 8,600 rulings by Strasbourg which have been defied by European countries.

Mr Cameron, whose government is now responsible for looking after British-born gunman Clifford Tucker following his expulsion from Australia after 40 years and making sure he does not harm the British public, must say that enough is enough.

We have plenty of nasty foreign-born criminals like Tucker living here. It is high time they were placed on a plane home, whatever the judiciary may say. Failure to do so will mean Britain remains a safe haven for the world’s worst criminals.

As of 8th April 2011, prison numbers were at 85,361.

Foreign nationals represent 14% of that number - 11,950
It costs the UK tax payer £40,000 per inmate per year, that is a staggering £478 million

This would pay the wages of 13,658 police constables. How would you prefer your hard earned and paid taxes to be spent?

To read the original article and comments click the link below.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1378728/Australian-career-thug-shipped-Britain-thing.html

and another ...

Why 47 dangerous criminals on the run can't be named: Because of their human rights, of course!

Forty-seven dangerous fugitives cannot be named by officials – because of their ‘human rights’.

They include criminals convicted of child sex offences, murder and rape. All have breached the terms of their licence and should have been returned to prison.

They are assessed by officials as being at ‘high or very high risk’ of committing further criminal offences. But the Ministry of Justice has refused to name them.

Critics said the human rights of offenders were being put before those of ordinary members of the public.

Details of the scandal first emerged 18 months ago when officials revealed more than 1,000 criminals were at large despite having been recalled to custody. Among the total were some who have been on the loose for up to 25 years after police failed to track them down.

The most recent Ministry of Justice figures show 960 have not been found, including two rated as level four – the highest risk to the public – and 45 rated level three. The group of 47 includes two murderers, two paedophiles, a rapist and ten robbers.

Police should find 75 per cent of recalled prisoners classified as ‘emergency’ cases within 74 hours and three-quarters of standard recalls should be completed within six days.

Details of all offenders who had not been returned were compiled following the murder in London of two French students, Laurent Bonomo and Gabriel Ferez, in 2009 despite the killer being recalled to jail.

Dano Sonnex, who had been serving eight years for a stabbing and a number of knifepoint robberies, had been mistakenly freed under low supervision when documents revealing his true danger to the public had not been shared by officials.

Opportunities to return the 23-year-old to prison were then squandered or missed. When an arrest warrant was finally issued, it took police a further 16 days to get round to knocking on his door.

By that time, Mr Ferez and Mr Bonomo were dead, knifed to death by Sonnex earlier that day.

Tory MP Philip Davies said human rights should not be used as an excuse to hide the ‘hugely embarrassing’ revelations.

‘It’s absolute madness. Once again it appears to put the human rights of dangerous criminals ahead of the rights of law-abiding people to know who is at large.

'It must be in the public interest to put the names of these offenders in the public domain.’ Ministers have now ordered a review of the policy of releasing criminals’ details.

A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: ‘This Government is committed to transparency and there should be a presumption that such information is published unless the police object for specific operational reasons. Recapturing high-risk offenders will always be a priority.

‘Over the past 10 years, in more than 99 per cent of cases where an offender has been recalled, the individual has successfully been returned to custody.’

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1378454/Officials-REFUSE-killers-child-sex-offenders-human-rights.html

SAVE 12,000 POLICE OFFICERS JOBS NOW!

2011-04-12T00:40:00.000-07:00

More than 54,000 European Union citizens have been convicted of crimes — including murder — in the past two years according to an article in The Daily Telegraph.

Poles and Romanians are the worst offenders according to the figures, adding to concerns over the impact of the two most recent EU expansions. And because of EU rules on freedom of movement, only those sentenced to at least two years in prison face deportation after they complete their punishment.

Less than a week ago, separate figures showed crime committed here by all foreigners had almost doubled in two years. Police last night warned that foreign criminals were putting extra pressure on already stretched resources because language barriers could delay even routine procedures.

One police leader said last week that a simple caution could take six hours to issue to a foreign offender who did not speak English.

Under data exchange systems in the EU, police here notify another member state if one of its citizens has been convicted of a crime. Figures from the Association of Chief Police Officers showed that last year 27,056 such notifications were made and 27,379 in 2009. That is the equivalent of 520 a week or 75 a day.

In 2010, 6,777 Poles were convicted of crimes and 4,343 Romanians.

They were followed by citizens from Lithuania (4,176), Ireland (2,423) and Latvia (1,938). It means, with the exception of Ireland, the worst offenders came from countries that joined the EU in either 2004 or 2007.

There were no details available regarding the offences committed or sentences. However, the figures will include the case of Piotr Zasada, 33, a Pole who received a life sentence for murder in October after he stabbed his ex-girlfriend Katarzyna Ryba and threw her out of a second-floor window in Bournemouth, Dorset.

David Cameron promised to introduce powers to deport more foreign criminals, in a speech made before the Tories came to power.

In January this year, Learco Chindamo, the Italian killer of headmaster Philip Lawrence, was charged with robbery only months after he was released from prison. He had been allowed to stay after he successfully argued that to deport him would infringe his human rights.

A Home Office spokesman said: "We are committed to removing foreign lawbreakers from the UK. We removed 5,235 foreign national prisoners in 2010."

Europeans convicted in Britain (2010)

Austria 58
Belgium 23
Bulgaria 296
Cyprus 162
Czech Rep. 783
Denmark 61
Estonia 181
Finland 58
France 1,032
Germany 360
Greece 102
Hungary 290
Ireland 2,423
Italy 706
Latvia 1,938
Lithuania 4,176
Luxembourg 3
Malta 70
Netherlands 516
Poland 6,777
Portugal 1,842
Romania 4,343
Slovakia 361
Slovenia 24
Spain 267
Sweden 104
Total 27,056

Or, put another way 1% of recorded crime in 2010 resulted in the conviction of Europeans. 1% may seem a small price to pay, but remember, these are only offences where offenders were caught and convicted. many thousands more offences are undetected. Police detections for 2010 were 10% worse than 2009, due in part to the increased pressure of immigrant crime. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/8439117/EU-migrants-commit-500-crimes-a-week-in-UK.html

See also:-
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2010/01/uk-immigration-2010-uncomfortable-truth_12.html

The current unrestricted, uncontrolled immigration has led to higher crime rates, demand for more housing, extra strain on the environment, traffic congestion, longer hospital waiting lists, lower educational standards, higher income tax, lower wages, high unemployment, a loss of British identity, a breakdown in community spirit, more restrictive policing, higher council taxes, a shortage of council homes, higher levels of stress and unhappiness and a fragmented community.

These are some of the consequences of the uncontrolled immigration we have witnessed in recent years, a massive financial burden on the taxpayer that should be spend on UK solutions, a broken criminal justice system, prison overcrowding, a broken society with a rapidly eroding sense of national heritage and culture.

The problem of immigration has nothing to do with race, creed or culture. It has everything to do with overcrowding and a politically motivated attempt by ministers to transform the fundamental make-up and identity of this country. The Labour Government immigration strategy of ethnic cleansing was devised and implemented with the deliberate intention to destroy the right of the British people to live in a society defined by a common history, religion, law, language and traditions. It was done to destroy what it means to be culturally British and to put another 'multicultural' identity in its place. And it was done without telling or asking the British people whether they wanted their country and their culture to be transformed in this way.

IMMIGRATION AND CRIME

Take a look at the foreign nationals in our prisons:
Population in prison by nationality – 30th June 2009

• All nationalities 83,454
• British nationals 71,231 85%
• Foreign nationals 11,350 14%
• Not recorded 874 1%

The Foreign National Prison Population is represented by :

• Africa 2,897 3%
• Asia 2,456 3%
• America 302 0.36%
• N America 137 0.16%
• Europe 3,617 4%
• Middle East 595 1%
• Oceania* 52 0.06%
• W Indies 1,289 2%
• Other 5 0.01%

*(Australia, New Zealand, Fiji) (We have the numbers by individual country).

14% of our prison population is foreign nationals. The Prison Service states that each prisoner is housed at a tax payer cost of £30,000 per year. That is a staggering total of £340,500,000 per year.

When key criminal justice and immigration facts for England and Wales are compared alongside each other, the picture becomes clear. The net migration figure (the inflow less the outflow) has more than doubled in the last ten years.

If these foreign criminals were returned to their country of origin, this would solve the prison overcrowding problem, and empower our courts to impose correct sentences for UK offenders who, all too often get away with a judicial slap on the wrist. Issues associated with immigration add further massive burdens on our police and judicial system, not only in financial terms (including the many millions required to provide interpreter services), but also with regard to the additional crime committed by this sector of the community.

There are those that say (including certain diversity obsessed Chief Officers of Police), that crime has not risen disproportionately when measured against the population increase. HOGWASH! The fact remains, that these are additional crimes committed by visitors to this country, who abuse the hospitality and generosity extended to them. At the moment, the criminal fraternity, including the law breaking element of the foreign national community is laughing at the farce of British justice.

Recorded crime has reduced, however as we have reported from these pages previously, in the article "Top Cops Are Fiddling The Crime Figures" recorded crime statistics can no longer be given any credence.

The increased prison population is a measure of the success of our front line police officers. The startling statistic, supporting our view that immigration has a major impact on crime, is the percentage of prisoners that are foreign nationals. This figure has stood at 14% for 5 years, having doubled since labour came to power, costing the taxpayer a staggering £1.7 Billion across the period.

We have compiled the recorded crime, police strength, population growth, prison population and foreign national and immigration statistics for the years of Labour Government. The composite picture when all the statistics are viewed together is a sad indictment on how they have decimated the social fabric of our nation.

We want Britain returned to the way it has traditionally been. Britain always will have ethnic minorities and most have no problem with this as long as it does not change nor seek to change the fundamental culture and identity of the indigenous majority.

The unrestricted, uncontrolled situation contributed to higher crime rates, increased pressure on the police and criminal justice system, prison overcrowding, a demand for more housing, an extra strain on the environment, traffic congestion, longer hospital waiting lists, lower educational standards, higher income tax, lower wages, high unemployment, a loss of British identity, a breakdown in community spirit, more restrictive policing, higher council taxes, a shortage of council homes, higher levels of stress and unhappiness and a fragmented community.

A measure of immigration and cultural diversity is indeed good for a country. Sadly, the immigration strategy of the Labour Government had nothing to do with enhancing British culture and society by broadening the mix. It was implemented for perverse political reasons that risk the destruction of its defining character altogether.

Other countries would not tolerate millions of immigrants taking over their society and miminising the value of its tradition, heritage and culture. Japan would not do it; China would not do it; India would not do it; Pakistan would not do it – so why should Britain?

Each nation has the right to maintain its own traditional culture and identity. The right of India to remain Indian, the right of China to remain Chinese, the right of Pakistan to remain Pakistani and the right of Saudi Arabia to remain Saudi does not mean that any of these nations have to “hate” anybody else. All it means is that they wish to preserve their identity and national existence.

This is all we want for Britain – the right to be British and the right to openly celebrate events like Christmas that we have celebrated for centuries, without fearing the imaginary offence this might cause. Is this such an extreme request? Is this so unreasonable? – NO! In fact, it is perfectly normal and completely in line with the rights granted to every other nation and in accord with international law.

14% of our prison population is foreign nationals.
Prison population at 8th April 2011 = 85,361 (97% of spaces)
549 are housed in Immigration Removal Centres
Almost 12,000 are foreign nationals
Immigrant Crime costs £4billion per year
At £30k p.a. each foreign national in prison costs £360million per year.

This is the equivalent of keeping 12,000 police officers in their jobs, on the streets. Does anyone else think we have our priorities massively wrong in this country?

27,056 EU criminals convicted. 12,000 foreign nationals in our prisons, of which only 3,617 (4%) are Europeans.

How many other countries would stand for the nonsense of tax payers forking out millions to keep foreign convicted prisoners in our jails whilst our police officers jobs are on the line?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/8426609/Concerns-over-foreign-crime-wave.html

Concerns over foreign crime wave

A foreign crime wave is sweeping Britain after arrests of migrants almost doubled in just two years.

By Tom Whitehead, Home Affairs Editor 7:00AM BST 05 Apr 2011

Police arrested more than 91,000 foreigners suspected of crimes last year – the equivalent of 250 a day – compared with less than 52,000 in 2008.

Rural areas, which have seen large influxes of new migrants, have been particularly hit with one force seeing arrests soar from just 27 to almost 5,000 since 2006.

The figures, released under Freedom of Information, have fuelled concerns over how Labour’s immigration policies have impacted on communities and services.

And the true figure could be twice as high as less than half of police forces responded.

Chief constables have already warned that a rising number of foreign criminals has put huge pressure on resources such as officer time and translation costs.

One rank and file leader last night revealed it can take an officer up to six hours just to issue a caution to a foreign offender who does not speak English.

The growing trend comes as the police service faces cuts of up to 20 per cent over the next four years with thousands of officers likely to be lost.

One MP last night described the figures as “deeply concerning” while police chiefs warned a “growing number of new communities” has made crime patterns more complex.

Information from 19 police forces show that in 2010 some 91,234 non-British nationals were arrested for crimes including murder, burglary and sexual offences.

That was a 76 per cent increased on the 51,899 arrested in 2008.

The rise coincides with a sharp increase in the number of migrants coming to live in the UK since the European Union expanded in 2004 to take in eight former Eastern Bloc countries including Poland.

Arrests of foreigners made by the Metropolitan Police increased from 24,264 in 2008 to 58,870 in 2010 – up by 143 per cent.

Rural areas also showed huge increases notably Cambridgeshire Constabulary which made 27 arrests in 2006 and 4,803 in 2010.

Durham Constabulary suffered a 629 per cent rise from 65 in 2006 to 474 in 2010 and Humberside Police increased by 138 per cent up from 865 to 2,055.

Arrests by Kent Police increased by 283 per cent from 1,075 to 4,119, while Surrey Police saw a rise from 1,959 to 2,079 – up six per cent.

If the trend was repeated across all 52 forces in the UK it is estimated that over 750,000 foreign crooks have been arrested since 2006.

Hugh Robertson, Conservative MP for Mid Kent said: "These figures are deeply concerning for anybody who lives in Kent and place a very unwelcome extra burden on our police forces.”

Nick Cowan, crime researcher for think tank Civitas, added: "To some extent with an open labour market you are going to end up with some undesirables which is a shame.”

Pete Smyth, chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, said migration has had a "huge" impact on police resources. He said: "It is a problem when you get someone in who can't speak English and we wait hours for an expensive interpreter to hear their side of the story. Even in trivial cases where you might be giving just a caution officers could be off the street for five or six hours – which is a massive expense."

A spokeswoman for Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) said the high amount of foreign crimes has added pressure to already "stretched" police resources. She said: "The growing number of new communities has certainly brought greater complexity to the pattern of crime and have contributed to already stretched resources. As police, we have to adapt all the time to deal with new and emerging problems. However we pride ourselves on our strong relationships within our local communities and the way we deal with the issues that emerge."

Julian Huppert, MP for Cambridge, added: "Cambridge is experiencing rapid growth and we need Government investment if we are to manage that growth effectively."

Cllr Geoffrey Heathcock, a former JP in Cambridge, added: "The volume of violent crime linked to foreign nationals is deeply troubling and is another factor in the whole story of why the county, with a growing population pressure, needs a significantly better deal from the Government."

WILL WE SEE JUSTICE FOR YVONNE FLETCHER?

2011-03-25T04:55:00.000-07:00

With special thanks to the webmaster at the Surrey Constabulary blog for their latest post reprinted here.

After 27 years, is a day of justice finally approaching for murdered WPC?

By surreywebmaster, March 25, 2011 09:02

Special report:

In a rebel camp in Benghazi, Kim Sengupta has a chilling encounter with a man accused of the 1984 murder of Yvonne Fletcher.

Friday, 25 March 2011
The shocking killing of Yvonne Fletcher in April 1984 led to the siege of the Libyan embassy by armed police.

Artillery shells exploded in the distance and ambulance sirens rose through the air as Libya’s revolution continued on its violent course. But, at the corner of an army camp in Benghazi, the focus was on a 27-year-old murder in London. Sitting on a white plastic chair on the parade ground, with a balaclava-clad guard training a Kalashnikov on him, Omar Ahmed Sodani recounted how he was accused over the shooting of PC Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan embassy in the UK. He accused three other men of the crime, of which he is the chief suspect. And he gave a glimmer of hope that he will finally be held to account by saying he would be willing to stand trial in London.

The shocking killing of PC Fletcher in April 1984 led to the siege of the Libyan embassy by armed police, the expulsion of the country’s diplomats and a permanent scar on relations between Britain and Libya.

Omar Sodani is accused of shooting WPC Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan Embassy in 1984.

Mr Sodani, the 59-year-old head of the Al Ejanalghoria, Muammar Gaddafi’s militia in Benghazi, has been photographed by British officials, according to a senior rebel, after being discovered hiding in a farmhouse 10 days ago. He has been questioned by his captors in the rebel movement not only about the shooting but for allegedly providing reports on Libyan students in London which led to their persecution back home, as well as complicity in human rights abuses.

“Of course I realise I am in a serious position. I don’t know if I am a prisoner or not, but I am the head of the Al Ejanalghoria, the revolutionary committee,” Mr Sodani said. He spoke haltingly at first, hunched forward into the gray fleece he was wearing, some of his words lost in a strong wind gusting around the parade ground. Occasionally his eyes would dart towards a group of rebel fighters who were watching him intently. “They have interrogated me about the shooting all those years ago,” he said. “I have explained to them that I did not do it.

“I do think about the policewoman and her family over time but there is nothing I can do. The shooting should not have happened. It was a mistake, but I had nothing to do with it. For years it was difficult to talk about it, but I can say that I did not kill her.”

At the time of the shooting, insisted Mr Sodani, he was under arrest at a London police station. He had tried to get into the embassy, where he acted as a part-time spokesman, while a group of dissidents were holding a demonstration outside and became involved in an altercation with a police officer. “I do not remember which police station it was, but it was near by. By the time I was released the shooting had already taken place,” he said. “I was in London, at my home in Ennismore Gardens, for two weeks and then I was expelled. But I have had this accusation against me ever since.”

Now he says that he is prepared to face justice. “The police in England never charged me with it even though I was there for two weeks after it took place,” he said. “I am being questioned about this again when there is so much happening in Libya. But I am prepared to stand up before a judge, here, or in England, and say that I did not kill her.”

PC Fletcher, who was policing the demonstration, was killed by a single shot from the first-floor window of the embassy, called the “people’s bureau” by the Libyans. Mr Sodani’s fingerprints were discovered in the room near the window frame and, it is claimed, he was seen by one of the protesters outside.

There has never been any proof of who fired the gun. But Mr Sodani’s protestations of innocence were met with scepticism in Benghazi. “At the time he was spying on students for his masters in Tripoli,” a rebel official said. “He was in the embassy, I remember seeing him at the embassy. He has done a lot of nasty things since he returned here. He will be held accountable for all that as well.”

Mr Sodani countered those claims with rising urgency audible in his voice. As he spoke he became louder, as if he would not have many other chances to protest his innocence.

“It is not surprising that my fingerprints were found, I was there all the time helping them put out statements,” he said. And, he added, Yvonne Fletcher’s death had made little impression. “I cannot remember where the shooting took place, it was more than 25 years ago,” he said. “We talked about it afterwards, but we did not talk about it much.”

Asked who had carried out the shooting if it was not him, Mr Sodani was reticent at first. “This is something I want to only talk to the police about,” he said. Mr Sodani shook his head vigorously saying he did not want to incriminate anyone else. Then, after a moment’s silence, he scratched his stubbly beard, leant forward and spread his hands. “There were three names which came up,” he said. “Two were students, both called Saleh, and the third person was a diplomat, Abdul Gader. I do not know what has happened to them.”

As well as Mr Sodani, Scotland Yard had investigated Abdel-Gader Tuhami, who, it was claimed, had carried out political assassinations on behalf of the Gaddafi regime; Moustapha Maghribi, a military intelligence officer; Ali Jalid, a press officer; and two political attaches, Matouk Matouk and Abdul Ghadir Baghdadi.

After prolonged negotiations, the Libyan regime agreed to pay compensation to PC Fletcher’s family. Relations between Tripoli and the UK and US thawed after similar payments were made to the families bereaved in the Lockerbie bombing and the handing over of the two suspects for trial.

Detectives from London flew to Libya a number of times after pledges of co-operation from the authorities. But those trips did not unearth enough evidence to enable prosecutions. Police sources claimed they had been unable to interview a number of crucial witnesses and potential suspects.

According to media reports, Mr Sodani and Mr Matouk had already been executed on the orders of Colonel Gaddafi. “I read that I had been killed and that also we had been given a ‘hero’s welcome’ first. But that did not happen either, there was no welcome.

“They [the regime] said they would look after all my problems, but I had problems with my accommodation and my work and I did not get much help. So, at the end I decided to go back to continue my studies in Europe. I had not been charged by the police with anything, and so I did not see any reason why I shouldn’t travel.”

While working part time at the embassy in London, Mr Sodani was taking a course at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and applied for academic places in Belgium and Germany.

“I had wanted to leave my past behind. But in both Belgium and Germany I was told that I would not be accepted because I was in London during the shooting,” he said. “At the end I had to go to East Germany, to Berlin. All I wanted to do was continue with my studies.”

Mr Sodani headed a department at Benghazi University after returning to Libya. According to a member of the protest movement “he failed students who did not attend lectures on Gaddafi’s Green Book. He was totally with the regime”.

Mr Sodani disappeared soon after the 17 February uprising. He was found by rebels searching for members of Gaddafi’s force who are said to be trying to infiltrate Benghazi.

After talking for a little more than an hour, Mr Sodani was led away. As he departed, he made one final pronouncement: “I have full confidence in the fairness of the revolution and the revolution’s judges. This country would be a far better place in the future than it was in the past.” There was no mistaking the fear in his voice.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/after-27-years-is-a-day-of-justice-finally-approaching-for-murdered-wpc-2252531.html

See also - http://blog.old-and-bold.com/wordpress/?p=2955

One Response to “After 27 years, is a day of justice finally approaching for murdered WPC?”

surreywebmaster says:

March 25, 2011 at 09:16 The peaceful London protest that became a day of bloody infamy.

It began with what should have been a peaceful demonstration watched by benevolent London bobbies on 17 April 1984. Outside a building which Colonel Gaddafi insisted on calling the Libyan People’s Bureau, in St James’s Square off Pall Mall, a little group of Libyan exiles had gathered to protest at the hanging of two Tripoli University students.

The police did not expect the protesters to cause any trouble, and what should have eased their task was that it was a holiday in Libya, so most of the staff of the embassy, or People’s Bureau, were not at work that day. Neither the police nor the demonstrators reckoned on the fanaticism of some of the Gaddafi loyalists who were inside the building, staring resentfully out at their fellow countrymen shouting slogans against their leader.

One of them, in an upstairs room, raised an automatic weapon and raked the crowd with bullets, hitting 11 of the protesters. All, mercifully, survived, though five were seriously injured.

But one bullet hit a 25-year-old police constable, Yvonne Fletcher, who by rights should not have been in the police force at all because she was just 5ft 4in tall. But somehow she had talked her way into getting a job and was engaged to a fellow officer, who was standing nearby and saw her die.

It is the only instance in living memory in which a British police officer has been murdered in the line of duty and the culprit has got clean away – which is why Yvonne Fletcher is the only murdered officer whose name can be instantly recalled by a very large number of people, although she has been dead for almost 27 years.

Though the Libyans refused to call their premises an “embassy”, its staff enjoyed all the privileges of accredited diplomats, which meant that the police were not allowed to go into the building to arrest the killer. All they could do was surround it, to stop him getting out.

The reaction in Tripoli was instant. Troops encircled the British embassy, trapping 20 people inside, and Colonel Gaddafi vowed that if their bureau was stormed “an act of this magnitude will not go unanswered by the Libyan people”.

The stand-off lasted several days, while the British authorities sought Libya’s permission for detectives to enter the building. They kept in telephone contact with staff inside, and took them supplies of food, drink and cigarettes, while armed police trained their weapons on the building, day and night. In Tripoli, the British embassy was under a similar siege.

After six days of tense and ultimately pointless negotiations, the British government broke off diplomatic relations with Libya, ordered the staff from the Tripoli embassy home, and gave Libya’s diplomatic staff one week to leave the country. The implication was that after a week they would lose their immunity and the police would be free to do what they could to identify and arrest the gunman.

Even as they left, they and their baggage were accorded diplomatic status, which meant that on 27 April police had to stand back, under the watchful gaze of diplomats from Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Syria, as dozens of bags were removed from the building – knowing that one of those bags held the gun that had killed Yvonne Fletcher. The next day, 30 people trooped out of the People’s Bureau and boarded a plane for Tripoli.

The police believed they already knew the killer’s identity. Using monitoring equipment, they had overheard a heated argument inside the building during which the gunman’s name was mentioned. All 30 occupants had to give their names as they left. Only one matched.

He was said to be a man with dark hair, in his early 30s, a description that fits Omar Ahmed Sodani, who has always maintained his innocence. Though it was reported that Fletcher’s killer was executed on arrival in Libya, the truth appears to be that he was given a hero’s welcome.

Diplomatic relations between Britain and Libya were severed for 15 years, until July 1999, after Gaddafi had agreed to hand over the two Libyans accused of the Lockerbie bombing. After that, detectives from the Metropolitan Police made several visits to Libya in the hope of cracking the case, but without success.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/the-peaceful-london-protest-that-became-a-day-of-bloody-infamy-2252530.html

See our previous related articles about Yvonne and the disgusting betrayal of her memory by Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and the Labour Government:

http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2009/10/murder-of-wpc-fletcher-gadaffi-sorry.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2009/10/petition-to-bring-murderer-of-wpc.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2009/09/police-federation-letter-to-gordon.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2009/09/wpc-yvonne-fletcher-growing-sense-of.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2009/09/murder-of-wpc-fletcher-uk-govt-betrayed.html

WINSOR REVIEW - HOW WILL IT AFFECT YOU? - PC to CHIEF INSPECTOR? FIND OUT HERE

2011-03-21T03:54:00.000-07:00

The Winsor Review team has produced a ready reckoner to show how much you could be winning or losing from its recommendations.

We have uploaded the ready reckoner from the site for you. To access or download it for yourself click here or directly via the Winsor Review site.

The 'ready reckoner' for Constables, Sergeants, Inspectors and Chief Inspectors enables you to click on your current role and circumstances and it will give you an indication of how much more or less you would earn in the future.

Many reports have caused considerable concern for police officer and staff salaries. Many officers will actually benefit from the changes, the review claims. If you are a federated rank - from PC to Chief Inspector - and want to know how the proposals affect you, go to the ready reckoner to show how your income, including allowances and overtime, will change if the recommendations are implemented.

Click on the image to see it larger. To see how the review will affect you click here.

The Winsor Review site

WINSOR REVIEW - PAY LOSS CALCULATOR - LETTER FROM GENERAL SECRETARY
Friday 18th March 2011

Dear Colleague,

I would like to draw your attention to the following website which shows the effect on an officer’s income of the Winsor recommendations:
http://review.police.uk/publications/review-recommendations

After inputting the required information, many members will find that their pay falls as a result of these changes.

Even for those whose pay appears to rise, it is important to remember that these calculations only show changes to income in cash terms.

Inflation is currently running at 5% and is forecast to be close to this level for at least the next 12 months, so the value of basic pay will fall as a result of the two-year pay freeze which the Government wishes to impose upon us.

These calculations also take no account of the fact that under the Winsor recommendations officers will not move up their pay increments. This means that if an officer is not at the top of his or her pay scale, their pay will actually be lower than it would otherwise have been, despite any increases that result from Mr Winsor’s recommendations.

I should also point out, for your information, that while Mr Winsor factors in pension contribution increases, these have yet to be discussed by the Police Negotiating Board, and we have been assured that discussions will take place there before any increases are implemented.

In common with all other employees, though, from April 2011 there will be several changes to the income tax and national insurance regimes. In particular:

The income tax personal allowance will rise to £7,475, but the salary level at which employees begin to pay the higher rate of income tax (40%) will fall from £37,400 per annum to £35,000 per annum.
Employee national insurance contribution (NIC) rates will rise from 11% to 12% for those who earn between £139 a week and up to £817 a week and from 1% to 2% for those who earn anything over £817 per week.

The effect of this is that employees with total earnings of more than £35,000 a year will find themselves paying more in income tax and national insurance contributions.

I hope that you find this information helpful to understand the true impact of the Winsor recommendations on your take home pay. The PFEW will engage fully on negotiations over these recommendations, but we have no intention of agreeing to any changes which would see a fall in our members’ pay and conditions of service. As I have tried to do throughout this process, I will continue to keep you updated on developments.
Regards

Ian Rennie

General Secretary
Police Federation of England and Wales
www.polfed.org
See source document

The Winsor Review - The effect on pay and conditions - 21 March 2011

To see source file on http://www.polfed.org/ click here

Dear Colleagues

On Friday 18th March 2011, we became aware of the circulation of an e-mail communication from Tom Winsor to Chief Constables requesting their urgent assistance and co-operation in ensuring that their police officers and staff are properly informed about the likely effects of the implementation of his review of pay and conditions. He asked them to circulate a letter and a ready reckoner that is also available on his review website, which he states officers and staff can use to dispel misleading information about the effects that his proposals will have on police pay.

This resulted in my communication above, from which it is clearly evident that Tom Winsor is being selective as to the information he wants officers to focus on and is a blatant attempt to generate support for his proposals by creating uncertainty and division between officers. This is particularly disappointing considering that the Home Secretary has yet to inform the Police Negotiating Board as to which of his proposals she considers should be the subject of negotiation. The adoption of this strategy by Tom Winsor clearly shows that his review, which proposes to remove almost £500M from police pay, can now be seen for exactly what it is, a cynical attack to reduce police pay and conditions.

It is important that you are aware of the full facts and not fooled by this misleading information provided by Winsor. I have therefore asked your local Federation to bring this information to the attention of your Chief Constable, requesting that they give my communication equal prominence with that of the Winsor Pay Calculator in any of their communications, including the force website. I would hope that as good employers and leaders of the service, Chief Constables would want to ensure that their officers are aware of the full facts. I await confirmation of their support and will keep you informed of their co-operation, however it would be inappropriate not to congratulate Simon Ash, the Chief Constable of Suffolk, who I understand is the first to refuse. We can only hope that this is not an indication of his support for the Winsor proposals, particularly as he represents ACPO on the Official Side of PNB, although one would hope that he would represent the views all the Chief Constables not just his own.

To ensure that you are fully informed, I also include my earlier communication of 11th March that includes previously circulated information identifying the detrimental impact the Winsor proposals will have on officers’ pay and conditions.

We are grateful for your continued support during this difficult time for policing.
Regards

Ian Rennie

General Secretary
Police Federation of E&W
Federation House
Highbury Drive
Leatherhead
Surrey KT22 7UY

We would urge all Federated ranks to read Ian Rennie's detailed comments about the review.

To read or download them now click here.

To see Paul McKeever's latest address to the membership click below.

Bonuses go in bonfire of police perks - Telegraph

2011-03-08T02:01:00.000-08:00

Bonuses go in bonfire of police perks - Telegraph

CRIME IS DOWN ..... OR IS IT? - PART 5 - CRIME OF THE CENTURY

2011-03-06T05:48:00.000-08:00

Over recent years, every Tom, Dick and Harry involved in the compilation, manipulation and obfuscation of crime statistics have thrown their thistle encrusted ACPO caps in the air to celebrate a steady fall in crime. The Home Office boasted it was all down to its crime prevention efforts. The police hierarchy said it was their intelligence-led approach that was responsible. Academics said rising consumption, falling inequality, better security devices, fewer adolescent males, an upsurge in abortions (with fewer neglected children) and/or a fall in unemployment were at the root of it all. The last Government would have us believe it was a direct result of their strategy to bolster officer numbers and wonderful performance targeting that brought about the miraculous decrease in crime and increase in detections.

But what if it never happened? What if all that research (and all of the political point-scoring which it inspired) is one big misleading lie? What if it was all a pernicious web of deceit involving Senior Politicians and Police Chiefs with the conspiratorial intention of fooling the public into believing that crime was falling and detections were rising year after year?

What if the truth is that crime didn’t fall at all – that it was only the statistics that fell, and in fact the illusion of falling crime was the biggest crime of them all?

"Crime Of The Century", the latest report from The Thin Blue Line argues that there has in fact been an appalling and orchestrated "Cooking of the crime books" for many years. Years of collaborative research and contributions from serving, retired and former police officers confirmed our worst suspicions. Police recorded crime and detections have been wickedly and deliberately manipulated for many years, resulting in millions being paid in performance bonuses to Chief Officers, gross misallocation and direction of fiscal and operational resources and perhaps the worst crime of all, the scurrilous conspiratorial deception of the tax paying public, perpetrated by Chief Officers and previous Home Office ministers that crime fell and detections rose dramatically under their watch.

Even more disturbing is that these "Gaming" practices have occurred with the knowledge and passive acquiescence of the responsible bodies whose duty it is, to manage and regulate policing, the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), Her Majesties Inspector of Constabulary (HMIC), The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) and the Office of the Information Commissioner (ICO).  Whilst some of the supportive information and evidence is subject either copyright restrictions or legal privilege, the report provides sufficient detail for the reader to grasp the gravity of the scandalous activity and subsequent failure of the regulatory bodies to take the necessary action.

Negative pr would be just one result from exposure of this scandal. This is the most likely motive for the regulatory bodies sweeping the details under the carpet in the hope that the activities will magically disappear. However, by concealing the extent of "gaming" the respective organisations are colluding or aiding and abetting the deception. By failing to act, they are silently condoning the strategies of Chief Officers who are ultimately responsible for these dubious and possibly criminal practices.

In the few instances where "gaming" has been exposed within forces, it has been the rank and file officers, carrying out the strategies of the senior command, who have been held responsible. Senior officers have been adept at applying pressure for results through the management chain down to the front line officers responsible for crime recording and detections. However, when questioned, these Chiefs have plausible prepared answers that they only advocate "ethical practices". The evidence from the front liners is that in practice, the tactics employed do not support the Chief Officers' protestations.

The discussions of sanction detection targets provided some of the best and most worrying examples of the negative effects of the strategies. In addition to diverting effort and resources from the investigation and detection of more serious crime, the pressure to achieve sanction detections is threatening the integrity of officers. On some BCUs officers are adopting practices which could have serious consequences for them if they were to come to light.

The senior officers who exert these production pressures were accused of duplicity by turning a blind eye to such infractions whilst making grand statements in public about the importance of police integrity.

The report opens with a review of "Gaming in public sector statistics" – exploring in some depth the prevalence of the activity as a result of performance targeting. Reference is made to respected research and commissioned articles that explain the subject in greater detail as an overview.

This is followed by section 2 which summarises the work of Dr Rodger Patrick, who served as a Chief Inspector in the West Midlands Police during the introduction of New Public Management and the Performance Management regime which accompanied it 1995 – 2005. Dr Patrick is responsible for conducting what is perhaps the most extensive and conclusive independent research into the practice of Gaming within the police forces of England & Wales. The section details and explains the identified "gaming" practices of "cuffing", "stitching", "nodding" and "skewing".

In section 3 "Police Officers have their say", the report provides actual comment from serving police officers, detailing more precisely how crime statistics and detections are manipulated and fiddled. The polite term is "Housekeeping" but many simply refer to it as "Cooking the books".

Section 4 summarises the official line, drawing extracts from the "Crime statistics in England & Wales" reports.

In section 5 the report explores the administrative changes implemented during the Labour years that dramatically skewed the statistics therefter. The Home Office Counting Rules, National Crime Recording Standard and the National Standard for Incident Recording each contributed to massive distortions of the crime statistics in years subsequent to their introduction, leading the Home Office to concede: "Variation in recording practices had made comparisons between police forces and, indeed, national estimates of the level of crime difficult to measure accurately". The notes that accompany the statistical tables contain the rider: "The National Crime Recording Standard was introduced in April 2002, although some forces adopted NCRS practices before the standard was formally introduced. Figures before and after that date are not directly comparable. The introduction of NCRS led to a rise in recording in 2002/03 and, particularly for violent crime, in the following years as forces continued to improve compliance with the new standard". The effects of these changes (argued to provide the previous Government with an obfuscation tool to assist with their reducing crime spin) are covered in more detail in section 6.

Section 6 "The numbers game" explores the statistical effects of "gaming" by examining recorded crime from 1997 to 2010 and highlighting the offences where manipulation is most prevalent and how the trends and patterns suggest that alternative recording methods are used to manipulate recorded crime and detection numbers. An extract from the section looking at recorded crime by offence 1997 to 2010 follows:-

The key offence groups have been extrapolated from the recorded crime statistics for each of the years from 1997, when the Labour administration began and the most recent complete recorded crime year up to 31st March 2010.

· The largest group of offences by far, is that containing property, Robbery, Burglary, Vehicles, Other Theft, Fraud & Criminal Damage (Volume Crime)
· This set represented 91% of total recorded crime in 1997, dropping to 70% by 2010
· The property group is most susceptible to gaming practices where a significant decline in crime can be represented. For example, the 10% decrease in property crime reported in 2009/10 amounted to 320,807 fewer offences. The total of all crime displayed 364,113 fewer offences, meaning that property crime represented 88% of the total decrease in crime. This illustrates the most likely area where gaming practices would have the most significant impact, by individual force and for the 43 force total.
· The property group is also the most likely to experience “cuffing” unless an insurance claim is involved, where a crime number is often required to validate the claim. However, even this is not insurmountable, as we have experienced many cases where cases are reported as an “incident” but not subsequently elevated to a “crime” so such cases never appear in the statistics. Burglary & vehicle crime are particularly susceptible to these distortive effects.
· Burglary offences where no property is stolen are frequently either not recorded as crimes or downgraded to minor damage (and only where damage is sustained).
· Batching of crimes remains a problem, where for example 20 caravans are broken into on a site and reported as one associated offence unless arrests are made when a crime per victim is generated as this produces an equal number of detections, thus distorting the true picture. This also applies with multiple damage incidents and offences against vehicles.
· Robbery offences involve theft with force. Where a prima facie case of robbery with force is not evident, these are commonly downgraded to other thefts to lessen the seriousness of the position.
· The rise in drug offences as a percentage of total crime from 1% in 1997 to 5% in 2010 is somewhat fallacious, reflective and supportive of officer comments that PND for cannabis possession have a perverse effect on overall crime. In the main, these offences come to light as a result of police activity and are over exploited for the purpose of reflecting improvement in detections.
· The steep decline in property crime as a percentage of overall crime is synonymous with one or more of the gaming activities being present, as this is the largest group and most susceptible for the big hit activities referred to earlier in the report. As outlined, whilst this has the outward appearance of reducing crime, in fact officer time is expended on the higher yield, less important matters at the expense of crime that requires greater effort, time and skill to resolve.

Section 7 briefly touches on the recent introduction of Crime Mapping. Whilst considered a useful tool for public interaction and raising awareness about crime, the report observes that until recorded crime is cleansed of its present impurities, the excellent potential of this facility will be undermined and mistrusted.

In section 8, the report outlines the terms of reference for the National Statisticians review of crime statistics & provides the detailed responses submitted by the Thin Blue Line.

To view the full report in digital format click here, or the link above this article "Enlarge this document in a new window" (when the above link is removed, the report may still be accessed via the "View our reports" section in the side bar to the right of this page). Once the digital report is accessed, the pages may be enlarged reduced and the document downloaded in zip format to your computer should you wish). A pdf version of the report can be uploaded by clicking here or via the View Our Reports section to the right.

For readers familiar with police and criminal justice matters, you may wish to focus on the Executive Summary, the officers comments section, the numbers game effects and submission to the National Statistician.

Officers contributions (anonymously) continue to arrive and are most welcome as these will be encapsulated in a further report in due course.

CONCLUDING COMMENT

Crime statistics have sunk to the depths where they are ridiculed, mistrusted and laughable. Frontline police officers have long since tried to raise public awareness about he scurrilous strategies engaged by Chief and Senior Officers in the pursuit of declining crime and increased detection targets.

Home Secretary, Theresa May has clearly recognised the suspicion and doubt that surround crime statistics, by announcing a review led by the national statistician to decide which independent body should have future responsibility for the publication of crime statistics and to oversee the implementation of recommendations last year from the UK Statistics Authority.

To quote her speech in the House of Commons : "I am concerned that our existing measures of crime are confusing and offer the public only a partial picture of the true level of offending. It is in the public interest that we have measures of crime that are clear, meaningful and in which the public can have confidence. While the UK Statistics Authority saw no evidence of political interference in crime statistics published by the Home Office, (perhaps they knew not where to look!) I believe bolder action is needed to more clearly demonstrate their political independence. For that reason, I have decided to move future formal responsibility for the publication of crime statistics to an independent body".

Theresa May has scrapped all performance targets for policing, replacing them with a single measure, to cut crime. To date, many Chief Officers have disobeyed her instruction, (30+ forces still promote the scrapped policing pledge), perhaps in fear that without a yardstick to be measured by, they will be unable to demonstrate how effective their force is. And for those forces where Senior Officer bonuses are still being paid (15%on top of the 100k+ basic salary for Chief Constables, 12.5% for Deputy and Assistant Chiefs, and 10% for middle management) it is likely grounded in the fear of financial loss. It is clear that not until and when crime statistics have been cleansed of its current malaise, will any subsequent successes be treated with respect.

On page 94 of the report, there appears a very damning chart which illustrates most clearly, the pattern that has developed within each of the 43 police forces of England & Wales, becoming increasingly unbelievable over the last six years. Starting with the recorded crime totals for each force from 2003 (the first year where such detailed data was available), it was possible to determine the percentage variance in crime by force year-on-year.

· In 2004 27 out of 43 forces experienced an increase in crime
· In 2005 7 out of 43 forces experienced an increase in crime
· In 2006 14 out of 43 forces experienced an increase in crime
· In 2007 12 out of 43 forces experienced an increase in crime
· In 2008 1 out of 43 forces experienced an increase in crime
· In 2009 1 out of 43 forces experienced an increase in crime
· In 2010 (to March 31st) 1 out of 43 forces experienced an increase in crime
· In 2010 (to September 30th) By now NOT ONE force experienced an increase in crime
· If you were the CEO of a 43 branch company, you would expect to see a variance in performance, between branches, month to month, year on year. Yet, we are expected to swallow the pill that not one force experienced a rise in crime for the year end 30/9/2010?

Looking further back, you will see from the gold boxes in the chart that there is an overwhelming pattern for nearly every force to experience crime decreases, particularly over the latter 4 years. No doubt forces will have a plausible explanation, but we doubt it would stand closer scrutiny.
· The steady decrease in forces experiencing crime increases, arriving at what is presented as a state of “perfection” by September 2010, lends further support to the belief that there has been a large scale manipulation of the statistics through gaming
practices.
· The uninterrupted decline of overall recorded crime between 2005 and 2010 as shown in the recorded crime by offence report, is mirrored by the decrease in the number of forces experiencing increases in crime. Whilst this seems an obvious statement, that the number of forces experiencing crime increases has fallen to zero is indicative of large scale gaming and manipulative practices with volume crime which needs to be investigated. Similar discrepencies appear in the report that details detected crime.

Even at 122 pages, the report contains summary information and evidence. Further conclusive evidence supprts the information and data presented which necessitates a thorough and transparent review of the current processes if true public confidence in crime statistics is to return.

Comments and contributions are welcome, anonymously if preferred.

CRIME IS DOWN ..... OR IS IT? - PART 4 - THIN BLUE LINE RESPONSE TO THE NATIONAL STATISTICIANS REVIEW OF CRIME STATISTICS

2011-02-28T19:54:00.000-08:00

"To be persuaded crime is going down, look at the Government figures.

To be persuaded it is not, look out of the window"

The Thin Blue Line response to the

National Statisticians Review of Crime Statistics

Q1: Responsibility for the publication of crime statistics is to be moved out of the Home Office. Who should now assume this responsibility to increase public trust in the crime statistics?

The Home Secretary is to be commended for identifying an opportunity to increase public trust in crime statistics. This is absolutely crucial if any real success in pursuit of the single target to cut crime is to be taken seriously and afforded any credibility.

However, before deciding who is best positioned to help increase public trust in crime statistics, no stone must be left unturned in getting to the root of how and why trust has become eroded in the first place. Without the essential painful steps to arrive at the heart of the matter, any efforts in this direction are liable to face the same scepticism and doubt about the motives of the Government.

Before committing the undoubted millions in financial resources, the Government must transparently deal with the causes that led and continue to feed the lack of confidence. Mistakenly focusing on the effects of such a lack will place them in no better position than their predecessors, and any action they DO take will be undermined by political and media agendas.

The integrity and reputation of crime statistics and detections has been damaged almost beyond repair. To do anything other than truthfully reveal what has gone wrong will be nothing short of a whitewash and such actions and obfuscations have contributed to the present malaise.

“Overcoming Barriers” and other reviews into crime statistics arrive at some useful observations and conclusions. At our pages on http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com we have conducted our own in depth analysis of crime statistics over recent years in the form of twenty articles and reports into the subject. We are presently compiling our most in depth analysis of crime statistics to date, containing evidence not previously available or published that reflects the pervading problem of Gaming and the distorting effect it has had on statistics, in particular throughout the years of the Labour administration, which will be presented to the Home Office when completed. There are we believe a number of key factors sapping public and commentator confidence that must be addressed before the subject of responsibility for publication of the statistics can be considered:-

• The very real endemic problem of “Gaming”, in the form of “Stitching”, “Skewing” Nodding” and “Cuffing” must be thoroughly and openly investigated and the results exposed. Each element has its own dramatic distorting effect on the integrity of recorded crime. Rank and file officers from all forces report that the practices remain widespread, despite the introduction of the HOCR, NCRS and NSIR. Performance targeting and financial incentives in the form of senior officer bonuses have corrupted the previous integrity of the data. The examples of how crime recording is perverted and manipulated to convey the impression of falling crime are many, particularly in regard to volume crimes such as theft related incidents involving vehicles, criminal damage and burglary. (One simple example: twenty vehicles are attacked in a car park, with twenty victims. It is commonplace for all twenty to be given the same crime reference number, so that only one offence is recorded. If suspects are detained, there would be twenty theft reports and twenty detections, hence improving the detection performance. The examples we have collated are too numerous to mention here.

• The regulatory bodies of HMIC, IPPC and the IOC have been fully aware of the corruptive influence of Gaming, but all have failed in the execution of their responsibilities and duty to expose the full extent of the problem to the public, evidenced by the lack of any individual or force being brought to account for the activities.

• The continued existence of two sources of data, the BCS and recorded crime, with their inherent weaknesses have led to a mass of confusion and continued opportunities for media and political misrepresentation. The merits of both are understood and appreciated. However the fact remains that the BCS is a survey based on estimates drawn from a small representative element of society and has too many exclusions. Despite the sound intent to arrive at the bigger picture and the significant effort and integrity involved in the collection of data, as a comparison tool, it is of little value. Recorded crime suffers from a number of flaws, massive under reporting, excessive complexity and most serious, the gross misrepresentations resulting from Gaming.

• It is staggering that despite all the analytical and statistical expertise that the previous Home Office Ministers have had at their disposal, that there has been no satisfactory explanation of the effects of the HOCR, NCRS and NSIR changes to the data collection and presentation. Again, whilst the reasons for their introduction can be appreciated, it cannot be acceptable that crime statistics, which have such a vital influence over such important matters as operational decision making in policing, have remained corrupted and incomparable year to year. As the Smith review concluded, such changes to vital statistical series should be better managed. The solution would seem to be to invest the time and resources to equalising the data from the years the changes were introduced.

• The biggest mistake this Government could make in this area, would be to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors. Many saw the HOCR, NCRS introduction as a political opportunity exploited by Labour to muddy the waters of crime, and thenceforth be able to present statistics that reflected reductions under their watch. Any consideration to appointing an “Independent Crime Recording Agency” must be preceded by honest transparent opening of the present books, as an insolvency agent would do when conducting the administration of a business. Only when all of the facts and truths are revealed, will there be a possibility of rebuilding and regaining confidence. To do otherwise would be to build on the existing weak and untrusted foundations.

• If two subsets of data are to continue, their respective values will not increase until they are comparable, with identical offences and offence groups.

• Many of the reasons for under reporting by the public have been well publicised. Yet, little has been done in practice to improve matters. Each of the key factors for non-reporting must be thoroughly examined and all solutions that encourage inter action by the public and victims of crime considered. A total crime picture is unattainable, but far more can be done to arrive at a more accurate reflection of the true nature and extent of crime. The expression that comes to mind is “How can you expect to hit a target you can’t even see?”

• Crime mapping is an excellent means of improving communication about crime on a localised basis to the community. However, whilst the current recorded crime data collection process remains unsatisfactory, this will worsen rather than improve public perception of crime.

• To a large extent, the biggest problem lies with the supervisory strategies employed by senior officers. To this extent, performance targeting must be forcibly extinguished. The fact that over 30 of the 43 forces have retained performance targets scrapped by Theresa May is an indication of size and nature of the problem. Whilst this is allowed to continue, it will have a perverse and divisive effect on the integrity of recorded crime. A return to the simplified and universal recording processes will greatly assist matters.

The views and conclusions conveyed here are condensed versions of those we have expressed on our site and in our reports. We will forward a copy of our detailed report in due course. A thorough review of crime statistics is clearly overdue and essential. The collection and presentation of the data should be in the hands of a totally non-political independent body such as the ONS. Value for money would be delivered as only through such independence, and assured data integrity for the future will the twin benefits of better financial and human resource allocation and a slow return of public and media confidence be enjoyed. Independent and detailed (without pre warnings) audits will be essential if the rot that currently exists within the process is to be eliminated and future integrity maintained.

Q2: Is there also a case for transferring responsibility for the management and/or compilation of data collected from the British Crime Survey and the police ? If so, where

The temptation for the Government might be to create an “Independent Crime Recording Agency”. Whilst excellent in principle, for reasons outlined in Q1, the integrity of the source data must be absolutely above reproach to avoid any subsequent slide back into the “Lies, lies and damn statistics”* accusations. (*Benjamin Disraeli)

Whether an independently funded organisation (risking the “Quango” criticisms) or remaining with the Home Office, the principle of Garbage In = Garbage Out will pervade until transparent and honest steps have been taken to clean up the data.

It seems most logical and sensible that the ONS should assume responsibility for the compilation of the recorded crime set. The BCS responsibility should remain with the Home Office to optimise the expertise and resources presently available.

The issue here revolves around trust and the lack of it from a public perspective. Until this issue is faced, openly and honestly – “head-on”, I suspect that doubt and scepticism will continue. Even if this involves controversial exposure of historic details with all that brings, crime statistics are too important to be allowed to fester in a sea of distrust.

Crime statistics should be the epitome of transparency and honesty, with good news or bad, so that the correct remedial action and police/judicial focus and deployment can be made.

The expression “Doing the thing right –vs Doing the right thing” springs to mid. There is a world of difference when applied to crime statistics. All participants of the judicial process may well be doing the thing they do right, but if their focus is misdirected due to inaccurate, mismanaged or worse, manipulated data (Gaming), then their efforts are devalued through doing the ‘wrong thing’ right.

Q3: Currently, the Home Secretary determines what is recorded by the police as a crime and approves the Home Office Counting Rules for crime and statutory data requirements from the police. Should this continue or would public trust in the statistics be enhanced if this responsibility moved elsewhere? If so, where and why?

This presents an opportunity for the Government and the Ministry of Justice to “Join Up Justice” by utilising the experience and knowledge of the judiciary to ensure crime recording is more compatible with the MOJ recording processes.

The current “Flows Through Justice” charts are useful but could be infinitely moreso if directly correlated to the offences to which they relate.

At present, the HOCR are excessively complicated for public consumption and require a dramatic simplification.

Whilst there is no independent body overseeing the Home Office determinations for application of the HOCR, there will always be the suspicion that the Home Office have exerted political interference with policing statistics to project a particular picture of crime. The Home Office have significant expertise in this area, as do naturally, the police. However, an independent body, suitably qualified from the judiciary with the vision to deliver a transparent joined up justice picture would inspire greater confidence.

Q4: The Terms of Reference for the review asks for consideration of the current definitions of crime. Do you have any comments?

The current definitions of crime would seem to be adequate for their purposes. The problem lies in the number of notifiable offences that exist. Perhaps if some multiple definitions could be combined this would reduce the statistical burden. It may complicate the legal definitions slightly, but this would be a small price to pay provided the definitions were not adjusted in such a way so as to compromise the ends of justice.

Q5: It has been said that the crime statistics provide a partial picture. What, if any, are the main gaps in Home Office crime statistics that you feel should be addressed as a priority

Transparency and honesty. Making no apologies for repeating the concerns here. The yawning gap that has existed for a number of years now, has been the non-addressed problem of gaming within the service. Whatever the extent and causes, until this is rooted out completely and the system made “Game Proof” (Bevan & Hood 2006), there will never be a more complete picture. over the coming days.

This review and action that may follow represents the perfect opportunity for reform and the Coalition should grasp it firmly.

The temptation to practice Gaming when producing and delivering performance management data including crime statistics on recorded crime and detections, could be removed by either making the targets less specific or by making the monitoring process more ambiguous and spontaneous. The HMIC thematic inspections are a step in the right direction, however we would maintain that this should be a more regular and unannounced practice with independent representation.

The ‘dark figure’ of crime as it is known – the mismatch between crime estimates produced by victimisation surveys and those recorded by the police – is a well-known concept in the most elementary criminology. Much has been written about the ‘reporting’ shortfall; why victims of crime do not report their experiences to the police. By comparison, the ‘recording’ shortfall is under-researched, and widely misunderstood. The shortfall is further exacerbated by “Cuffing” and other practices to under record or fail to record crime.

The ‘dark figure’ of crime is an argument that will not fade until the focus is shifted toward statistics that can be relied upon more consistently. There is a strong case for abandoning the British Crime Survey which, as well as being an expensive luxury in times of fiscal constraint, serves to highlight the gap between recorded and actual crime, yet offers no realistic and acceptable solution.

Why do we need the entirety of BCS? It tells us that crime levels are higher than those reported to the police, which is a fact that is widely known anyway. Whilst public opinion, experience and perceptions of crime are useful barometers of public concern and opinion and we would not advocate dispensing with this element, we must question the statistical element that mischievously competes with recorded crime. If the concern lies with the accuracy of recorded crime, then surely the focus should be on implementing measures and safeguards that improve the recorded crime system, not continue with a system that only serves to deplete public confidence year after year. A survey, no matter how well conducted remains just that, a survey of opinion, not fact. Strip it down, reduce the costs associated with it and remove one of the greatest barriers of all, to public trust in crime statistics.

Perhaps then, with an improved and properly regulated recorded crime system, the gap will diminish and we will return to a situation where the public can confidently rely upon police recorded crime.

Q6: What are the most important considerations for trustworthy crime statistics?

Transparency, honesty and currency.

The figures presented must instil faith in the public that they are of the highest integrity. Currently, the statistics fail this test.

Opening the recorded crime books to the public in the form of crime mapping is an excellent first step. However, until the recorded crime act is cleaned up, the success of such ventures are compromised.

Historic data is useful only to identify trends on a local and national level, to establish which areas of crime have been successfully addressed.

This enables the appropriate allocation of fiscal and human resources to the current crime position. We would repeat the earlier statement… It is all about doing the right thing as opposed to doing the thing right. A police team focused on crime patterns that have long since disappeared may well be doing the job right, but they should be focused on the crime that is causing most public concern, backed up by current recorded crime incidents.

At present, the police focus is misdirected. Despite the Home Secretary’s instruction to scrap all targets but cutting crime, Chief Officers have, in the large majority, failed to comply, fearful perhaps that without a yardstick to be measured by, they will not be seen as effective. Current crime statistics, centered around those offences that cause most current public concern are where the police focus should be directed, not toward the “Big Win” detection activities that cause so much public disaffection and distrust. It is a fact that the police activity of recent years has criminalised more people who are less deserving of police attention. The focus should remain with those key offence groups of violence, sexual offences, property etc. Protection of life and property, prevention and detection of crime (real crime, not playground disputes that have escalated out of hand and have demanded police attention. Return our police officers to what they joined up for. No more, no less.

Q7: What do you consider to be the main strengths of crime statistics?

Current, transparent, honestly recorded crime statistics are an essential component in allocating the true fiscal and human resources required for policing, both locally and on a national level. Used sensibly and with sound management, crime statistics should underpin and focus police activity.

Q8: Do you have any other views you wish to feed into this review?

We have completed twenty or so articles and analytical reports centered around crime statistics over the last two years, consulting with rank and file police officers, Home Office statisticians, referring to respected public domain publications to form a broad and overall view of the subject. Coincidentally, we are near to completing a detailed analysis of crime statistics “Crime of the Century” that will be connected by hyperlink to our site http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com

Visit http://bankbabble.wordpress.com/2011/03/01/crime-figures/ for an excellent an excellent perspective of the statistics fiasco! With thanks also to Dickiebo http://dickiebo.wordpress.com/2011/03/01/crime-%e2%80%93-and-the-lies/ for the mention and http://allcoppedout.wordpress.com/2011/03/01/bent-crime-figures-in-perspective well worth a visit.

BRITISH JUSTICE? - A JOKE THAT JUST ISN'T FUNNY

2011-02-20T04:47:00.000-08:00

A BRICK IN THE FACE OF A BEAUTIFUL GIRL
AND WHY WE SHOULD ALL WEEP FOR BRITISH JUSTICE

The extent of the damage done to Samantha Fraser's face

This case, reported in the Mail today by Peter Hitchens highlights the sickening state of the miserable justice system of our country, where a slouching youth can smash the face of a beautiful girl with a brick and walk from court with nothing more than a £200 fine and a year to pay it.

He won’t even have a criminal record and we're not allowed to know his name.

His case was heard in a special 'youth court' where his victim was not present and where everyone behaved with great consideration in case he was upset.

Peter has written a long article about the case, some of which is reprinted here. His sentiments must surely be echoed by every decent citizen left in the UK. Even as a time served retired copper, this one made my blood boil to read the details.

Somehow the story needs to reverberate for years to come in the minds of the fat-bottomed, complacent people who are responsible for this, and who will do nothing about it, ever, in case somebody at the BBC calls them 'fascists'.

When Clare Fraser told Peter what had happened to her lovely daughter Samantha, and what had not happened to the boy who attacked her, he admits that he actually cried. I can understand why.

Not just because of the horrible injury to a good and admirable person; not just because of the eloquent fury of Clare's letter to Peter; not because of the squalor and mean-mindedness of the lout who, in a second of casual cruelty, smashed a hole in another person’s life as well as in her face. But because Peter had to admit to her that there was probably nothing to be done about it.

The injustice of our age is of a different kind. But it is no less smug and no less in need of being made to feel so ashamed of itself that it reforms its behaviour deeply and permanently. Something similar needs to be said here to those who for decades have withdrawn the police from the streets, neutered the courts, and coddled the lout in the hope that he will be nice back.

The people (of all political parties) who have fiddled the crime figures down, the people who have automatically halved every prison sentence, the people who even now are saying that it will be perfectly all right if fewer wrongdoers are sent to prison, the sort who say that critics such as me are indulging in exaggeration and 'moral panic'. Not to mention the dried-up dead-hearted prosecutors, with calculators instead of consciences, who think their purpose is economy rather than justice.

So far have we come that these events can happen in our country.

The scene is Widnes in the modern North of England, a district of neat, modest houses and sweeping new road systems, more Morrisons and Lidl than Waitrose, but bright and reasonably prosperous, not some lunar dead zone of boarded-up windows, dead fridges and old mattresses.

Ambitious: Before her ordeal, Samantha
had hopes of a modeling career

Samantha Fraser, a superb young athlete, Christianly brought up in a kind home by good parents, suffered as follows.

A youth, having nothing better to do one evening, hurled a brick at the car in which she was sitting. He just happened to be feeling that way, without warning. It could have been any car. It could have been your car, or mine. The brick came straight through the window at an impact speed of about 30mph, bringing a shower of glass fragments with it. It smashed Samantha’s nose into a thousand pieces.

It made an actual hole in her forehead.

She, having no idea what had taken place, numb with fright, unable to see and pouring blood, screamed repeatedly: ‘What’s happened?!’ ‘What’s happened?!’ Her friends in the car tried to tell her everything was all right, but as she says: 'I didn’t believe them. I couldn’t see. I was thinking that I would now be blind, that I would never be able to do athletics again.'

When her elder brother saw the wreckage of her face, he urged his mother, Clare, not to come to the hospital because the sight would distress her too much.

Samantha herself wasn’t allowed near a mirror for months after the attack last June.

Later, when she saw pictures of herself soon after the attack, she did not believe it was actually her. 'It didn’t look anything like me. It looked like something out of a violent film.'

Surgeons had to cut up through the roof of her mouth and slice the skin of her scalp from ear to ear to pull her poor face back into shape. She has metal plates in her cheeks and nose. They have done a marvellous job of rebuilding, and that Samantha herself is still a very good-looking young woman (though her mother talks wistfully of how irrecoverably perfect her nose used to be) and astonishingly free from bitterness.

Samantha explained flatly that her senses of taste and smell have been destroyed forever. 'Eating food now is just like eating ... nothing,' she says, with a quiet understatement that actually conveys rather powerfully what a loss this is.

'Sometimes we wish she would moan a bit,' says Clare, a funny, thoughtful fierce person who understandably thinks her daughter has a lot to complain about. Rather than moan, this remarkable 17-year-old has thought very carefully about what the event means, and how she should respond. As her vision slowly returns to normal, she is once again training as an athlete. She is not so sure about the (entirely justified) hopes she had once of a modelling career. She still hopes to study to become a nurse, as she always planned.

Disgustingly, her attacker – who was for a while at the same school as her – was able to intimidate her while he awaited trial, making foul gestures at her through classroom windows and once mocking her by miming the throwing of a brick. As long as she lives in the family home, she knows he is not far away.

She won’t go near the stretch of road where the attack happened. She doesn’t like it. Suddenly, in the only sign of real distress she gives in a long conversation, she blurts out: 'I don’t like it anywhere in this country!
'It’s horrible. Do I want to move away from here? Yes, I want to move to America.' In Texas or California, she believes, she can live her life free of such people.

Samantha’s parents were not told that they had 28 days to lodge an appeal against the trivial sentence imposed on the youth responsible, so they have no formal route to justice. All they can do is protest. The insulting compensation payments arrive, in little dribbles, and perhaps they may obtain more such compensation, but it does not actually compensate.

What they hunger and thirst for is justice. For a while they actually hoped to get it.

They unreservedly praise the police for trying to catch the culprit and succeeding.

The letter from the CPS which shows how little they cared about Samantha

But Clare was quickly suspicious of the Crown Prosecution Service, which seemed mainly anxious to avoid expense and trouble, and so reduced the charge from one attracting a heavy sentence to one involving a far lighter one. They also abandoned the very serious charge of witness intimidation, watering that down to the charge normally used when someone swears at a police officer. When Clare challenged them, she says, they patronised her.

Then there is the sheaf of letters from the CPS 'Witness Care Officer', one Linda Mullarkey. These letters, prompted by years of complaints that victims and witnesses were treated like dirt by the courts, seek to give the impression that the authorities really, really care. Alas, one of Ms Mullarkey’s missives shows the concern is just cut and pasted out of a book. 'On behalf of the prosecution team,' she says, 'I would like to thank you for your assistance in this case. 'Samantha’s evidence was crucial in bringing it to justice and his contribution is greatly appreciated.' We all make mistakes, but male Samanthas are rare in this country, if not entirely unknown, and anyone who had the slightest true concern about this particular crime would not have allowed such an error to remain in a finished letter. In this piece of sloppiness we see the gap between what we are told and what actually happens.

If all the recent politicians’ speeches about 'crackdowns', 'bobbies on the beat', 'tough sentences' and the rest were played end to end, they would last about a year. But in this wholly clear-cut case of wicked, inexcusable and life-changing violence on an ordinary suburban street, we see them for what they are. A slimy mass of conscious falsehood, accompanied by the patronising and insulting dismissal of real fear and pain by people who themselves live in comfortable safety.

I agree with Peter in wishing I could think of a way to make them cry.

Professionals behind the travesty

The CPS Prosecutor

Clare Sedgmond was previously a solicitor at the Department for Work and Pensions. Last year she prosecuted a man who had threatened his ex-wife and her family in abusive calls and texts. He received only a 12-month community order after Ms Sedgmond told a magistrate: 'We hope to come to some amicable agreement.'
Defending her conduct in the case against Ms Fraser’s attacker, a CPS spokeswoman said: 'The defendant was charged with causing grievous bodily harm (GBH) with intent which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. The defence offered a plea to GBH without the intent element. After reviewing the evidence, the prosecutor decided the plea was acceptable.'

The CPS Regional Chief
Paul Whittaker, Chief Crown Prosecutor for CPS Merseyside, has a CBE for his work to reform the justice service – but he appears to have largely made his name by cutting costs. His CPS biography says he has been 'at the forefront of innovation in the service'. It adds: 'Merseyside was the first CPS area to develop the Early Guilty Plea scheme, which ... reduces expense to the public purse whilst also achieving swift justice.'

The Youth Court Magistrate
Vivienne Higgins, magistrate at Runcorn Youth Court, lives with her property developer husband in Widnes. She declined to comment, but in court she said she decided not to give a custodial sentence because the assailant was not a persistent offender, adding it was important to note he was 14 at the time of the crime.
She said: 'We have considered the principle of the Youth Justice System and lack of previous offences. We therefore are sentencing him to the recommended Referral Order for [12 months]. Compensation £200.' The Order is a contract 'to repair harm caused by the offence and address the causes of offending behaviour'.

The Defence Solicitor
Liam Ferris persuaded the CPS they would be unable to prove his client guilty of GBH with intent, and successfully challenged attempts to have the case heard at Crown Court instead of Youth Court. Mr Ferris, who has been a solicitor for 16 years and works in Widnes, has admitted he tries 'not to think about' whether his client is guilty. He recently defended a heroin dealer saying his client needed to 'deal' to pay off a drugs debt. He was unavailable for comment.

OUR COMMENT
Well done Peter for bringing this to public attention. Your sentiments must be echoed by every decent minded citizen left in this country. Sady, this is yet another nail in the coffin in the miserable joke that has become our British justice system.

S18 Offences Against The Person Act : Whosoever shall unlawfully and maliciously by any means whatsoever, wound or cause GBH to any other person with intent to do GBH to any person. (Life Imprisonment)

S20 Unlawfully and maliciously wound or inflict GBH upon any other person either with or without any weapon or instrument. (5 years Imprisonment)

Malice includes a recklessness as to whether any harmful consequences which are foreseen as likely will actually ensue or not.

If the intent to do GBH is absent, there is certainly a reckless element, so prima facie offence of S20 is committed. The penalties are there. The sentencing guidelines are a joke. This offence should have attracted a custodial sentence.

CRIME IS DOWN ..... OR IS IT? - PART 3 - HAVE YOUR SAY!

2011-02-18T05:34:00.000-08:00

"Gaming - Cooking the Books" of Crime Statistics

As regular visitors to these pages will know, one of the most contraversial subjects that we have reported on most frequently in depth, is the manipulation of crime statistics and detections. Shortly after her appointment as Home Secretary, Theresa May scrapped the plethora of police performance targets in an effort to free up our police officers to focus on one single objective, what the front line police really want to do, what they do best and what the public want most - simply to cut crime.

The challenge that faces the Home Secretary, the policing minister Nick Herbert and their team, is that confidence and trust in the integrity of recorded crime and police detections is at an all time low. This lack of trust is fuelled by years of political interference, linking crime reduction and detections to senior officer bonus payments and selective focusing by the media. Until this confidence and trust begins to return, any genuine advances in this area will be received with scepticism and suspicion.

We have written at length in previous articles detailing the various tactics within the practice that has become known as "Gaming". Previous articles and reports on the subject can be accessed via the links at the foot of this piece. In summary, we conclude from our dialogue with serving officers from all over the UK, that the practices of statistic manipulation remain evident, perpetrating what we have called the "Crime of the Century" - a pernicious conspiratorial deception in an attempt to fool the public that crime has decreased and detections have risen. Officers of the highest rank appear to have colluded at worst, condoned at best, practices that amount to "Cooking the books" of crime for personal financial or career gain. Politicians have used the statistics to gain political advantage in the most blatant point scoring exercise, all based on the fallacy of falling crime and rising detections.

Taking courageous and sensible steps in an attempt to bring about reform, the Home Secretary has invited the National Statistician to conduct an independent review of crime statistics with the aim of increasing public confidence in these statistics. The Home Secretary has decided that the publication of crime statistics should be moved out of the Home Office to promote greater public trust and demonstrate their independence. The review is due to report at the end of April 2011. It is then intended to run a public consultation on the recommendations from the review.

The review will:

•consider gaps, discrepancies and discontinuities within crime statistics;
•recommend the best future location for the publication of crime statistics, and their associated data collection systems; and
•produce an action plan for the implementation of recommendations from the UK Statistics Authority’s report Overcoming Barriers to Trust in Crime Statistics: England and Wales published in May 2010.

The full terms of reference for the review can be downloaded from this link.

The National Statistician will use the following criteria in evaluating options for the future location of crime statistics. She will look at the impact on:

•public confidence in the statistics;
•quality of the statistics;
•burden on data suppliers;
•cost and efficiency;
•statistical expertise and capability; and
•uses and user needs.

The National Statistician would like to invite comments on this review and has published a news release to this effect which can also be downloaded from this link.

To feed your views into the review please respond using the Word template available for download by clicking here. Please send this form back via email or post:

Email: ns.crimereview@statistics.gsi.gov.uk

Crime Statistics Review
National Statistician's Office
Room 1.015
Government Buildings
Cardiff Road
Newport
NP10 8XG

The Overcoming Barriers report states:

Most commentators would agree that measuring crime and reporting on crime statistics are inherently difficult. The crime figures for England and Wales, for which the Home Office is responsible, have been subject to many improvements over the years and, in terms of technical quality, they compare well with corresponding statistics for other countries.

However, there continues to be public criticism of the statistics and mistrust in the way that they are used and quoted. As far as we can tell, this exceeds the level of criticism and mistrust in most other countries.

Research and previous reviews have suggested that this mistrust is exacerbated by the nature of some media reporting of the statistics. This may, in part, reflect wider mistrust of official information, not just statistics, but there are factors inherent to crime statistics that may also play a role:

• the existence of two major data sources (police recorded crime figures and the British Crime Survey). Both sources are essential to create a full picture, but their different strengths and weaknesses lead, on occasions, to a degree of public and political confusion and present an opportunity for selective and misleading quotation and reporting

• the difficulty of ensuring consistent recording practice across the 43 territorial police forces and the British Transport Police. The counting and classification of crime after it is reported to the police is a complex process; and changes to the rules and guidelines are necessary from time to time as problems emerge and are resolved, or in order to reflect changes in legislation. This is a proper part of a process of continuous updating and improvement, but it can also generate suspicion and confusion.

CAUSE FOR CONCERN

Theresa May, in appointing the National Statistician Jil Matheson to review the process, has begun to prize the lid off the "Can of Worms" of crime statistics. The greatest cause for concern is that those who have benefitted most from the orchestrated manipulation of the numbers down the years are adept at disguising their activity or worst, deflecting responsibility downward to the rank and file officers who have been instructed to carry out their strategies.

The absolute facts must be unearthed if true confidence is to be restored. If, as it is believed, some Senior Officers have abused the process and knowingly received bonus payments for crime reduction and detections that have been manipulated, the scandal that will emerge will undoubtedly eclipse that of the MP Expenses saga. If proven to be the case, the consequences are worse, in that it would involve our most senior and previously trusted police officers, who are expected to conduct themselves in the most exemplorary manner. If this is, as we believe the case, the truth must come out if the slate of crime statistics is to be wiped clean and moved forward with honesty and transparency. If senior officers have knowingly perpetrated or condoned such activity, we must ask and answer the tough question: "Are such officers fit to be controlling our police service?"

From all the evidence we have compiled, from serving, former and retired officers all around the country, we have every reason to suspect that Jil Matheson will face resistance to uncovering the absolute truth. We hope that she will demonstrate the courage and determination to expose any improper activity and that the Home Secretary will deal with any transgressions quickly and publicly.

Concern exists over the "regulatory bodies" of the HMIC (Her Majesties Inpector of Constabuary), the IPCC (Indpendent Police Complaints Commission), and the IOC, (Office of the Information Commissioner), all of whom have been aware of the "Gaming" practices prevalent in our police forces, yet have brought no individual or force to account for fear of the further bad "PR" this would undoubtedly create. If the regulatory bodies have indeed failed in the execution of their respective duties, Jil Matheson, Theresa May and all who seek transparent and honest reporting will face an immense challenge.

The majority of this activity, if and when reealed and proven, will be shown to have taken place under the Labour administration, focused as it was with all the pubic sector, on performance targeting accompanied by financial incentives. This is a divisive tactic, open to abuse and manipulation and Theresa May has a limited window of opportunity to expose the activity before the opposition can weaken her argument that this took place on their watch.

A simplistic view is that the proposed introduction of Locally Elected Police and Crime Commissioners may in part, have been born out of a mistrust of the senior officers to exert proper fiscal control over the fiefdoms Nick Herbert is keen to break up. An extension of this line of thought is that perhaps this is partly why policing was not "ring fenced" and protected from the budget cuts the service now faces. Could it be that profligate spending combined with fudged crime statistics have contributed to the belief that the forces can now achieve "more with less?" and that so many officers fear the security of their future?

HAVE YOUR SAY

Here at the Thin Blue Line, we are compiling our own submission to the National Statisticians review. We intend to pull no punches. Coincidentally, we are in the process of compiling our own, in depth report "Crime Of the Century", which will appear on these pages when complete. This will accompany our submission to Jil Matheson.

Rank and file officers are naturally fearful of the consequences of speaking out about strategies imposed on them by their senior officers. We have collated numerous examples of "Cuffing", "Stitching", "Skewing" and "Nodding" in forces all around the country. For the uninitiated, or those who simply need a reminder, we have explained these terms below:

1. ‘Cuffing’ is about making crime seem to disappear by failing to record it. The term ‘cuffing’ derives from the magician’s trick of making something disappear up the cuff of their shirt. This is associated with an ‘evidential’ crime recording standard which places the onus on the victim to establish that a crime has been committed. This allows officers to use their discretion on whether or not to accept the victim’s account and record the crime for investigation. This has a long association with ‘gaming’, as officers are known to use a variety of tactics to prevent the crime ‘appearing on the books’.

2. ‘Stitching’ is the fabrication of evidence. Whilst the use of such tactics to secure convictions at Court has largely been addressed by the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, administrative procedures still offer the opportunity to obtain detections in circumstances where there is in-sufficient evidence to secure a conviction. These procedures include cautions, informal warnings, and in some circumstances an offence could be recorded as detected without the suspect being made aware of the allegation against them.

3. ‘Skewing’ is about concentrating effort and resources on areas subject to performance indicators. This involves investing less in the investigation of the more difficult and resource intensive areas of police activity, such as the prevention and investigation of serious crime i.e. child abuse and sexual offences. It could also involve the re-deployment of officers to more affluent neighbourhoods where crime is easier to investigate and detect (Patrick 2004).

4. ‘Nodding’ refers to the practice whereby suspects ‘nod’ at locations where they have committed crimes and are able to have them ‘written off’ without any risk of increasing their sentence. The legitimate aims of this administrative procedure is to reduce court time and enable offenders to admit outstanding offences i.e. ‘clean the sheet’ prior to sentencing. This allows the courts to impose a sentence which takes into account the extent of the offender’s criminal activities and alleviates the offender of the fear of being re-apprehended after they have served their sentence for an offence committed prior to incarceration. This administrative procedure has a long history of abuse and appears in two formats; ‘offences taken into consideration (TIC)’ and ‘prison write offs’, which allows offenders to confess to offences post sentence. In these circumstances a senior police officer or member of the Crown Prosecuting Service (CPS) would make the decision to charge on the grounds of whether the individual was likely to receive an increase in their custodial sentence. In both cases the police should have sufficient evidence to charge the suspect if they subsequently decline to accept the offences as TIC or ‘prison write off’. These procedures have long been associated with abuses involving collusion between officers and suspects. The offer of inducements in return for admissions lies at the heart of these illicit exchanges.

Readers are of course free to click the link to the contribution document above and to send it by post or e mail to the addresses supplied. However, there will be many officers who will wish to expose what they believe to be improper practices they have been instructed to implement, but are fearful of exposure and the consequences. (We are only too aware that the police service does not yet protect well intending officers as well as it might). For those officers who wish to contribute anonymously, we would welcome examples that we may include to demonstrate where changes are necessary. These contributions can be made directly to our e mail contact address at the foot of the page, or via anonymous contribution on this or other similar pages.

LET'S PUT THIS WRONG ACTIVITY TO BED ONCE AND FOR ALL.

One final point. No doubt readers will by now have seen and perhaps experimented with the online crime mapping at http://www.police.uk/ Whilst well intended, the site is at its earliest stages of development and we hope it proves to be an invaluable tool to inform the community of instances of crime in their local area. However, until the process of recording and presenting crime statistics earns the reputation for transparency and accuracy; and the integrity, trust and credibility of the data is restored, the jury will remain out on this one.

Our recent articles and reports about crime reporting :-

(hopefully the link label will decribe each article sufficiently).
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2011/01/crime-is-down-or-is-it-part-2-lies.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2011/01/crime-is-down-or-is-it-part-1.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2010/11/top-cop-pay-bonus-scandal-chiefs-still.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2010/05/too-many-chiefs-part-3-full-report.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2010/05/too-many-police-chiefs-part-2-bonus.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2010/05/too-many-chiefs-part-1-bonus-scandal.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2010/04/crime-of-century-deception-of-falling.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2010/04/criminal-justice-uk-police-part-2.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2010/04/criminal-justice-uk-police-part-1.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2010/02/chief-police-officers-and-home-office.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2010/01/top-cops-are-still-fiddling-crime.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2010/01/national-police-improvement-agency-yet.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2009/12/force-or-farce-police-recorded-crime.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2009/12/top-cops-pay-crime-scandal.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2009/11/home-office-crime-figures-conspiring-to.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2009/10/fudging-crime-statistics-is-no-way-to.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2009/10/crime-mapping-is-police-recorded-crime.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2009/10/no-faith-in-police-statistics.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2009/09/crime-statistics-hide-truth.html
http://thinbluelineuk.blogspot.com/2009/09/extracts-from-labours-home-secretary.html

BRITAINS CAR CRIME HOTSPOTS

2011-02-15T15:43:00.001-08:00

To see our report of Britains Car Crime Hotspots CLICK HERE.

CRIME IS DOWN ..... OR IS IT? - PART 2 - Lies, damned lies and fudged crime statistics

2011-01-31T10:52:00.000-08:00

Lies, damned lies and fudged crime statistics

The problem with crime is that it’s illegal. This means it’s secret, which means that there is not one person at any level of the criminal justice system in this country who can honestly declare that they really know what’s happening.

Over recent years, every Tom, Dick and Harry involved in the compilation, manipulation and obfuscation of crime statistics have thrown their hats and helmets in the air to celebrate a steady fall in crime. The Home Office boasted it was all down to its crime prevention efforts. The police hierarchy said it was their intelligence-led approach that was responsible. Academics said rising consumption, falling inequality, better security devices, fewer adolescent males, an upsurge in abortions (with fewer neglected children) and/or a fall in unemployment were at the root of it all. The last Government would have us believe it was a direct result of their strategy to bolster officer numbers and wonderful performance targeting that brought about the miraculous decrease in crime and increase in detections.

But what if it never happened? What if all that research (and all of the political point-scoring which it inspired) is one big misleading lie? What if it was all a pernicious web of deceit involving Senior Politicians and Police Chiefs with the conspiratorial intention of fooling the public into believing everything in the garden was rosy? What if the truth is that crime didn’t fall at all – that it was only the statistics that fell, and in fact the illusion of falling crime was the biggest crime of them all?

There are two sources of crime statistics in this country. The first is the police whose figures are deeply unreliable because they deal only with the crime which they record. Millions of crimes each year are never reported to them at all: victims of assaults and sex attacks (particularly children) are often too fearful; the stores who are the victims of shoplifting often discover the offence only in their stock-taking and then prefer not to advertise their vulnerability; and a mass of victims of minor crime simply do not bother to contact a system which offers them only a faint prospect of justice.

More importantly, even if crime is reported, it is frequently not recorded because the police have a long and skillful history of fiddling the figures. They call it ‘cuffing’, because the reported offences magically disappear up the officer’s sleeve. On a wider scale, the deception is known as “Gaming” and there are a number of tricks that Senior Officers (who would no doubt deny their existence) employ to satisfy their police authorities and political masters. Make no mistake, this is not a few officers or even forces engaging in some kind of occasional sport. The alarming reality is that “Gaming” (as confirmed by front line officers) is endemic and widespread throughout the police forces of England and Wales.

In July 2000, HM Inspector of Constabulary reported that in eleven forces which his staff had inspected, 24%) reported crimes had been mis-recorded, either through genuine confusion or deliberate concealment. At the end of that year, the Labour politicians celebrated a fall in the crime recorded by police nationally of 122,344 offences. Taking it further, if HMI’s snapshot were repeated across the country, then in that same year, police forces concealed or mis-recorded 1,635,424 offences – more than 13 times the number of “alleged” fewer offences recorded. In other words, for years, the fudged police statistics have been not just slightly misleading but wholly worthless as a statement of what is really happening.

In April 2002, the Home Office introduced NCRS, the National Crime Recording Standard, supposedly to tighten up the process. They rejected HMI’s strong advice to make the rules legally binding and to order ‘robust and independent audits’ of police practice. Instead, they relied on dip-sampling by the Audit Commission and internal checks, enforced by chief officers – even though past scandals indicated the collusion of chief officers in delivering false figures. In the foggy aftermath of the NCRS and other statistically challenged changes prior to that, it is not clear whether the NCRS rules are killing off or even reducing the cuffing, but the Home Office discounted 5% of the reported crime in years that followed it on the basis that police were indeed obeying them.

More recent evidence from front line officers confirms that the "Gaming" practices are as rife as ever in modern policing. This is perhaps what prompted Home Secretary Theresa May to appoint the National Statistician to conduct a full review of the recording processes. Let us hope that the deceitful conduct of the few over the years is finally brought to the surface so the honourable police officers can start afresh with a clean slate.

Theresa May has replaced the plethora of nonsense performance targets with one single focus, to reduce crime. In order that this can be measured accurately with figures that can be trusted going forward, the whole rotten, shoddy corrupt system must be exposed for the sham that it is. It is a pityful display of arrogance by those Chief Officers who have disobeyed her instruction and to this day, implement strategies based on targets they believe will justify their existence.

The really sad part of all of this, is that when the can of worms is finally prized open, it is unlikely that Chief Officers will admit they have condoned and encouraged deceitful practices all along (many have received up to 15% bonus payments on top of their handsome six figure salaries for doing so). No, the likely scapegoats will be the very front line federated ranks forced to implement their devisive and corrupt plans. Little wonder so few rank and file officers are prepared to speak out.

The second source of crime statistics is the British Crime Survey. This is fundamentally flawed because it cannot record crime unless a victim tells one of their interviewers about it, so the survey misses all crimes where the victim decides not to disclose details. Until recently crimes against children (estimated by the Home Office at 600,000), all crimes against commercial victims (all bank robbery; and all shoplifting, which is estimated at anywhere between 7.7 million and 30 million offences a year), were omitted from the survey. Perhaps the biggest criticism of the BCS is that it is based on estimates drawn from the survey of 45,000 citizens. Crimes against public sector property (arson, criminal damage, theft) and all murder offences have been or remain omitted from the survey.

So, the survey fails to record at least 11.3 million crimes and possibly as many as 33.6 million crimes, in addition to the 13 million which it does pick up. And that is without taking account of commercial fraud, which the Association of British Insurers blames for a third of the £35 billion annual cost of all crime.

Let us take a step back and examine the fall in crime figures. Two important clues jump out at us to support the belief that the books have been well and truly “cooked”. First, it has happened all across the developed world. Jock Young, formerly professor of criminology at Middlesex University, likes to tell the story of the American crime conference which he attended a few years ago where the opening speakers armed themselves with a stage full of multi-coloured graphs and flow charts and announced that they had explained the dramatic drop in US crime rates. It was the effect of the Brady Bill in cutting ownership of handguns, plus the peaking of the market in crack cocaine, plus a dip in the population of adolescent males, plus a little of this and a little of that. All the percentages added up – until a delegate from Spain stood up to say that they had the same fall in crime numbers in her country and none of those explanations, and then a delegate from Canada said the same, and so on around the globe.

Second, this fall has happened at the same time as every developed country in the world reports more blackmarket drug use. In this country, for example, since 1998, according to the British Crime Survey, there has been “a statistically significant increase” in Class A drug use, particularly of crack cocaine. The Home Office’s own assessment of the number of problematic drug users suggests that they are responsible for more than 50% of crime. How can there be more prolific offenders and yet less crime?

There is one explanation of which we can be certain: the drug users who drive the crime figures are committing a mass of offences which are statistically invisible. Repeated surveys of drug users in custody show that easily their most common property crime is shoplifting (50% of their offences in most surveys); and, beyond that, most drug users fund their habit by selling drugs, whether to friends or strangers – thousands of them in any major city in the time it has taken to read this article. In both cases, this mass of offences are almost entirely invisible to police records (they are recorded only when they are detected); and completely invisible to the British Crime Survey. Parallel to that, drug users commit crimes against each other – the Yardie dealers are constantly ripping each other off, pimps rob cash off each other’s working girls, rival gangs beat each other up. And these victims don’t go to the police or sit down with a form from the British Crime Survey.

It is one of the enduring problems of criminal justice systems that whilst they can change the pattern of crime they struggle to change its scale. The one explanation which applies to all the developed countries who have seen their crime figures fall is that they have shifted their expanding population of blackmarket drug users into committing a surge of invisible offences. It is difficult to prove that that is what has happened – because crime is hidden. But it is fair to say that the great crime fall is at best unproven and at worst a politically useful myth born out of deceitful practices.

Look at how the “fall in crime” is used. The right have claimed it proves that Michael Howard’s programme of imprisonment was a success. Liberals spun it in the opposite direction, as supposed evidence that there is no need for any kind of fundamental change in the criminal justice system. The Labour government repeatedly used it to claim credit for bringing down crime since 1997. They not only ignored the impact of invisible crime, they also conveniently overlooked the absence of any observable link between the fall and government policy. So, for example, assuming they were right to say that in reality, burglary and vehicle crime have been falling: it must be significant that the same downward trend shows up independently both in the police figures and in the British Crime Survey. But they chose to date this from the year they came to power when in fact the statistics show that burglary figures have been falling since 1993 and vehicle figures have been falling since 1992. Nobody knows why, and, during that time, crime recording policy has changed direction repeatedly adding layer upon layer of obfuscation to the mess, as if to throw distraction techniques into the pot to disguise the deceitful practices.

If you really want to understand the reality of crime in this country, the figures that matter are the research which show that just 1% of the population suffer 59% of all violent crime; that just 2% of the population suffer 41% of all property crime. And where are these victims? Most criminals commit their offences within 1.8 miles of their own front door. In other words, they rob their neighbours. Overwhelmingly, those offenders live in the shabby tower blocks and rotting council estates which have been consumed by poverty and criminalised by the war against drugs. That is where crime is booming, far, far away from where our Chief Officers deploy their resources toward easier middle class detection pickings in the middle class suburbs. In these inner city areas, as a single example, an 18-year-old lone woman with a child is more than five times more likely than the average to be a crime victim – far away from the statisticians and the politicians and their celebrations of success.

In this series of articles we will delve further into the practices that have brought our crime statistics into such a malaise, leaving all but the exceptionally naïve bereft of confidence in a system so corrupt as to undermine the good work being done by our front line officers.

CRIME IS DOWN ..... OR IS IT? - PART 1

2011-01-25T11:09:00.000-08:00

It was with more than a little annoyance, that we read once again about the continuing fall in crime last week. Such was the shortage of real news, the media jumped on the bandwagon with Yahoo, the BBC, the Independent, ACPO, The Guardian once, and twice, The Home Office, The Telegraph, and Theresa May all throwing their hats into the ring to have their say.

The frontline officers who read these pages and others on police sites, have long since tried to raise public awareness about the scurrilous strategies engaged by Chief and Senior Officers in the pursuit of declining crime and increased detection targets.

Home Secretary, Theresa May has clearly recognised the suspicion and doubt that surround crime statistics, by announcing a review led by the national statistician to decide which independent body should have future responsibility for the publication of crime statistics and to oversee the implementation of recommendations last year from the UK Statistics Authority.

To quote her speech in the House of Commons :

"I am concerned that our existing measures of crime are confusing and offer the public only a partial picture of the true level of offending. It is in the public interest that we have measures of crime that are clear, meaningful and in which the public can have confidence. While the UK Statistics Authority saw no evidence of political interference in crime statistics published by the Home Office, I believe bolder action is needed to more clearly demonstrate their political independence. For that reason, I have decided to move future formal responsibility for the publication of crime statistics to an independent body".

The review – led by Jil Matheson – the National Statistician will look for cost effective ways to improve the coverage and coherence of crime statistics.

Crime statistics are made up of crimes recorded by the police and the British Crime Survey is based on interviews with the public about their experiences.

Theresa May said: 'Any reductions in crime are welcome, however levels are still too high and we know these statistics only offer a partial picture about the level of crime. More needs to be done to bring crime down and we need to take bold action to restore public trust in crime statistics. That is why I have asked the National Statistician to lead a review and why we are moving the publication of crime statistics out of the Home Office to an independent body. Improving public trust and confidence in crime statistics is crucial if we are to improve transparency and empower local communities to hold authorities to account.'

Better information

The review aims to give the public a clearer picture of crime levels, including:

• ensuring definitions of crimes and anti-social behaviour are aligned with the priorities and concerns of local communities

• improving transparency and trust in the crime data which is collated and published

• recommending how gaps in the statistics could be addressed
• advising which independent body should publish crime statistics in future

The review will report back by the end of April 2011 with any changes implemented from April 2012.

We have written extensively about how top UK police officers "Cook the books of Crime" for financial gain, bonus payments, political and career advancement. This "Conspiracy to Deceive" has gone on for too many years, and the news that Theresa May has appointed the National Statistician to clean up the mess is most welcome. Our concern is that the books are opened fully for Jil Matheson so she may see for herself the extent that the figures have been manipulated down the years.

It is a popular view that when the lid is finally prized off the crime statistics and detections can of worms, and the Top Cop pay scandal associated with it, here, here and finally here, the mess that will spill out into the public arena will eclipse that of the MP Expenses cases, brought courageously to the surface by Heather Brooke.

SO WHAT OF THE LATEST CRIME STATISTICS?

Many in the know, may say just that . . . so what!

Suffice to say, we have done some of our own homework on the statistics, (which incidentally only cover the 12 month period up to September 2010). Over the coming days, in sequels to this post, we will shed even more light on the numbers with our data taking us up to November 2010, which is at least a little more current.

The most recent figures released were submitted by Chief Officers and their forces still drunk under the political influence of the last Govenment. Theresa May abolished the old performance targets in June last year. Yet, despite having killed off Professor Frankenstein, his monster, in the form of performance targets and manipulated statistics, lives on in the senior management of the police forces of England and Wales. We need look no further than 32 of the 43 forces and their websites to see that te scrapped and expensive policing pledge is alive and well in those forces. Why? It is clear that the Chief Officers like the comfort of being able to say "We met our targets" even if the numbers were fiddled to get there.

To Theresa May and Jil Matheson, we wish you well in your fight to untangle the crime and detection statistics web of deceit. It may well be, that to restore confidence, we may have to accept drawing a line under the fabricated, financially driven statistics of Nu Labour with the introduction of a fresh start, or a "Ground Zero" approach. If that turns out to be the case, so be it. At least then there will be hope of some transparency and honesty about crime and detections, so that resources may be properly allocated.

As it stands at the moment, if we were to ask ourselves the questions: "Who is reponsible for the current malaise? Why were the police not ring fenced in the spending review of last year?" Many might answer that the Chief Officers, with year upon year of fudged figures, gave the impression that they were reducing and detecting crime admirably with existing resources thank you very much. Is it any wonder they have now become the authors of their own and the rank and files current misfortunes?

So, to all Chief and Senior Officers who have even by their silence, helped to perpetuate the problems and challenges you now face, we would say this. For once, be honest. Before you point the finger of blame at everyone but yourselves, including the federated rank and file, who you have instructed to carry out your despicable and scurrilous "strategies" -remember this . . .

When you point the forefinger of blame, three more are pointing right back at you.

THE PLIGHT OF UK POLICING IN 2011

2011-01-08T15:27:00.000-08:00

A COPY OF A LETTER POSTED IN THE

SURREY ADVERTISER

From MICHAEL NICHOLSON O.B.E.

Former Chief Foreign Correspondent ITN

Special thanks go to The Surrey Constabulary Blog, for bringing this article to our attention.

Born in Romford, Essex, Michael Nicholson was a war reporter for ITN, who has covered more wars and conflicts than any other British newsman. He has reported from wars in Nigeria, Northern Ireland, Vietnam, Cambodia, Jordan, India and Pakistan, Rhodesia, Beirut , Cyprus, Angola The falklands and The Persian Gulf. During a twenty-five-year career, Nicholson reported on fifteen separate conflicts and became one our most respected and admired journalists. He has won numerous British and International awards, including the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, The Richard Dimbleby Award for his reporting of the Falklands War, and three times The Royal Television Society's Hournalist of the Year. He holds the Falklands and Gulf Campaign medals, and in 1991 was honoured with the OBE.

It was on matters closer to home that Michael wrote to his local newspaper, The Surrey Advertiser concerning the plight that faces UK policing, in particular, the challenges now facing his local force, Surrey Police.

To read what Michael has to say about the cuts to policing click here.

Clearly au fait with the policing plight, Michael makes reference to many of the issues highlighted previously on these pages and those of many other police bloggers. Whilst the content of his letter is focused on the challenges faced by Surrey Chief, Mark Rowley and the likely effects of the tax paying residents of the county, his observations and astute comments apply to each of the 43 forces of England and Wales and therefore to the tax paying community on a national basis.

Michaels main complaint is that the residents of Surrey have not been adequately consulted on the proposed cuts to the service and the likely consequences. This is synonymous with typical reports from around the country.

To illustrate Michaels clear grasp of the "policing plight" we have reprinted here some of the relevant points that transfer across all police force boundaries.

"In another of those optimistic police pledges, these response teams, sirens blaring, blue lights flashing, promise to be with you within 15 minutes of your call. That will indeed be all improvement because in reality current official response time figures show that it is more often nearer sixty minutes. Last year in the Haslemere area, only 30% of police response time were within target. That is one in three. Surrey police record for quick response is among the worst in the entire country and that’s official".

Officers and regular readers will echo these sentiments, knowing that it is the poor managerial application of resources that has resulted in this travesty of policing, not just in Surrey, but in forces across the UK. Earlier this year, Home Secretary Theresa May ordered that all forces must scrap the Policing Pledge.

Most Police Forces in England and Wales have ignored the Home Secretary’s stated aim to abolish Policing Pledge and Public Confidence targets. Ignoring her instructions on June 29th 2010 is an act of defiance because for 13 years, ACPO officers collectively wrung their hands and rolled over to acquiesce to everything the Home Office and Labour ministers suggested, no matter how silly or damaging. Now, suddenly, they pretend that they do not have to do what the Home Office tell them, even though it makes perfect sense. Over 300 own police officers commented on the Inspector Gadgets blog pages, confirming that their forces were still promoting the pledge:

• Bedfordshire Police

• Cambridgeshire Constabulary

• City Of London Police

• Devon & Cornwall Police

• Dorset Police

• Essex Police

• Hertfordshire Constabulary

• Sussex Police

• Kent Police

• Leicestershire Constabulary

• Lothian and Borders Police

• Northumbria Police

• Metropolitan Police

• Merseyside Police

• Cumbria Constabulary

• West Yorkshire Police

• South Yorkshire Police

• Lancashire Constabulary

• Lincolnshire Police

• Northamptonshire Police

• Nottinghamshire Police

• Surrey Police

• North Yorkshire Police

• Norfolk Constabulary

• Essex Police

• Gloucestershire Constabulary

• British Transport Police

• Cheshire Constabulary

• West Mercia Police

• Derbyshire Constabulary

• Warwickshire Police

• Wiltshire Police

The Policing Pledge was a bureaucratic, top down way of attempting to improve performance which just became a whole lot of targets in disguise. It was wrong to spend £6 million of taxpayers' money to advertise it. The Coalition have said they want to replace bureaucratic accountablity like this with democratic accountability. They scrapped the policing pledge to cut central bureaucracy and ensure a focus on cutting crime. Of course the police need to deliver a high quality service, but this won't be achieved by central dictat. In future it should be local people who judge whether the service they get is good enough, through the Police and Crime Commissioners, and it will be for Commissioners to determine the strategic priorities of the force.

Michael again . . .

"In another of those police pledges, Surrey is promised 200 new constables. Great news but given a 20% cut in revenue how will the county afford them? And where can we expect to see them? On the beat? Or more likely ensconced in their offices keeping their seats warm, or attending classes in social engineering? When was the last time you saw a uniformed warranted Policeman patrolling your high street?"

"The make-up of Surrey’s police force is revealing and on closer examination, rather disturbing. Did you know that there are more civilians in it than police officers? We have, at the last count, around 1,840 full time police officers in Surrey but more than 2,500 civilians on the Pay roll".

There are around 143,000 warranted police officers in England and Wales with a basic salary cost of £4.8billion. There are 82,000 civilian or police staff employees that cost in the region of £2.7billion. Much media coverage has focused on the growth in police numbers over recent years, yet the growth in civilian personnel has dwarfed this by comparison. The argument is that civilain staff are cheaper to employ, but is this what the public want? Would they rather not see more police officers making our communities a safer place to live? Would the better allocation of funding on warranted officers not alleviate much of the media and senior officer hype about the liklihood of rising crime in that wake of future austerity cuts?

"There is not a square foot of space to be seen between the parked cars and most of them do not belong to police officers. As the budget shrinks, how many of them will be handed their P45s? How many casualties? We bankroll them. Do we have a right to know?"

Excellent point well made Michael. This echoes what police bloggers have been trying to bring to the public attention for many years.

"Delve further and you find that fewer policemen than you think are on what they call ‘front line’ duties. In other words, out there in the cold, rain and snow protecting life, liberty and property. There are currently only around 460 front line uniformed warranted officers on call in Surrey. But about a third of them will not be available for duty because they are either on leave, (including maternity), at in-service training, on court attendance or absent due to the increasing contagion of days off sick.

So if my arithmetic serves me correctly and with Surreys population at around the one million 100,000 mark, we have only around 300 officers on call spread over three eight-hour shifts. That works out to one front line police officer for every 10,000 people.

And given that Surrey already has one of the lowest detection rates in the country, does it make you feel any safer?"

Once again, this echoes the points in reports from this site and many others, supported by in depth reports from Her Majesties Inspector of Constabulary. Too many of our warranted police officers are not avaialable when and where it's needed most .... at the front line of British policing, not sitting behind a desk, ticking boxes, filling in forms and adding to the over stretched burden of the frontline staff with nonsense e mails regarding targets that should by now have been scrapped.

"What exactly will a police presence represent? A part lime copper-cum counsellor on a nine to five shift, Monday to Friday? And where will that police presence be situated?

How accessible will it be? How visible? How responsive?

We do not want him or her squatting in Tesco or in the back room of the library or along a dim corridor of a council office. Surely we should demand it deserves prestige, some dignity? Perhaps even a blue lamp?

Public confidence of the police has fallen to an all-record low.

PC Plod has lost the plot and all because, according to Sir Denis O’Connor, currently Chief Inspector of Constabulary, the police “have retreated from the streets… they should be more visible, more in touch with the very people they are meant to protect”.

Isn’t that exactly what the rest of us have been saying for years?

Much the same complaint has come from another of our knighted policemen, Sir Ian Blair, the less than successful former head of the Met. How ironic then that these remarks are made by these two former chief constables of Surrey who were, in no small part, responsible for our current policing crisis. The one Mark Rowley has, much to his annoyance, now inherited.

That we have been left out of the loop and all but bypassed by the arrogance of a small number of un-elected people who reckon they and only they, know what is best for us".

Many readers will undoubtedly echo the sentiments so eloquently expressed by Michael as being representative of their forces. Many members of the public too, would confirm that they have little or no consultation in how the cuts will affect their quality of life.

This will be music to the ears of the Home Secretary Theresa May and Nick Herbert, the Police and Justic Minister, who will be pressing for the introduction of Locally Elected Police and Crime Commissioners in 2012. The main driver behind this proposal is that greater local consultation on policing matters will be introduced with Commissioners holding Chief Constables to account for their performance on local issues such as this.

The invisible and under performing police authorities have been shown to be unfit for the purpose they were intended to fulfill. This point was endorsed by the HMIC inspections of the 43 police authorities, who were shown to have a weak grasp and control of police issues.

There are arguments for and against the introduction of Localy Elected Commissioners and whilst not seeking to comment on that debate at this juncture, the experience and reporting of Michael Nicholson suggest that this is one area where the new regime needs to improve communication between the police and the tax paying public they serve.

We are hoping that Michael will be given the opportunity to read these pages and that he might lend his weight to the issues on a national level. Either way, he is to be thanked for his contribution as a tax paying citizen who has earned the respect of us all.

A SEASONAL THANK YOU TO ALL POLICE OFFICERS

2010-12-25T05:36:00.000-08:00

We would like to take this opportunity to wish all of our visitors a happy and peaceful Christmas and New Year!

At this time, it is all too easy to forget that our police officers are out there selflessly serving, away from their homes and families, ensuring we are protected and able to enjoy our festivities safely and peacefully.

We would like to take a few moments to thank those officers who are working over the holidays.

Police officers confront and overcome obstacles every day at the risk of their own lives to benefit our communities, and we owe them a massive debt of gratitude for their efforts.

Please spare a few appreciative thoughts for our police officers.

I have been where you fear to go...

I have seen what you fear to see...

I have done what you fear to do...

All these things I’ve done for you.

I am the one you lean upon...

The one you cast your scorn upon...

The one you bring your troubles to...

All these people I’ve been for you.

The one you ask to stand apart...

The one you feel should have no heart...

The one you call the man in blue...

But I am human just like you.

And through the years I’ve come to see...

That I’m not what you ask of me...

So take this badge and take this baton...

Will you take it? Will anyone?

And when you watch a person die...

And hear a battered baby cry...

Then so you think that you can be

All those things you ask of me...?

So often we take our freedoms for granted.

We forget those who put their lives on the line every day to ensure our safety and freedom.

Police officers do more than enforce the law; they serve and protect. Every day, officers go to work not knowing the challenges they will face, but they do know the danger every challenge will bring.

Rather than think of danger, officers think of courage. They selflessly work to make this country a safer and freer society.

Police officers sometimes have to make difficult choices. They have to protect those who want to do harm. They do it because they believe in the law. Justice has to be enforced, and they have answered the call of duty.

Police officers dedicate their lives to preserving justice and safety for us all in this country.

They continue to protect us from danger and risk their own lives in the process. We should pay tribute to police officers for the sacrifices that they make in the name of freedom.

"They are our soldiers of humanity. When the devil roars, they shield us from evil".

Wishing you all a safe, peaceful and enjoyable Christmas.

To each and every one of you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Steve B

Thin Blue Line

Virtual courts cost more than they save - Telegraph

2010-12-22T07:00:00.000-08:00

Virtual courts cost more than they save - Telegraph

Shotguns aren't the problem – criminals are - Telegraph

2010-12-22T06:59:00.000-08:00

Shotguns aren't the problem – criminals are - Telegraph

Met police chief warns force faces toughest challenge yet | UK news | guardian.co.uk

2010-12-22T06:55:00.000-08:00

Met police chief warns force faces toughest challenge yet UK news guardian.co.uk