CRIME PREVENTION


Measuring what matters


The coalition government is settling in, former new labour programmes and spending commitments have been mercifully swept aside and – guess what – targets are a thing of the past! How true will this be? Dr Stephen Brookes explores the impact of measures and what the prospect is for a target- free world in public service delivery using community safety as an example


inequalities in health and education there will be high levels of crime and the need for partnership approaches has been a byword of public leaders for over twenty years. However, central government performance regimes have not reflected this during the same period.


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Dr Stephen Brookes is a senior fellow in public policy and management at the University of Manchester (Manchester Business School).


One would have thought that a coalition government having formed themselves into an administration through many days of hard-won negotiation would reflect the importance of such coalitions and


collaborations in public service. Rhetoric is encouraging but reality seems to be less so.


Most people who work in the public sector are only too well aware of the inverse impact that performance targets have had in the public sector. As recently as July 2010, three senior police officers faced misconduct proceedings over errors made in the Metropolitan Police investigation into a sex attacker in south-west London.


The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) said that too few resources were allocated to the inquiry and that officers prioritized other crimes, including robberies, muggings and burglaries for which targets for success had been set. As a result, they say, insufficient attention was given to a series of crimes committed by this one individual.


Speaking on Radio 4 on behalf 30 pse


herever there are high levels of unemployment,


of the Association of Chief Police Officers, chief constable of Cheshire Dave Whatton agreed with the Independent Police Complaints Commission IPCC that ‘what gets measured gets done.’


This resonates with what Albert Einstein once famously said ‘count what counts and not what can be counted.’


The notion of ‘what gets measured is what gets done’ is not new and has been around since the early 1980’s with the introduction of the infamous Financial Management Initiative itself influenced by the private sectors courtship with ‘management by objectives’. Its translation into public sector management has been less successful and, many argue, both divisive and counter-productive.


In anonymised findings from research with one large police force, there was evidence that it put significantly more resources into the investigation of crime then other forces in their most similar family which reflected the level of crime experienced by its population.


This had significantly more cost to the force than its comparative forces, but its performance on volume crime was not well recognised by the Home Office.


There was evidence to show that the economic cost of crime to its residents was £73m for homicide compared to £71m for burglary and yet the number of crimes are at the ratio of 1:433. Each was measured equally within


police performance regimes – so for one ‘burglary’ - it is counted once and, for one homicide, this is also counted once. Should we therefore be surprised that targets focused on burglary and similar volume crime will get the biggest share of resources?


As the IPCC and Dave Whatton highlighted, assessing the performance of the police cannot be reduced to a number of simple measures.


While simple and quantitative measures make it easier (and more attractive to national politicians) to devise benchmarked ‘league tables’ the approach does little in improving public perceptions of trust and legitimacy – two critical elements of what the Harvard scholar Mark Moore calls public value.


An improvement in benchmarked performance assessments requires a focus on what is important to the public as well as the politicians. It is also important to compare these on a consistent basis and within a consistent manner that takes due accounts of social, economic and political factors.


Home secretary Teresa May has swept away the many targets that were set for the police including - much to some practitioners’ disdain - the single ‘trust and confidence’ measure.


In the consultation white paper published on July 26th


, tackling


crime is the top priority although the paper appears silent on how the coalition will assess these efforts.


Nov/Dec 10


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