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Crime Of The Century - A Chilling Look At Crime Statistics In The UK


Neyroud and Disley identify this as a source of concern: 'Our concern lies not with performance culture per se, but with the rather aggressive form it can take in contemporary policing. Chief officers and BCU commanders are pressured by central government and this is passed on to managers throughout the organisation; performance management is no longer the preserve of chief officers and BCU commanders, but is expected of officers of every rank, and this is specifically a pressure to reach performance targets'.


Participants in some groups explained that Comstat placed them under constant pressure to produce detections as the following figurative quotation illustrates:


Our chief superintendent goes to headquarters and gets clubbed with a big stick. He then comes back and canes his senior management team and they come down and beat us up forsanction detections.


Participants from some forces were able to specify the number of sanction detections members of GO CID teams are required to produce per week or month. In other forces the teams are not put under direct pressure to achieve a specified number of sanction detections but the overriding importance attached to them by their SMTs means they still do not escape the consequences of those pressures.


On the face of it, the opposition of the detectives to sanction detections seems incongruous. As they frequently claimed, they are detectives first and foremost and take professional pride in the detection of crime through the apprehension, prosecution and conviction of criminals. In fact, many members of the groups claimed this is the most satisfying part of their role. They also believe that it is appropriate for their forces and BCUs to select burglary and robbery as core crimes and to put resources into the detection of the persons committing these offences.


There is no doubt in my mind that burglary and robbery are horrible offences. We can’t have smack heads running around with guns and knives and what have you, forcing people to hand over their money at cash machines.


This detective then went on to explain that the typical robbery arrest which leads to a sanction detection does not fit this description He and many of his colleagues claimed that sanction detections relate to less serious offences and this is reflected in the penalty the offenders receive. A detective in another group summed up where she and her colleagues thought the priority should lie:


You ask any detective what they want. What they want is to work on a criminal investigation into real crime. They then want to charge the person and they want to go and have their day in court.


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