Policing To A Different Beat Measuring Police Perf
Policing To A Different Beat Measuring Police Perf
Policing To A Different Beat Measuring Police Perf
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Contents
Preface x
vii
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viii Contents
Index 221
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1
Policing to a Different Beat:
Measuring Police Performance
Tim Legrand and Simon Bronitt
1
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2 Policing to a Different Beat
sorts of measures. We will explore this issue with reference to the use
of metrics across, particularly, the United Kingdom and Australia. It is
our intention to explore the different policing dynamics induced by per-
formance regimes and to propose additional measures of policing that
act as a corrective to the unwelcome trade-offs that often arise under
these performance regimes. In so doing, we seek to address two pressing
questions of measuring contemporary policing:
1. What tensions arise between the use of effective and efficient mea-
sures of policing in performance management regimes?
2. Are there alternative measures of policing that can better reflect the
range of police duties and their interaction with the public?
Senior police management (as in other sectors such as health and edu-
cation) saw the opportunity to institute efficiency and cost-effectiveness
as important measures of performance for police. The effect of NPM
has been to prioritize the goals (or ‘goods’) of policing as crime pre-
vention, order maintenance and bringing offenders to justice. On this
model, the rates of reported crime in regions, arrests and ‘clearances’ (as
measured by the number of cautions, infringement notices issued and
convictions) are the markers of effective policing.
However, the development of the policing management model
has not been without criticism. Fleming (2009) points out that the
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6 Policing to a Different Beat
It is vitally important to realize that the way society and police managers
conceive the objects of policing fundamentally affects the ‘measures’
being applied to police performance. The normative aims of modern
policing, and more specifically the priorities accorded to competing
objects (which range through crime prevention, public order, bringing
offenders to justice, as well as newer roles such as protection of human
rights and emergency management), affect what is measured and how.
This is self-evidently not simply an empirical or sociological issue but
also a political and moral one.
In the current financial climate, many police forces (indeed, pub-
lic sector services) are required to operate with diminishing or finite
resources. In the United Kingdom, the Inspectorate of the Constabulary
has found that, on average, police forces intend to cut their expendi-
ture by 14 per cent over the two years to 2014/15 (HMIC, 2011). More
trade-offs between efficiency and effectiveness are, it seems, inevitable.
It is clear that the measurement of efficiency is wrought with method-
ological, political and, indeed, moral questions. Notwithstanding these
problems, determining the efficiency of the police remains a crucial
challenge. Yet, without a set of overarching objectives, or awareness
of the appropriate effects of policing, any measures of efficiency are
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Tim Legrand and Simon Bronitt 7
Political figures in recent years have reasoned that if the ultimate objec-
tive of a police force is to uphold the laws and values of the community,
then policing effectiveness should be gauged from how civil society
perceives its success in so doing. From the outset of its administra-
tion in 1997, New Labour in the United Kingdom sought to achieve
popular consent for its radical agenda by way of ‘managerial meth-
ods of promotion and forms of consultation (e.g. in focus groups)
which it [could] control’ (Fairclough, 2000, p. 12). A similar trend
manifested in Australia in 2008, with the Rudd Government’s 2020 Sum-
mit, and more relevantly in this context, the Federal Criminal Justice
Forum, both of which aimed to assist in developing reform priorities
for the incoming Labor Government (Attorney-General’s Department,
2008). This approach to policy development in the United Kingdom
and Australia contrasted sharply with that of the previous Conserva-
tive administrations, or indeed any administration, and demonstrated
their commitment to placing the public’s sense of security at the heart
of police effectiveness. In the United Kingdom in particular, this com-
mitment resulted in a series of performance frameworks, set out in
legislation, that incorporated local perceptions of policing (viz. effec-
tiveness) with efficiency. In Australia, it is less clear that these forums
have functioned as anything but public relations exercises, at least in
the context of criminal justice reform, which continue to be dominated
by local state law and order agendas and moral panics about crime and
disorder.
We now turn to a brief examination of how these principles of
performance measurement sit together in this framework.
residents tended to ‘feel’ more secure and believed that crime had
been reduced in their area. The empirical basis of the evaluation was
subsequently contested by the ‘broken windows’ theory. Kelling and
Wilson (1982) propounded the simple hypothesis that a failure to
address public disorder on the streets is a sign that no one cares and that
this neglect invites further disorder and crime: ‘[t]he basic plot is sim-
ple: fighting minor disorder deters serious crime’ (Harcourt, 2001, p. 27).
Broken windows, in this view, become ‘a metaphor for the deterioration
of a neighbourhood’ (Walker, 1984, p. 76).
While widely credited by senior police, politicians, media and some
academics for solving crime problems in large cities, including New York
and Chicago, there is a lack of empirical data to support the ‘broken win-
dows’ hypothesis or zero-tolerance policing more generally (Harcourt,
2001, p. 8; Weatherburn, 2009, p. 186). Indeed, the danger is that the
aggressive policing of minor offences can have serious unintended con-
sequences or counterproductive effects, including damaging the trust
and perceived legitimacy upon which, as procedural justice research
demonstrates, effective policing rests (Tyler, 2003). It is often noted that
zero-tolerance practices ‘tend to be associated with low-level repression,
discriminatory use of police powers, and violation of the civil liberties
of the poor and minorities’ (Garland, 2001, p. 183). Notwithstanding
these concerns, as political actors assumed closer control of policing pri-
orities, police effectiveness was tied to community perceptions of their
safety. The ‘walk and talk’ community foot patrols of 1970s America
caught the attention of UK policy officials in the 1990s. Used as a means
to promote and strengthen the relationship between the community
and police (Lurigio & Rosenbaum, 1994), the ‘walk and talk’ patrols
were intended to capture local needs and glean street-level information,
thereby embedding local priorities within policing strategy.
The UK government, under New Labour, determined that policing
had lost its community focus. Despite falling levels of recorded crime,
the government was concerned by the finding that the public perceived
crime to be on the increase. In an attempt to resolve this paradoxi-
cal perception deficit, the government implemented a trial programme:
the National Reassurance Policing Programme (NRPP). The NRPP design
was predicated upon models of community policing developed else-
where, notably the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (Skogan &
Hartnett, 1997), and bound policing to closer public consultation and
enhanced street-level visibility (Millie, 2010). This style of commu-
nity policing constituted two key elements: (i) the presence of visible
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Tim Legrand and Simon Bronitt 9
The efficacy of the NRPP was measured not only by material decreases
in crime levels but also in falls in the public perception of crime and,
indeed, falls in the perception of visible crime. Better policing, in this
view, was concerned primarily with community perceptions of safety
and control in what McLaughlin (2005) described as a ‘new localism’,
which saw police forces perform their duties in ‘active cooperation’ with
local communities. Active community cooperation represents a strong
engagement by the police within local communities to elicit local con-
cerns, knowledge, priorities, vulnerable areas or individuals, repeated
offending and so on. Such cooperation not only promotes confidence
and trust in the police but also provides the police with local or bottom-
up intelligence, assisting in resource allocation. This principle is an
important one, since it represents how the police engage with the pub-
lic. Crucially, community engagement became a central plank in the UK
government’s police performance evaluation model under the Policing
and Performance Assessment Framework (PPAF).
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10 Policing to a Different Beat
not directly concerned with arrests or fear of crime, but with the wider
remit of policing activities, might offer (indeed, even ‘incentivize’) the
police a more balanced set of performance measures. We explore this
notion further below.
There are numerous competing influences on police officers, on the
street and in the command centre, that erode the primacy of the effec-
tiveness principle. Fundamentally, policing involves day-to-day trade-
offs between resources, crime prevention, crime detection, community
work, high-demand emergencies and so on. Against this backdrop, it
seems hardly possible to produce robust, comparable and objective mea-
sures of performance. Effective policing cannot always be efficient, nor
does it hold that efficient policing is effective policing. Yet, as Grabosky
observes, ‘No public sector agency should be able to command an
increase in resources unless it can demonstrate that its current allocation
is being used efficiently, and that its resources are targeted at specific,
measurable objectives in a logical manner’ (Grabosky, 1988, p. 6).
In an important sense, policing suffers from its historical image as
merely being a crime-fighting body. Its role has not changed in regard
to its core function of preventing and responding to crime and disor-
der, yet modern policing is much more than that. For example, the
nature of police work necessitates cooperation and collaboration with
not only emergency services but also frontline mental health and social
(child and adult) services. The assessment of police performance must
take account of the wide range of activities that the police undertake.
Many such activities are not immediately conducive to statistical mea-
surement, yet are nonetheless core components of policing. Since its
inception, the mandate of modern policing has evolved to include a
variety of functions that speak directly to the ambitions of securing
a more free, fair and democratic society. As a result, police forces in
Australia and the United Kingdom have been at the forefront of exper-
imenting with new forms of diversion processes such as restorative
justice conferencing (Bronitt & McSherry, 2010, pp. 27–32). With the
advent of human rights legislation both in the United Kingdom and
Australia in the past decade, police agencies are acknowledging their
key roles in the protection of human rights. Indeed, in the United King-
dom, following the 2009 G20 protests, a national review of tactics led to
human rights principles set within revised national guidelines on pub-
lic order (Orde, 2011). Drawing lessons from procedural justice research,
police forces in Australia, the United Kingdom and United States are
increasingly giving attention to due process and fairness concerns dur-
ing routine interactions with citizens which have been demonstrated to
improve both the level of perceived legitimacy and public confidence
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14 Policing to a Different Beat
in police as well as citizen compliance with the law and with police
directions (see Hinds & Murphy, 2007; Tyler & Murphy, 2011). Method-
ologically, quantitative measures (focusing on numbers of ‘services’
delivered) are not always suited for an assessment of ‘soft outcomes’
work such as these. As Fleming and Scott point out, performance
measurement tends to neglect the complexity of functions of modern
policing, being focused on a narrow range of indicators: ‘while it is possi-
ble to measure output indicators such as arrest rates and response times,
such measurement cannot reflect the professionalism and/or the qual-
ity of the performance’ (Fleming & Scott, 2008, p. 323). Clearly, more
imaginative qualitative methods of measurement are needed to assess
the value and impact of policing performance across the board.
As we have seen above, the use of recorded crime (measured by the
police) and unreported crime (measured by surveys) as the de facto indi-
cator of police performance is problematic for a number of reasons.
Indeed, there is a temptation to suppose that the compulsion to mea-
sure performance trumps the utility or indeed validity of measurement.
As Shilston notes, ‘The imperative to find things that can be readily
counted rather than things that really matter to the public can lead to
goal displacement, the use of meaningless measures and the diversion
of resources to meet false targets’ (Shilston, 2008, p. 362). In princi-
ple, that which ‘really matters to the public’ should be reflected in the
way the public votes for its government. The public assent for policing
policy is delegated and entrusted to elected officials; in this view, demo-
cratic principles are applied in a top-down manner; that is to say, the
police broadly operate according to democratic principles because they
are subject to the control of democratically elected public officials. Yet,
this is broadly only implicit in policing and far from evident in current
measures of police effectiveness.
It is our view that measures of police effectiveness should incorpo-
rate outcomes that speak directly to core democratic principles: that is,
police performance should be partly read from how often the police
themselves undermine, contravene or fail to protect the ‘sacred cows’
of democratic policing: law and order, fundamental human rights (free-
dom of expression, peaceful protest, privacy and equality and so on) and
probity in office. Below we propose a set of hard and soft indicators of
police performance that represent core bottom-up notions of democratic
principles and progressive policing. There are three fundamental areas
in which such alternative measures might be employed: (1) community
participation, (2) confidence in the police and (3) probity of the
police. We regard these measures, suggested as complements rather than
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Tim Legrand and Simon Bronitt 15
application of the law and human rights are particularly problematic since
the law in some areas may be applied in an uneven fashion, reflect-
ing the legitimate exercise of police discretion and the circumstances
of the case (Bronitt and Stenning, 2011). That said, social scientists
have to hand an array of quantitative and qualitative research tools
that, adapted appropriately, could provide robust measurement, such
as interviews with the public, judges, prosecutors and defence lawyers;
quantitative/qualitative surveys with the public, detainees and con-
victed criminals; and observation of policed events (i.e. sporting events,
public rallies and protests). Use of these and innovative methods can
directly benefit the use of the alternative measures suggested here as
well as police performance measurement more broadly.
Conclusion
References
Attorney-General’s Department. (2008). Federal criminal justice forum. Retrieved
from http://www.ema.gov.au/www/agd/agd.nsf/Page/Consultations_reforms_
and_reviews2008_Federal_Criminal_Justice_Reform_Forum.
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Tim Legrand and Simon Bronitt 17
Index
Note: page numbers with f indicate figures; those with t indicate tables.
221
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222 Index