I would like to start by apologising if any offence was
caused by the front page of the last edition of Manchat, which showed ACC Gary
Shewan at the Pride festival. Some
people found the picture a little offensive.
Can I assure those people that this was not what my intention was, the
picture was meant to be one showing Mr shewan waving to the crowd and nothing
else.
By the time this edition comes out we would be in the New Year,
I hope you all had time to spend with your families during the festive period
and for those who celebrate it, I hope Santa bought you what you wanted.
Now in this issue I wanted to talk about Sir Robert Peel,
the founding father of the modern police service and his founding
principles. I think in the fast pace
that we live in we tend to forget these principles but they are as relevant
today as they were those many many years ago.
So what are these principles I hear you ask well they are
- The basic mission for which the police exist is to prevent crime and disorder.
- The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of police actions.
- Police must secure the
willing co-operation of the public in voluntary observance of the law to
be able to secure and maintain the respect of the public.
- The degree of co-operation
of the public that can be secured diminishes proportionately to the necessity
of the use of physical force.
- Police seek and preserve
public favour not by catering to public opinion but by constantly
demonstrating absolute impartial service to the law.
- Police use physical force to
the extent necessary to secure observance of the law or to restore order
only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be
insufficient.
- Police, at all times, should
maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic
tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police;
the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time
attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests
of community welfare and existence.
- Police should always direct
their action strictly towards their functions and never appear to usurp
the powers of the judiciary.
- The test of police
efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence
of police action in dealing with it.
The principle I want to concentrate on is the last one, the
fact that police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder. In effect it means that the police service
should be judged on how low the level of crime is and nothing else. No other statistics should matter, not the
number of arrest an officer has or the number of stops the officer has in one
month. Statistics should not be used as
a badgering tool for Mangers to use against officers nor should they be used to
potting one division against the other, or one force against the other.
Now the Home office would have us believe that they do not
care about statistics in fact the Home Secretary said at last year’s
Superintendents association meeting that despite government moves to free
officers from bureaucracy and targets, some senior officers were still clinging
on to them. “We have cut the useless
bureaucracy that turned officers into form-fillers rather than crime fighters.
We have given you the freedom to make your own decisions and to follow your own
crime-fighting policies. It is essential that you pass this down the chain of
command. You need to trust your junior officers to use their own judgement,
just as I trust you. Having freedom means taking responsibility. It’s down to
you to decide what crime-fighting policies you’re going to follow,”
So what does this mean? And why are we still seeing
performance targets as a hot topic at Performance Review Meetings. With the low numbers of officers that we have
we cannot afford to be chasing targets.
Officers on the streets should not be worried about getting the right
ticks in the box for that month or worried about how many arrests they need for
the month. Having this issue hanging
over their heads they forget about what they are really there and forget about
their use of discretion. It is not
necessary to arrest every person or submit everything as intelligence just
because you are down on your monthly target.
We should be concentrating on quality and not quantity in everything we
do.
Our Chief Constable Sir Peter Fahy when he came into office
championed the notion of ‘Doing the Right thing’, this seems to have died its
death with the concentration of cutbacks and the like. I for one would like to see this come back
and I urge the Force Leadership team to be the champions of this and send a
clear message to Divisional SLT’s that targets are a thing of the past. Trust your officers to ‘Do the right thing’. Take away this notion that every officer
needs to have a minimum number of arrests, stops detections etc. because what
is coming through is not always quality arrests/stops.
This is my challenge for the upcoming year and I hope this
is reinforced by the Force Leadership Team and we don’t see the question
getting asked to the lonely Inspector at the PRM, ‘why is your team’s arrests
so low’.
On a final note I was greatly disappointed with the low
numbers of questions that were submitted for the PCC by yourselves. Those questions that were submitted I hope
you find the answers useful. I thank you
for reading this and I hope you enjoy this edition of Manchat as always any
feedback is greatly appreciated.
No comments:
Post a Comment