‘To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.’

This statement was written in 1829 as part of the ‘9 Principles of Policing’ and issued to every member of the nascent Metropolitan Police Force. Unfortunately, continuous governments have not heeded this advice. Today’s police forces have developed an admirable proficiency at reporting the ‘visible evidence of police action’. However, the government has yet to convince a sceptical British public of any corresponding breakthroughs in having achieved the ‘absence of crime and disorder’. Proposals in a new Green Paper consultation are the latest attempts at creating the necessary reforms, but what does taking a systems view tell you about its chances of success?

Richard Davis has extensive experience of working with several forces to apply systems thinking to policing. According to him, it is presently common to find just 10 officers from a command unit of around 350 out policing at any one time, whilst the rest are caught up recording data and form-filling.

How has policing come to this? For Richard, the story of the past decade is one where the police have become enslaved by waves of command-and-control ‘reform’ legislation. One of the examples he gives of this is the way the police have allowed their information systems to be hijacked to provide the Home Office with figures on crime and reporting. Another is the unhelpful tendency of the reform regime to create new functional specialisms (knife crime, volume crime, school liaison, etc.) for every newly announced initiative, fragmenting the police’s work and making management and resourcing problematic.

Amongst much fanfare of "clearing the decks, cutting the red tape, cutting back on bureaucracy", this July’s Green Paper made many proposals for another round of government policing ‘reform’. The proposals that were outlined included:

• a pledge of public service standards e.g. for returning non-emergency calls
• the reduction of red-tape and the greater use of technology
• the move to a single “top-down target” of “improving public confidence”

For Richard, the focus on the bureaucracy is a red herring that will lead the policy makers down the wrong path. He thinks that if the police are allowed to design the way that they work in a more purposeful way, then the bureaucracy will evaporate. The appointment of a ‘bureaucracy tsar’ is therefore a “fatuous error”.

For Richard, any attempt to undo much of the recent damage inflicted on the police is ‘laudable’, but that these new proposals ‘cover too much ground in too much detail’. He thinks that there are likely to be real problems with the government’s new prioritised target of ‘improved public confidence’. It is right to try and refocus on outcomes for people instead of the present emphasis on feeding the reporting regime. However, Richard thinks that “the best way to do this should be to understand the problem in the specific, not the general. The only feedback worth gathering is to know what mattered to person X, who contacted the police with a specific problem, and then to know whether what the police did worked for them.” If, as commonly happens, judgements are made on public confidence as measured by survey activities, the police run the risk of leaving behind one set of arbitrary measures (government targets) and just substituting them with another (the public’s generalised opinions of the local force). As Richard sees it, “there is little enough evidence of the link between crime levels and police activity, and none at all as to what drives public confidence”.

Going back to basics, most would agree that the purpose of a police force is to understand and respond to the crime and disorder that is affecting its citizens. When looked at as a system, Richard’s experience is that the vast bulk of the demand for the police is entirely predictable when seen in the context of local and national characteristics. It is then against this demand that a systems thinking force can design the way it approaches its work, rather than in a government prescribed structure that satisfies the latest crime initiative.

Seen from a systems perspective, three problems recur that need to be solved by the regime. The first is the need to reduce paperwork resulting form the need to report against government targets. The Green Paper goes some way towards addressing this requirement.

Secondly, there is a need to move away from a risk-averse ‘what if’ culture, and its replacement with a ‘what do we know’ logic. Instead of designing services based on calculations of ‘risk’, services should be designed against the predictable demand, gathered from studying the organisation as a system.

Thirdly, the removal of the culture of endless policies and procedures needs to be prioritised. The procedures remove discretion from the work of the officers, encouraging instead unthinking compliance with standards set by HM Inspectorate. In place of such procedural inflexibility would be a culture of ‘principles’ that provide a guiding framework for action. Much as the Metropolitan Police had their inaugural ‘9 Principles of Policing’ laid out in 1829, a new series of locally decided operating principles would guide the individuals to use their own judgement in how they approach incidents. 

Once these principles have been established, it is essential to allow forces to experiment with what works for them. This means not ‘inspecting’ against preordained national standards, but learning about what works locally. One certainty is that IT systems and solutions are not the answer. In fact, the use of IT for reporting is the cause of many of the current design problems. The police should decide what is purposeful, and once they have created good systems can then decide if IT may help them do it better and faster.

This brings us back to the common public sector problem of the role of inspection. Much of the debate around inspection dwells on whether it should be ‘heavy’ or ‘light-touch’. The former feels wrong, the latter unachievable. The inspectors should instead encourage accountability and learning, getting forces to answer the question ‘How well are you meeting your purpose, and how do you know?’ The tests for success of this new approach would be in improvement in all aspects of performance, whether there was greater engagement (in morale, pride and innovation from the workforce), falling costs and greater capacity. The incentives to cheat or distort the figures would be removed at a stroke.

So, the Green Paper is at least in some ways a move in the right direction, according to Richard. And the even better news is that some of the new freedom to experiment that accompanied the Green Paper’s announcement means that some Forces have decided to ‘have a go’ with a systems thinking approach. Richard advises us to ‘watch this space’.

Richard Davis an occupational psychologist who joined Vanguard 20 years ago and has worked in both private and public service organisations. He is also a lecturer at Cardiff University. Recently, he has worked predominantly in the public sector with Local Authorities and particularly the Police. He can be contacted at richard@vanguardconsult.co.uk