Post by Teddy Bear on May 16, 2007 19:26:02 GMT
Melanie Phillips writes an excellent article on the way the government desire for 'good statistics' is guiding the fight on crime, instead of common sense.
I can also add that it only counts as 542 'crimes' when it is solved. If for example a vandal damages 15 cars on the same noght on a street, it now counts as one crime, unless they find the vandal, and it then becomes 15 crimes. Theoretically there could be more crimes solved than committed. But since the government know that even with their twisted figures it is unlikely to happen, they carry on with this spin.
May 16, 2007
The criminal cucumber cop-out
Daily Mail, 16 May 2007
People who wonder why the police are not doing more to prevent crime and arrest criminals might rub their eyes at claims made yesterday by the Police Federation.
It would seem that one reason why there never seems to be a police officer around when you are being mugged or your house is being burgled is that our police service has turned itself into a stage for the theatre of the absurd. It has simply turned the concepts of crime and order on their heads.
Incidents which ten years ago would have led to a word of advice are now landing thousands of people with criminal records. Ludicrously, such incidents listed by the Federation include a man who was cautioned for being ‘in possession of an egg with intent to throw’; a child who was arrested for lobbing a slice of cucumber at another child; and a woman who was arrested on her wedding day for criminal damage to a car park barrier when her foot slipped on the accelerator.
Then there is the case reported today of the boy who collected £700 for Comic Relief but failed to hand in the money. Because it had been collected from 542 different people, Home Office rules stipulate that this counts as 542 crimes solved — which the police force dutifully logged.
The criminal cucumber cop-out
Daily Mail, 16 May 2007
People who wonder why the police are not doing more to prevent crime and arrest criminals might rub their eyes at claims made yesterday by the Police Federation.
It would seem that one reason why there never seems to be a police officer around when you are being mugged or your house is being burgled is that our police service has turned itself into a stage for the theatre of the absurd. It has simply turned the concepts of crime and order on their heads.
Incidents which ten years ago would have led to a word of advice are now landing thousands of people with criminal records. Ludicrously, such incidents listed by the Federation include a man who was cautioned for being ‘in possession of an egg with intent to throw’; a child who was arrested for lobbing a slice of cucumber at another child; and a woman who was arrested on her wedding day for criminal damage to a car park barrier when her foot slipped on the accelerator.
Then there is the case reported today of the boy who collected £700 for Comic Relief but failed to hand in the money. Because it had been collected from 542 different people, Home Office rules stipulate that this counts as 542 crimes solved — which the police force dutifully logged.
I can also add that it only counts as 542 'crimes' when it is solved. If for example a vandal damages 15 cars on the same noght on a street, it now counts as one crime, unless they find the vandal, and it then becomes 15 crimes. Theoretically there could be more crimes solved than committed. But since the government know that even with their twisted figures it is unlikely to happen, they carry on with this spin.
The reason for such extraordinary over-reaction is that the police, like other public servants, are under the cosh of performance targets which require them to deliver tangible results on pain of losing government funding.
Of course, by no means all have given way to such pressure, and they maintain high professional
standards. Yet not only can their careers be jeopardised if they don’t meet these targets, but they find that ticking the box marked ‘crimes solved’ or ‘arrests made’ is a fast track to promotion.
As a result, diligent, hardworking officers who want to tackle serious offences are forced to inflate trivial incidents into crimes and to criminalise people for the slightest misdemeanour, all in the interests of bumping up targets.
Their traditional discretion, which enabled the police to temper enforcement of the law with common sense and an elementary grasp of proportion, has been all but destroyed.
And all the time, of course, the police are failing to prevent or detect real crimes that cause harm and distress. The result is that the law-abiding public who are normally the staunchest supporters of the police are becoming terminally disenchanted with them, and police officers themselves are leaving the service in droves.
This lunacy is not confined to the police. It is rife throughout the public services which have all fallen victim to Whitehall’s target mania, producing the surreal situation in which the quality of the actual service that the public receives goes steadily down while the proclaimed achievements of that service go steadily up.
This is all because the Government decided that the way to force the public services to deliver better results was to set performance targets that they had to meet. This would publicly separate the efficient public service sheep from the backsliding goats — and most important of all, would enable the Government to boast to the public of actual improvements in service that had been achieved.
But it hasn’t worked like that at all. Instead, it has produced a tick-box mentality which has grossly distorted priorities and driven the public services off the rails altogether.
In the health service, hospitals were given targets, for example, for the reduction of waiting lists. This was enforced with single-minded ruthlessness; civil servants would phone hospital managers and scream at them if these targets had not been met.
The result was that the managers took the easiest option. Patients whose conditions were fastest to treat took priority over those whose conditions were more serious but would take longer to treat — some of whom disappeared off such lists altogether. Waiting list numbers accordingly went down, targets were met — and suffering hugely increased.
Meanwhile, the real problem of the NHS — that it was bust — was never addressed. It was masked instead by bogus performance figures which falsely proclaimed that things were getting better, even as the service sank into bankruptcy and chaos.
A similar trick was pulled in education, with catastrophic results. To show progress was being made, more children had to pass exams and go to university. The inevitable duly happened; to ensure that more poorly-educated children could pass public exams, the standard of those exams progressively dropped.
Despite patently unbelievable grade inflation every year as record numbers of pupils gained top results, the Government claimed with a straight face that standards were rising — even while employers were pointing out that fewer and fewer school-leavers could actually string a sentence together or perform long division.
The target culture thus became the means to perpetrate a systematic fraud upon the public, contributing in large measure to today’s dangerous climate of radical distrust of government. Official statistics became simply unbelievable. The recorded crime figures were hopelessly distorted as a result of the police targeting one crime rather than another to please their political masters.
While the Government boasted that primary school test results showed radical improvements in literacy, nearly half of all school-leavers were still functionally illiterate.
And while hospital waiting lists were said to be tumbling, more and more people were dipping into their savings to buy private treatment to avoid the huge delays and filthy wards in the NHS.
Moreover, far from getting to grips with poor performance, such problems were being made even worse. By using public service agreements to set literally thousands of such targets, the Treasury was able to control what these services were doing to an unprecedented degree.
It also subverted and radically disrupted the orderly process of government by undermining individual departments, which dramatically lost control to the puppet-master in the Treasury who was so ruthlessly manipulating the purse strings.
Such interference was disastrous. It not only meant that politicians and civil servants were imposing the wrong decisions on local services which they had no business trying to run, but it also provided an added incentive to inadequate professionals to behave even more incompetently.
The senior police officers whose heads were filled with the politically correct mumbo jumbo they had absorbed during their social science degrees; the teachers who refused to mark their pupils down for fear of hurting their feelings; the hospital staff who turned a blind eye to the filth on the wards — all now had the perfect alibi.
All they had to do was meet their spurious performance targets, and hey presto! Gross failure would be turned instantly into political success.
Under such centralised control, the essence of their professional identity — the independence of their decision making — was wholly undermined.
Professionalism itself went out of the window altogether as police officers, teachers, medical staff and other public service workers became mere ciphers of the political spin machine.
The target culture thus brought together power-crazed politicians and incompetent professionals, and made a perfect match. It has been a bureaucrat’s dream — and the public’s nightmare.
If the leaders of these professions had only made a stand — if chief constables, university vice- chancellors, the royal medical colleges had denounced the target culture, declared they would have none of it and told the politicians to get lost — the Government would have had to back away.
But they did not make such a stand. They silently — and cravenly — went along with it. The result is public services on their knees, and a culture in which criminalising egg-throwing or awarding prizes for failure are surely to be considered targets only of derision.
Of course, by no means all have given way to such pressure, and they maintain high professional
standards. Yet not only can their careers be jeopardised if they don’t meet these targets, but they find that ticking the box marked ‘crimes solved’ or ‘arrests made’ is a fast track to promotion.
As a result, diligent, hardworking officers who want to tackle serious offences are forced to inflate trivial incidents into crimes and to criminalise people for the slightest misdemeanour, all in the interests of bumping up targets.
Their traditional discretion, which enabled the police to temper enforcement of the law with common sense and an elementary grasp of proportion, has been all but destroyed.
And all the time, of course, the police are failing to prevent or detect real crimes that cause harm and distress. The result is that the law-abiding public who are normally the staunchest supporters of the police are becoming terminally disenchanted with them, and police officers themselves are leaving the service in droves.
This lunacy is not confined to the police. It is rife throughout the public services which have all fallen victim to Whitehall’s target mania, producing the surreal situation in which the quality of the actual service that the public receives goes steadily down while the proclaimed achievements of that service go steadily up.
This is all because the Government decided that the way to force the public services to deliver better results was to set performance targets that they had to meet. This would publicly separate the efficient public service sheep from the backsliding goats — and most important of all, would enable the Government to boast to the public of actual improvements in service that had been achieved.
But it hasn’t worked like that at all. Instead, it has produced a tick-box mentality which has grossly distorted priorities and driven the public services off the rails altogether.
In the health service, hospitals were given targets, for example, for the reduction of waiting lists. This was enforced with single-minded ruthlessness; civil servants would phone hospital managers and scream at them if these targets had not been met.
The result was that the managers took the easiest option. Patients whose conditions were fastest to treat took priority over those whose conditions were more serious but would take longer to treat — some of whom disappeared off such lists altogether. Waiting list numbers accordingly went down, targets were met — and suffering hugely increased.
Meanwhile, the real problem of the NHS — that it was bust — was never addressed. It was masked instead by bogus performance figures which falsely proclaimed that things were getting better, even as the service sank into bankruptcy and chaos.
A similar trick was pulled in education, with catastrophic results. To show progress was being made, more children had to pass exams and go to university. The inevitable duly happened; to ensure that more poorly-educated children could pass public exams, the standard of those exams progressively dropped.
Despite patently unbelievable grade inflation every year as record numbers of pupils gained top results, the Government claimed with a straight face that standards were rising — even while employers were pointing out that fewer and fewer school-leavers could actually string a sentence together or perform long division.
The target culture thus became the means to perpetrate a systematic fraud upon the public, contributing in large measure to today’s dangerous climate of radical distrust of government. Official statistics became simply unbelievable. The recorded crime figures were hopelessly distorted as a result of the police targeting one crime rather than another to please their political masters.
While the Government boasted that primary school test results showed radical improvements in literacy, nearly half of all school-leavers were still functionally illiterate.
And while hospital waiting lists were said to be tumbling, more and more people were dipping into their savings to buy private treatment to avoid the huge delays and filthy wards in the NHS.
Moreover, far from getting to grips with poor performance, such problems were being made even worse. By using public service agreements to set literally thousands of such targets, the Treasury was able to control what these services were doing to an unprecedented degree.
It also subverted and radically disrupted the orderly process of government by undermining individual departments, which dramatically lost control to the puppet-master in the Treasury who was so ruthlessly manipulating the purse strings.
Such interference was disastrous. It not only meant that politicians and civil servants were imposing the wrong decisions on local services which they had no business trying to run, but it also provided an added incentive to inadequate professionals to behave even more incompetently.
The senior police officers whose heads were filled with the politically correct mumbo jumbo they had absorbed during their social science degrees; the teachers who refused to mark their pupils down for fear of hurting their feelings; the hospital staff who turned a blind eye to the filth on the wards — all now had the perfect alibi.
All they had to do was meet their spurious performance targets, and hey presto! Gross failure would be turned instantly into political success.
Under such centralised control, the essence of their professional identity — the independence of their decision making — was wholly undermined.
Professionalism itself went out of the window altogether as police officers, teachers, medical staff and other public service workers became mere ciphers of the political spin machine.
The target culture thus brought together power-crazed politicians and incompetent professionals, and made a perfect match. It has been a bureaucrat’s dream — and the public’s nightmare.
If the leaders of these professions had only made a stand — if chief constables, university vice- chancellors, the royal medical colleges had denounced the target culture, declared they would have none of it and told the politicians to get lost — the Government would have had to back away.
But they did not make such a stand. They silently — and cravenly — went along with it. The result is public services on their knees, and a culture in which criminalising egg-throwing or awarding prizes for failure are surely to be considered targets only of derision.