In one of my earlier posts entitled ‘People respond to Incentives’ I rehearsed this argument made in the books ‘Freakonnoics’ and ‘Superfreakonomics’ by Stephen D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner. If you haven’t read them – you should.
In the context of policing, these incentives often include being selected for a specialism, being promoted or just pleasing your boss. Home Office targets were decided upon by civil servants with no understanding of (a) what achieving those targets actually entailed, (b) what unintended consequences might result, and (c) what might be ignored in order to prioritise the activity that is designed to achieve the target.
Some of the fallout of this approach was the Public Administration Select Committee in November 2013 where the cynical manipulation of police crime statistics was laid bare. The toothless tiger that is HMIC Â was engaged...
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