Cameron shows his colours to the police

grokit23

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Camerons New Economic Model Police Force

Firstly is there anybody who still doesn't understand that you shouldn't try to make public services behave like capitalist businesses or compare them along the same lines? You can't just say we gave you more X% money, so we expect you to catch X% more crooks.

Under his cover of reform the guy is setting up to have different police forces paid at different levels, with performance targets which will affect their pay. WTF!!! 'You've not arrested enough druggies this month, sorry no bonus for you.'
 
i can see it now - custody suites becoming profit centres - sell the tea and coffee, provide optional al la carte menu and mini bars in cells (helps promote the availability of 24hr alcohol) - charge hotel rates for the use of the cell - and thats without even thinking about it
 
grokit23 said:
Under his cover of reform the guy is setting up to have different police forces paid at different levels, with performance targets which will affect their pay. WTF!!! 'You've not arrested enough druggies this month, sorry no bonus for you.'

The problem with your paragraph above, is that you just totally made it up.

So it is pointless ranting, isn't it?

The article (that you gave us a link to) seems to mention more about removing the bureaucracy that the current government has introduced than anything other single measure.

On the subject you've focussed on, I did see on the telly about him wanting performance related pay, but I'd like to think there's going to be more to measuring performance than counting up how many druggies have been arrested.

Catching more crooks isn't what it's supposed to be all about. More bobbies on the beat instead of behind a desk should mean less people doing crimes, so less crooks to catch.

Fuck all to do with running the cops like a business. I really don't know where you got that from.
 
Chris, how else do you measure performance?

You can bet your arse tha if there are arrest quotas introduced based on perceived crime figures, that it'll be the easy arrests that are yanked in first - and that invariably means casual drug users.

Performance related pay for police officers was a pet project of Howard and Portillo back in 1993. I wrote snarky little teenage protest songs about it then and feel the same way today.

J.
 
arrests for cannabis are recorded by the old bill with the same level of "performance" as muders and rapes - i know who i would be looking for if i wanted to boost my "performance" related bonus's
 
Sorry, but no. Second paragraph of the article:

He said the performance of the police had not improved in line with the money poured into the service.

Then follow a pile of reforms based around changes to the pay schemes followed by the sweetener for all, which is the cutting back on the bureaucracy.

Sounds very much like a business viewpoint to me. Get more from your staff for less.

Sure the 'not enough druggies' bit is poking a bit of fun, but can I help it if that's the way he's pushing things? Everything else there is in the article. :Smile3:
 
JPsychodelicacy said:
Chris, how else do you measure performance?
Crime levels too?

I mean, surely anyone could work out that, even if number of arrests doubled, that an increase in crime levels would not be good performance.

JPsychodelicacy said:
You can bet your arse tha if there are arrest quotas introduced based on perceived crime figures, that it'll be the easy arrests that are yanked in first - and that invariably means casual drug users.
Agreed. And that is why I would think it very sad if arrest quotas were used as the measure of performance. I personally can't believe that anyone would be stupid enough to introduce such a system, since it hasn't taken you and me very long to work out what a bag of shite that would be.

JPsychodelicacy said:
Performance related pay for police officers was a pet project of Howard and Portillo back in 1993. I wrote snarky little teenage protest songs about it then and feel the same way today.
Blimey. At 15? When I was that age I was almost exclusively interested in doing things with my willy.

grokit23 said:
Sorry, but no. Second paragraph of the article:

He said the performance of the police had not improved in line with the money poured into the service.
He could have said that about most things.

grokit23 said:
Then follow a pile of reforms based around changes to the pay schemes followed by the sweetener for all, which is the cutting back on the bureaucracy.

Sounds very much like a business viewpoint to me. Get more from your staff for less.
Quite the opposite in my recent experiences of businesses. (Which is getting less and less recent, I have to say!) More bureaucracy = more work, but less effective work. Ask anyone who's worked in the IT department of a large-ish company. Less bureaucracy = more time to do your proper job. That can also be interpreted as getting more from your staff, possibly for less, since needless bureaucracy is expensive.

Now then, I wasn't particularly agreeing with performance related pay for cops. I posted because I found it interesting that it was possible for one person to extract something so pessimistic and another person to draw something optimistic from the same article.
 
Warwick Bassmonkey said:
Crime levels too?

I mean, surely anyone could work out that, even if number of arrests doubled, that an increase in crime levels would not be good performance.

Amen Brother!

Though one issue here is that Cameron ALSO said that he wanted to get rid of "underperforming" officers (See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4615718.stm). If the police presence is so good that no major crimes are commited then how do you dig out these under performers? Hmmm ... any other metric you can think of APART from arrest quotas?

Slightly concerning ...
 
What they could do is make up a load of new crimes like dropping a fag butt in the street or smoking a pipe or wearing a hood and arrest the people doing that. After an initial spike or crimewave if you will followed by some high-performance policing you would then see a huge drop in reported crime as pipe-smokers and hood wearers vanish underground away from the concerned citizens.

All boxes checked. Voters happy. At least until a News of the World expose into the underground world of pipe-smoking hood wearers which still continues unabaited just out of sight of middle England.
 
Warwick Bassmonkey said:
Blimey. At 15? When I was that age I was almost exclusively interested in doing things with my willy.

Same thing, innit? Although you can play your snarky little songs in public... :Wink3:

(Dont worry, my willy received plenty of attention too)

Quite the opposite in my recent experiences of businesses. (Which is getting less and less recent, I have to say!) More bureaucracy = more work, but less effective work. Ask anyone who's worked in the IT department of a large-ish company. Less bureaucracy = more time to do your proper job. That can also be interpreted as getting more from your staff, possibly for less, since needless bureaucracy is expensive.
Hmm - well, my current experience of business is whereby the bosses drain the number of shop floor personnel and utilise overseas contractors, which means more bureaucracy, as the shop floor people are constantly having to write specifications in arse-clenching detail because the contractors' first language is rarely English, then write reports on why the contractors are not performing to spec. Of course, the person writing the reports takes the blame, the boss hires a junior into their role and pockets the savings in their annual bonus.

Cynical, moi?

J.
 
JPsychodelicacy said:
Hmm - well, my current experience of business is whereby the bosses drain the number of shop floor personnel and utilise overseas contractors, which means more bureaucracy, as the shop floor people are constantly having to write specifications in arse-clenching detail because the contractors' first language is rarely English, then write reports on why the contractors are not performing to spec. Of course, the person writing the reports takes the blame, the boss hires a junior into their role and pockets the savings in their annual bonus.

Cynical, moi?

J.
Not at all. In fact I lost my last job to an unknown bum-on-a-seat in Bangalore.

At least they can't replace a British bobby with someone over there... although there is the 999 call centre... no, they wouldn't, would they?
 
What I heard from Cameron on Radio yesterday was that he wants to make it easier to sack under-performing police.

So - doesn't that mean they're going to have to *measure* performance in the same way we're currently measuring teaching staff's performance.

In other words, sound to me like he wants to apply a similar deal to Labour's teaching deal to the Police force.

If that *is* true (notice I say *if*), then what he's saying is: that stuff we've been criticising Labour about (targets etc.), well, we like it so much, we're going to apply it to the police too!
 
All this obsession with measuring things boils my piss really badly.

So many things can not be measured, yet it can still be damned obvious when someone is bad and someone is good [at their job].

I don't know what the answer is, but less bureaucracy is good no matter what.
 
Well there's the spin. We say we're going to reduce bureaucracy, but at the same time we're going to introduce a different kind of the same via targets.

Seems to me the guys displaying the same behaviour as Tony.

No surprise to me.
 
Why can't we for once have the "less bureaucracy" bit without the "measuring performance" bit ?

In my experience, whenever a firm has introduced a new way of measuring performance against targets, it has *always* meant more bureaucracy.

There... now I am totally pessimistic again.
 
One way of measuring police performance could be by number of hours on the beat. Less bureaucracy, not necessarily any increase in arrests, although increased use of CCTV has rendered much beat policing redundant.

Having league tables in policing seems ludicrous to me. Although it's also counterproductive to have them in health and education, since it's not as if someone reporting a crime has much choice about where they go to do it. To want more arrests means to want more crime. More crime = more criminals to arrest.

Cameron is a politician, and will say whatever he thinks will get him more votes. A quick glance at Tony "education, education, education" Blair's record shows how it works out in the end.
 
Warwick Bassmonkey said:
Now then, I wasn't particularly agreeing with performance related pay for cops. I posted because I found it interesting that it was possible for one person to extract something so pessimistic and another person to draw something optimistic from the same article.

Good point and one that I wanted to draw awareness to by pointing out what was below the surface of the article, though it's mostly preaching to the choir here. Here we had an article about a set of planned reforms and as always there's something being taken away and something being given with the deal. Nobody wants needless police bureaucracy and that's all that a lot of people will take from that article, it takes a bit of further thought to see that the whole plan is based upon flawed comparisons and is nothing more than a big wagecutting exercise which is bound to add another layer of bureauracy to administer it. This is all spun up to look like something we all want so that we swallow it all the easier.

I generally consider myself to be an optimist, but I don't like to make that mistake when it comes to politics so I like to dig deeper than the sugar coated message for the public.
 
They can say anything before they get into power. Problem is, most of them run into the same problem Thatcher ran into.

Thatch said she was going to reduce government interference, but when things went wrong and the media pointed the finger at the government, her response was to increase government involvement to sort things out - hence greater bureaucracy in place to give centralised government more control.
 
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