British police turned one crime into 542

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From The Times

May 16, 2007
Why police officers turned a single theft into 542 cases
Stewart Tendler, Crime Correspondent

Police spent weeks doing door-to-door investigations to turn a single theft into 542 different cases to bolster crime-fighting targets, a national conference was told yesterday.
The operation began after a child was accused of keeping £700 raised for Comic Relief through sponsorship. PC Simon Reed told the Police Federation’s annual conference that officers were sent to talk to every person who had sponsored the child.

Mr Reed, who is a senior official of the federation, said that the case was dealt with by an English force but he would not go into further details. “This is a real case,” he said. “To bump up the targets they spent two weeks on door-to-door inquiries sending community safety officers to get 542 crimes. Five hundred is better than one.”

The conference debated growing fears that performance targets are distorting traditional policing. But Home Office minister Tony McNulty told the conference: “If there are perversities in the system I want to know about them.” He told delegates that he did not apologise for measuring performance and establishing some targets, but if they were getting in the way of policing then changes must be made.

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Yesterday Sam Roberts, a sergeant from North Wales, said that in her force officers have to meet monthly targets and get points for their work. She said that an arrest is worth ten points and so is a penalty notice for disorder. Police have complained that the notices, which are regarded by the Home Office as detecting crime, are being widely used for minor offences.
Sgt Roberts said that in the force run by Richard Brunstrom, a controversial chief constable, an officer gets five points docked if they were slow to take statements and penalised another five points if a crime was three months old and not solved.

Another officer told the conference that the performance demands left officers terrified.
PC Sue Larry, from Essex, said that officers were given monthly targets for cautions, arrests or fixed penalty notices. Even trainee constables are expected to reach them or face poor performance reports.

On Monday the federation gave details of a dossier of trivial cases where police had been forced to act rather than use their traditional discretion and warn a miscreant.

The cases included a Cheshire man who was cautioned by police for being “found in possession of an egg with intent to throw”. A child in Kent who removed a slice of cucumber from a tuna mayonnaise sandwich and threw it at another youngster was arrested because the other child’s parents claimed that it was an assault.

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Leaders in several forces said that they had not heard of the cases mentioned in their area, but the federation said that they had all come from officers who had responded to a national e-mail message requesting cases in preparation for the conference.

In all there were about 30 cases and those publicised were the most serious, according to Meten Enver, the federation’s senior press officer. “The best I can do is take on good faith that they are accurate,” he said.

So who thought that this quota system was a good idea?

He might want to find better and more interesting ideas.

Amazing . . . .

It's a bad idea for schools and it's a bad idea for the police. Tie "success rates" and funding to statistics, and people will start figuring out how to play those statistics--even if an individual has no sinister motives, they don't want to lose out to those who are manipulating the figures.

I agree that many modern initiatives for tackling crime are just about headline grabbing. But IMO, this story is a reflection of the general Sovietization of the UK and not just a reflection of one or two stupid politicians.

I sometimes try telling people that the UK’s turning into a milder version of the Soviet Union. But just because we have people earning multi-millions in the City, and just because we invaded Iraq, some people I’ve spoken with think I’m talking garbage when I talk about the Leftist takeover of the UK.

The UK is run by a bunch of socialists who think they can engineer a perfect society through bureaucracy and indoctrination. Many years ago the police actually served the people, and used their own initiative to keep the peace. It was understood that they enforced the accepted moral code of the people. But the socialist state despises the ordinary law-abiding people and their moral code. It views criminals as victims of society, and the law-abiding majority as oppressors of the “underprivileged”. So the socialist state cannot trust the police to use their own initiative; the police must now serve the state, and their actions are determined by the targets the state sets them.

So you get situations like the one above. The police will spend their time on simple cases like this so they can meet their targets. The flipside is that they’ll often not even bother recording crimes that might prove difficult to solve.

What’s more, the the ruling elite’s ideology is reflected in the instructions they give to their police force. The police devote masses of resources to investigating “thought crimes” at the expense of tackling burglary, theft, mugging etc.

If they need that much policing and need to continually increase it, they are doing something really wrong. Perhaps the policing increases the need for itself.

One the one hand, as a British citizen, I find this sickening. On the other hand, it seems almost ingenius as a way to meet your quota, and as a result have more time to spend actually working.

I actually have no idea what to think about this one.

Quotas for tickets are just wrong for this very reason