“Targets also miss the point of what the public want. The Home Office judges each police force by how many crimes it detects and clears up. The public want something different. They do not want crimes happening in the first place. They believe, like Sir Robert Peel, the founder of the Metropolitan police, that ‘the test of police efficiency’ is ‘the absence of crime and disorder’. It is not ‘the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them’.”

Harriet Sergeant on the stupidity of target-setting. In The Sunday Times, here.

Posted Sunday, May 25th, 2008 @ 2:20 pm
Filed in community and social, politics

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Further reading

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1. Incarcerating innocents
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3. Portuguese police criticism