I have spoken to many people recently about the emerging ‘crisis as opportunity’ mind set.

That there is the potential for a ‘crisis’ in policing is without doubt. The concept of crisis is of course, relative to where you currently stand and where you think you should be headed. That said, there are certainly sufficient storm clouds gathering to make a crisis of some kind (manufactured or otherwise) attractive to a wide range of vested interests.

So, if a crisis is coming, where are the opportunities that go hand in hand with it ?

Published today is an interesting report from Rick Muir, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research  entitled ‘Arrested Development: unlocking change in the police service’

Rick takes a wide ranging look at policing in England and Wales. Examining the context of policing, the political backdrop to policing, police performance, governance and blockages to change.

The report is interesting, challenging and highly topical, asking key questions about the relevance, direction and structure of policing.

Rick argues that Labour’s policing strategy, based on increased spending on the police alongside performance targets set from Whitehall, is no longer sustainable. There is no more money to spend and the target regime has reduced the  ability of police forces to respond to changing local demands.

He goes on ‘while crime has fallen, police performance on a number of key measures has not improved: importantly, the number of detections per officer has fallen and public satisfaction with the police is lower than it was before Labour came to power’.

He identifies four priority areas for reform:

A need to better equip the workforce to deal with new challenges (involving changes to pay, recruitment, roles and management)

A need for integrated information systems and processes across forces.

A need for improvement in the relationship between the public and the citizen (changes to the way officers are trained, the further embedding of neighbourhood policing, greater public access to police data and more use of social media to open up new lines of communication and collaboration between the police and the citizen (IT and HQ Comms teams please note)).

A need to tackle an excessively bureaucratic and process-driven organisational culture.

He is clear though that, in his view, none of these reforms can be progressed unless a wider set of problems that are caused by the way the police service is governed, organised and held to account, is tackled

Amongst the key recommendations he makes for reform of police service governance are:

All local crime priorities should be set at the local level, most importantly by strengthening the role of elected local government. Priorities would be set at three different levels:

Reformed police authorities made up of senior councillors would set the budgets and priorities for each police force and hold chief constables to account for performance.

Local authorities would directly commission key police services from their respective BCU’s

Local neighbourhood policing meetings would set the priorities for each neighbourhood policing team.

A National Policing Agency (NPA) should be established by merging the NPIA with those parts of  ACPO that currently coordinate or delive rnational policing services.

Rick concludes the 72 page report by stating that ‘the key to unlocking such a radical agenda for reform is to change the way the police are organised and held to account.The police service as a whole is currently too fragmented, with confused roles and responsibilities and a lack of clear local and national leadership.This system needs to change: local forces should be free to respond to local people’s needs, held to account by the proven institutions of elected local government. At the national level ministers should stop meddling in local police matters and focus on tackling serious and organised crime and promoting value for money in areas like administration and the provision of protectiveservices’.

Hard to argue with most of that. A good report, well worth reading that makes a useful contribution to the ‘crisis as opportunity’ debate.

Related posts:

1. Strategic Policing Priorities 2009 – 2010
2. Policing for the 21st Century
3. Police use of Web 2.0
4. Neighbourhood Policing: None of the changes were statistically significant
5. Social engineering and policing