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Crime Solicitors

Home Secretary announces review into police “tick box” culture (21 May 2015)

Date: 21/05/2015
Duncan Lewis, Crime Solicitors, Home Secretary announces review into police “tick box” culture

Home Secretary Theresa May has criticised police forces which concentrate on targets, taking frontline officers away from serious crime.

Speaking at the Police Federation conference in Bournemouth, Mrs May announced an independent national review into a prevalent “box ticking” culture among some forces – which police bonuses are linked to – at the expense of serious crimes such as child abuse and rape.

The Home Secretary abolished national police targets introduced by New Labour when she was Home Secretary under the coalition government. She said that too many police forces were clinging to a “targets mentality” – which some officers have their salary linked to.

Mrs May told the Police Federation:

If anyone is in any doubt about the perverse outcomes targets can cause, they need only look at the culture of South Yorkshire Police in the early part of the last decade – a police force allegedly so intent on meeting Home Office targets about car theft and burglary that it ignored hundreds of young girls being abused in Rotherham and Sheffield; where resources followed those so-called “priority” crimes and may have diverted away from issues like rape and sexual violence that were not on the list.”

Police targets were also held responsible for some forces being accused of manipulating crime records to hit targets set by New Labour and suggest crime was falling.

The Evening Standard newspaper reports that Mrs May also criticised the Police Federation for “scaremongering” and “crying wolf” over government reforms to policing – the Home Secretary warned in 2014 that unless the Police Federation introduced reforms, she would move to reform policing.

Police chiefs had claimed that government budget cuts would lead to a paramilitary style of policing.

Chair of the Police Federation Steve White attacked governments cuts to police budgets – saying that neighbourhood policing was “just one of the endangered species in the new streamlined, barren policing landscape”.

Mr White told the conference that around 17,000 police officers have been lost since 2010, when the coalition government came to power and the Home Secretary abolished police targets introduced under New Labour. He said that police forces were at breaking point as a result of the cuts.

However, the Home Secretary told the Police Federation that when the former Home Secretary had introduced police reforms, the federation had claimed that these would destroy policing forever:

“I have to tell you that this kind of scaremongering does nobody any good,” Mrs May told the Police Federation.

“It doesn’t serve you, it doesn’t serve the officers you represent – and it doesn’t serve the public.”

A review of the targets culture will be led by the president of the Police Superintendents’ Association, Irene Curtis – who previously claimed that targets had created a generation “who are great at counting beans”.

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