External examiners for police statistics

Nigel Williams, 10 April 2014

The Public Administration Committee has come down heavily on several aspects of recorded crime. The goal was already wide open, following earlier ONS analysis and criticisms by HMIC and the UK Statistics Authority. Police Recorded Crime does not presently have National Statistics status. The strong suspicion is that some police forces have recorded fewer crimes than the National Crime Recording Standard requires in order to look better, particularly when attempting to meet targets for crime-reduction.

The Public Administration Committee went further and suggested that the UK Statistics Authority could look at other public sector data

‘where personal and organisational performance is measured against data which those same organisations are responsible for generating.‘

There is a danger that this will divert administrative systems away from their primary purpose. In the case of crime statistics, the reason for recording the incident is so that it can be investigated and, if appropriate, the perpetrator can be caught, cautioned or prosecuted. Aggregating these records to make national statistics is secondary. The records are already there, so it makes economic sense to make use of them when planning resources and strategy but solving crimes should always be more important than counting them.

The public’s role in crime-reduction

Crime-reduction is partially the work of the the police but it is more a target for the whole of society. The Crime Survey of England and Wales still provides an independent measure of the level of crime with a high assurance of quality. By that standard, many categories of crime are falling. Shop-lifting is on the increase, cyber-enabled fraud and attempted fraud spiral ever upward, but many of the specific crimes that the public most fear are decreasing. Some miscreants are caught by the police and then kept from committing further offences by a spell in prison but a fall in crime ultimately depends on individuals choosing to stay within the law. British policing, we are regularly reminded, is by consent. Most police powers depend on public co-operation. Solving crime requires the public to provide evidence and prosecutions depend on witnesses appearing in court. When crime falls, it is not just the police that deserve the credit and they should not get all the blame when it rises.

Trust and loyalty

Policing demands a high degree of trust. Genuine grievances over the cases of Andrew Mitchell and Stephen Lawrence that have merited a lot of public scrutiny. At the opposite extreme, police regularly put themselves in positions of danger in order to protect the public. If attention has to be wasted on compelling every police force to record its incidents correctly, it will harm the level of trust that the more important parts of the job require.

Equally important is loyalty. Given that police are facing danger in the public service, they need to rely on each other. The College of Policing is consulting on how to instil ideas of professionalism into the police. In most cases, the ideas are already there. However, when a situation arises in which an officer feels compelled to criticise fellow officers, it takes some effort of imagination to see it as acting for the good of the whole force. A good referee knows when to play advantage instead of blowing the whistle. Foul play still has to be noted and corrected, but there is seldom a need to destroy the whole team ethos in the process. The police force does not want its honest internal critics to exclude themselves.

Not marking all your own homework

There is a light-touch solution. The target-driven culture is decreasing but will not vanish altogether, especially when forces are competing for scarce resources. Police forces could borrow an idea from the universities. Examination papers are set with reference to an external examiner, who works for a different university. The standard of the paper has to be such that the university is content to show it to an outside representative, who will comment if it looks amiss. Applying this idea to police crime recording, if one of the team reported to a different force, it could be enough. Professional standards are enough to make most officers record the incidents they are told about. Having someone present who belonged to a different force and whose career would not be damaged for noticing infringements would remove the temptation to misrecord. It is one more area of public life where ‘marking your own homework’ is better avoided.