MANAGING THE POLICING PLEDGE

The current Home Office approach is to have just one top down target that impacts on police forces:

“to increase public confidence in the police and other agencies to reduce crime”.

 No longer will simply 'counting statistics' be used to show how effective police forces are in fulfilling their role.

All police forces have published their 'Policing Pledge' and the focus is now on police reporting and responding to local communities, rather than central government, as well as on individual police officers having the responsibility and the discretion to tackle the issues that matter locally.

The Pledge is part of the Government's "Justice Seen, Justice Done" project which is a cross government programme to address public concerns about crime and justice.  As a result,  progress towards delivering the pledge will come under intense external security.  Whilst all police forces have internal inspection functions experience shows that they do not always discover the weaknesses and it is only when HMIC arrives that those weaknesses become painfully obvious and Chief Constables are held to account.

I offer a 'critical friend' approach  whereby I take an 'outsider' view to identify whether the actions required by the Chief Officers really are being put into practice by the responsible policing departments.