« Previous | Contents |
Listen
Narrowing The Gap
CHAPTER 5 Conclusion
Organisational Balance
The response of the police service to what the public want is influenced by a multiplicity of factors, both negative and positive, external and internal to the organisation. In ensuring that this balance between what the public want and what the police can or should provide is an acceptable one, cognisance has to be taken of key issues. Within organisational management, there is a need to look much more analytically at the stresses of resource deployment and abstractions, reviewing current shift deployment models to ensure the best address to operational, welfare and health needs and the Working Time Regulations 1998.
This requires extended leadership and management development to ensure that supervisors and managers are adequately prepared for their responsibilities in the modern policing era. This process needs to ensure sufficient continuing training and development of staff throughout their service to develop and preserve skills. HMIC is encouraged to note, under the aegis of the Police Advisory Board for Scotland (PABS) the establishment of a Working Group on Leadership and Development
To complement this, there needs to be a mechanism for ensuring the identification and dissemination of good practice in areas of crime and operations, an area in which HMIC obviously has an important role.
In the context of these main themes there is also a need to recognise different frames of service delivery. These span intelligence led policing, with enhanced capacity for proactive targeting through the developing National Intelligence Model, and extend to patrol capability - a modern specialism in its own right where reactive demands and proactive potential require to be reconciled. In addition longer term outcomes require to be assimilated as part of an enhanced community policing orientation which in turn has to acknowledge the diversity and competition of views across differing communities. In this respect the modern day community is a changing kaleidoscope of demands, tensions and aspirations within which consensus for change has to be achieved. Within this there are challenges to enlist local neighbourhoods and engage in a managed response which meets long-term local needs and addresses short-term fluctuations in crime.
Optimising Supply And Managing Demand
Given the current level of resourcing it is unrealistic to expect the police service in Scotland to do all that is expected of it by the public, far less embrace any further extension of its role introduced by new legislation without an impact on service. With little prospect of a significant increase in real overall funding, it is increasingly essential that the police service continues to make the most effective and efficient use of existing resources. This position renders progressive partnership working, accurate assessment of crime intelligence and community information allied to optimum resource deployment, absolutely vital. These critical aims will remain unfulfilled unless they are complemented by more effective consultative processes which succeed in informing the public of the competing priorities facing the service. Even if successful, these achievements must be coupled with a reassessment of the statutory role of the police and assigned core responsibilities.
HMIC has suggested in this report that setting policing priorities inevitably involves searching for a compromise. After all, deploying resources predominantly to satisfy the general public's demand for 'a reassuring visible police presence' could be at the expense of upsetting the balance of other operational priorities. The net effect might be a more reassured public but one which is more at risk.
Achieving a proper balance may be more about engaging in debate with a better informed public and gaining their understanding of, and involvement in, the setting of priorities. As further efficiencies in the utilisation of available resources will arguably only have a marginal effect on the ability to increase visible deployment, the best opportunity of narrowing the gap between expectation and reality lies in a multi-layered approach. Such an approach should bring about improvements in consultation and marketing processes together with robust and dynamic engagement between the public and the police. If this can be accomplished it may assist in allowing forces to use their resources to tackle problems in an agreed order of priority, which more clearly matches public expectations.
A Model for Policing
The strategic issues raised by the HMIC inspection on Visibilty and Reassurance provide a practical template for future action. It is emphasised that the recommendations do not provide a simple panacea which would close the gap between perception and the capacity to respond.
Nevertheless, on the basis of the evidence presented, HMIC suggests that an approach to policing based on the following principles is more likely to narrow the gap between expectations/ demands and actual policing delivery:
- Consultative, evidence based, sustained policing policies
- Policing strategies which have a wide national resonance but which remain locally sensitive
- The clear articulation of these policies through coherent communication
- Easier access to service, exploiting information and communications technology
- More consistent management of the grading of calls and the police response
- Development of community intelligence as a proactive aid to local problem solving
- Personnel strategies which ensure healthy recruitment, retention and efficient resource deployment
This template is subsumed within the span of the recommendations presented.
RELATED FUTURE STUDIES
This study highlights the need for a detailed examination of a number of areas, notably, Crime Management and Community Policing, and thematic inspections in these areas are programmed for 2003.
« Previous | Contents |