I’ve long been interested in management culture in organisations, particularly policing and other organisations that provide a service, rather than a product per se.  Although, management jargon might suggest that, in thinking outside the box, the service is a product, produced by a human resource, and therefore productivity is as easy to measure as that of a product coming off a conveyor belt; nothing like a bit of Neo-Taylorism (Pollitt, 1993) to get the party started.

Anyway, enough of that, the other day in a student discussion I was talking about policing and ethics and professionalism and all that stuff.  Stuff that, I was trying to convey, was easier said than done because the social world is both complex and complicated.  We happened to discuss the Mission and Vision of New York Police, and it reminded me of research carried out regarding how the New York Police recorded, or more to the point failed to record, crimes (Eterno and Silverman, 2012).  Some of the crimes were very serious and at least one case led to an offender going on to commit more crime, when had the original crime been recorded, he might well have been caught before inflicting further serious harm. 

This all occurred in the nineties at a time when crime in New York was through the roof and when Mayor Guiliani and Commissioner Bratton were at the helm.  Under their stewardship, crime came down, detection rates went up, and Bratton was hailed as a hero with a suggestion that he could become the new commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in this country. Those of you that are old enough to remember will know it was more than just mooted by government sources.  Zero Tolerance policing (based on the much-criticised Broken Windows Theory) had been forged in New York and Jack Straw our home secretary was talking about it being introduced here.  The so-called success also lay in the fact that CompStat had been introduced in New York where borough commanders were publicly hauled over the coals and humiliated if their crime figures were not up to scratch.  The fact that they had little or no control over crime (Hough, 1987), and the reduction of crime had more to do with the declining crack market (Bowling, 1999), was neither here nor there.  What Bratton and Guiliani had done was to throw a thin veneer of respectability over the crime problem. 

Eterno and Silverman (2012) through their research, however, threw a whole new light on what turned out to be corrupt practices and, research in England and Wales began to throw up the same issues in crime recording practices on this side of the ‘pond’ (Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, 1999; 2000).   In this country the practices emanated from government’s preoccupation with statistics and the measurement of success through what can only be described as bean counting or what was officially known as objectives and Key Performance Indicators.  The Audit Commission and Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) applied pressure on forces to ‘perform’ and league tables were developed and published, the media love league tables.  The ideal place to be; mid table. That way no-one scrutinised what you were doing. Crime figures were massaged to produce the desired results. There was a whole industry in examining and manipulating statistics.  If you were at the bottom of the table, then interventions were put in place.  An action plan was imposed, the rationale behind the figures was ignored, this was not about quality, although the action plans were dressed up as quality improvement, this was simply about applying sufficient pressure to get forces to produce pleasing statistics.  The pressure was applied at the top, but very quickly through managerial manoeuvring, became a problem for those at the bottom.  Chief constables were quick to point out the failures of departments and individuals in departments.  CompStat but in a different guise came to the fore.  What became clear was that those at the bottom were supposedly, both ‘lazy and incompetent’.  If they weren’t, they were certainly made to feel that they were.

The corrupt practices that ensued (manipulation of crime statistics, misclassification of crimes, failure to record crimes, detection of crimes that were not really detected) were a direct consequence of overburdened frontline staff being charged with producing results that were not within their control and managers, rather than managing expectations, directing operations through innuendo and veiled threats.  Or in some cases such as CompStat, very direct threats.   Officers that were ignorant of the issues such practices might cause, obliged and were fêted as being exemplary, others that were not compliant, perhaps because they knew what the consequences were to the public, were shunned and humiliated, until they bowed to the inevitable.  The bottom line was simply to cheat and not get caught, forget integrity and ethics, those values were just not worth the stress.  Although of course, the cheats if caught, were on their own as managers pointed to current published policy and rules (not the real policy and rules though).   Some forces ended up in deep water as whistle-blowers spilled the beans on what was going on and the press had a field day.   Institutional reputations took a major blow and to this day the Office for National Statistics carries a rider about the validity of police statistics.  

Over a period of time, to some extent, the issues of performance management were addressed at government level, but the culture had become so inculcated that problems continued and manifest themselves in different ways to this day.   

What of this tale? My observations are that other organisations are not immune to this phenomenon particularly in times of financial stress and political uncertainty.   A management culture that either wittingly or unwittingly pushes staff on the front line, to make unethical decisions may produce a thin veneer of respectability, but they fail society miserably and risk significant reputational damage whilst doing so.

It seems to me that organisations can learn a great deal from the historic mismanagement of policing and the lack of ethical leadership in uncertain times. 

References

Bowling, B. (1999) The rise and fall of New York murder: Zero tolerance or crack’s decline? The British Journal of Criminology, 39 (4), p.p. 531–554.

Eterno, J. A. and Silverman E. B. (2012) The Crime Numbers Game: Management by Manipulation.  Boca Raton: CRC Press

Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (1999) Police Integrity: securing and maintaining public confidence. London: Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary.

Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (2000) On the Record: Thematic Inspection Report on Police Crime Recording, the Police National Computer and Phoenix Intelligence System Data Quality. London: Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary.

Hough, M. (1987) Thinking About Effectiveness. In Reiner, R. and Shapland, J. (eds.), Why Police? Special Issue on Policing in Britain: British Journal of Criminology, 27, 1, p.p. 70-79

Pollitt, C. (1993) Managerialism and the Public Services: Cuts or Cultural Change in the 1990’s. 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell.