Strategic Choices in Policing: Setting Clear Objectives for High Performance
The Case for Clear Objectives
Police budgets are tight, calls for service continue to flood in, and Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) and police leaders are under pressure to improve in countless areas. One week there will be a call from the Home Office to prioritise shoplifting, the next a letter (1) asking PCCs and Chief Constables to investigate all lines of enquiry. Shortly after, the Inspectorate will call for urgent improvements in compliance with the Victims’ Code. The following week, there might be a high-profile event that sparks pressure to focus on improving trust in policing for specific communities.
It is therefore easy to understand why policing sometimes gets caught in a reactive cycle, moving focus – and officers – from one area to another, standing up new units, creating new ‘strategies’, but then having to shift focus again before real progress is made. And it’s easy to see why many forces don’t set clear long-term goals, fearing that new pressures will soon come along or that it will be impossible to please all stakeholders.
Some police responsiveness to new events and pressures in policing is helpful – and indeed inevitable. Ducking the job of setting clear, medium or long-term objectives, however, is a mistake. Clarity drives focus. Prioritisation provides stability and certainty to leaders. Concrete ambitions are motivating and build organisational energy and confidence. Our experience is that every job in the organisation becomes easier if you are clear on objectives and priorities. Priorities provide a framework for selecting which projects to invest in, and which to cancel, which functions to support with more officers, which partnership arrangements to invest time and money in. They shape how resources are prioritised on a daily basis and ensure the most important things are done.
Policing can therefore no longer accept high level platitudes. The variations on a theme of ‘keeping people safe’, ‘cracking down on criminals’ and ‘supporting victims’ are perfectly laudable high-level ambitions – but without clarity on what these really mean, and what good looks like, they aren’t useful objectives for informing decisions that matter.
Four key choices
To set meaningful, achievable goals, PCCs and senior police leaders need to grapple with (and come to a view on) several critical trade-offs for police objective setting. These include:
- Crime-focus vs broader public safety focus. When then Home Secretary Theresa May told policing “your job is nothing more, and nothing less, than to cut crime”, she was wrong. Any officer knows that the police prevent harm and protect safety in myriad ways – tracking down missing persons, dealing with suicide threats and incidents, helping ensure safe, lawful, public protest and contributing to the efforts of public sector partners to build community cohesion and quality of life. However, police forces must all actively debate how far they ‘stick to the core’ of preventing and investigating crime. As a service of last resort, policing tends to be asked to help widely – so leaders need to decide what workload they are best placed to deal with – and then creating the conditions for other people to meet wider community needs. The Right Care, Right Person (2) initiative is an example of how some forces are trying to protect a focus on crime, but it is valid to embrace a broader focus if police resources and skills mean this makes sense for the community.
- Prevention of crime and harm vs victim & witness experience vs delivery of justice. Many things the police do can contribute to both crime prevention, keeping victims satisfied and delivering justice. For example, supporting a victim of domestic violence can both reduce risks of repeat victimisation, support victim recovery from trauma and increase the odds of a successful prosecution of the offender. However, with limited resources, policing can’t do everything. Choices are needed about the level of investment in victim and witness support, crime prevention and investigation. While there’s a strategic rationale for emphasising prevention to alleviate downstream demand and improve outcomes, achieving the right balance remains crucial.
- Focus on harm vs focus on volume (quality of life). An important – and ultimately quite political debate – is whether policing should concentrate more on the confidence of the majority in policing (who are mainly affected by higher volume and less serious crimes), or on the support provided to prevent and respond to the most serious offences (which typically affect fewer people, and disproportionately affected marginalised groups). Linked to this, forces must choose to provide equal service or investment in every geography – or whether to target resources based on levels of need and demand. Often forces have a balanced model here: guaranteeing a minimum standard for all, then targeting based on need and using risk assessment tools (THRIVE) (3) to support daily prioritisation. But there are many variations on this theme.
- Short-term vs long-term results. Timeframes for objectives affect feasibility and approach. Usually we recommend medium term goals – over 3-5 years – largely because this is a window that leaders can feel personally invested in, and it provides enough urgency. But it’s also vital to sequence goals. It’s powerful to demonstrate to the public, the organisation and yourselves that major progress can be made in one area in just a year.
There are other elements of choice, of course. When we work with forces, we typically start with setting objectives relating to serving the public. But we also look at objectives for the workforce (including capability, culture and engagement) and key financial objectives – in particular making choices on how to phase investments and manage reserves over time. These are critical to shaping appropriate focus on efficiency and culture change in strategic planning.
There are also choices about the priority-setting process, including how to engage the public, how to manage ensure both political and professional input in priority setting, and how to assess existing performance strengths and weaknesses.
There is both art and science involved in making these choices. But a clear, structured process of objective setting, is a necessary starting point for building high performance for the public.
Get in touch to discover how our expertise can help your organisation in establishing impactful strategic planning initiatives to cultivate high performance.
About the authors
This week’s Leapwise Perspectives comes from our Director, Sean Cregten (4) and our Managing Director, Tom Gash (5).
Sean leads public sector consulting projects for Leapwise with focuses on strategic planning, long-term decision making, organisational capabilities development, and effective governance. He brings a wealth of experience from public and third sector, as a previous consultant at PwC and with his MBA with distinction from the University of Cambridge.
Tom spent his career supporting decision making of ministers and prime ministers, senior officials and the boards of non-profits and private companies worldwide, at the interface of government, business, and academia. His specialism is crime, security, and justice and authored a ‘Times Thought Book of the Year’ Criminal: The Truth About Why People Do Bad Things (Penguin, 2016) (6).
