Refreshed Perspective – 4 Strategic Choices for High-Performance Policing

For policing and many other public services, the reality is that demand will almost always outstrip supply. If you’re a chief constable, the force’s limited resources mean that you won’t be able to catch every shoplifter and deal with every report of anti-social behaviour, all while running critical murder and serious violence investigations. In health or local government, it’s just the same. Public services naturally can’t meet all public demands. 

At Leapwise, we’ve been thinking a lot in the run up to the next Spending Review. With a radical overhaul in health (with NHS England abolished) or constant media stories about spending and cuts in areas like defense, aid or welfare, it’s clear that politicians are making big strategic choices – often highly controversial ones – to try and focus delivery on what they believe the public wants.  

Regardless of our views on those individual choices, it’s clearly right for leaders to be consciously engaging with those big strategic questions. It reminded us of a blog we wrote last year, setting out how police leaders could do the same by focusing on 4 key choices to unlock mission-focused, high-performance policing. We think those still hold true today for PCCs and chiefs across England and Wales.

4 Key Strategic Choices for Police Leaders

To deliver effectively for the public, PCCs and senior police leaders need to take decisions around 4 critical strategic trade-offs: 

1. Focusing on crime or adopting a broader public safety mindset 
2. Balancing crime prevention, victim and witness experience, and delivery of justice 
3. Targeting only ‘highest harm’ or focusing on volume 
4. Short-term wins or long-term results. 
   

   
   1. Focusing on crime or adopting a broader public safety approach 
   

   In 2010, then Home Secretary Theresa May told policing: “Your job is nothing more, and nothing less, than to cut crime.” We’ll be clear. She was wrong about that.  

   Every officer knows that the police prevent harm and protect safety in myriad ways – tracking down missing persons, dealing with mental health incidents, helping ensure safe and lawful public protest, and contributing to the efforts of public sector partners to build community cohesion and quality of life. Policing is more than just cutting crime. 

   However, police forces should be consciously debating 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. Leaders need to decide what workload they are best placed to deal with and then create the conditions for other people to meet wider community needs. The Right Care, Right Person initiative is an example of how some forces are trying to protect a focus on crime, but a broader focus can be valid too if police resources and skills justify this approach for the community. 

   2. Balancing crime prevention, victim experience, and delivery of justice 

   Many things the police do can contribute to crime prevention, keeping victims satisfied, and delivering justice. For example, supporting a victim of domestic violence effectively can reduce the risk of repeat victimisation, support victim recovery from trauma, and increase the odds of a successful prosecution of the offender. In these cases, successful activity delivers on all three priorities. 

   However, with limited resources, policing just can’t do everything. Deliberate choices are needed about the level of investment in victim and witness support, crime prevention, and investigation. While there’s always a strategic rationale for emphasising prevention to alleviate downstream demand, achieving the right balance remains crucial

   3. Targeting only ‘highest harm’ or focusing on volume  

   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 high-volume, less serious crimes), or on the support provided to prevent and respond to the most serious offences (which typically affect fewer people who are disproportionately in marginalised groups). This isn’t always understood as a realistic trade-off by some in policing. 

   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 like (THRIVE) to support daily prioritisation. But there are many variations on this theme.

   4. Short-term wins or long-term results

   Timeframes for objectives affect their feasibility and the right approach to take. Usually we recommend medium term goals – over 3-5 years – largely because this is a window that leaders can feel personally invested in and because it provides enough urgency to mean things start moving in the right direction. 

   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. The quick wins can play a crucial part in unlocking some of the harder next steps that deliver on your medium-term goals.

   The art and science of making strategic choices  

   There are other elements of choice, of course. When we work with forces like Police Scotland, we typically start with setting objectives relating to serving the public – considering all of the choices above and evidence about which approaches best deliver improvements in public safety and public confidence. However, we also try to define key objectives for the workforce (including capability, culture and engagement) and key financial objectives – e.g. choices on how to phase investments and manage reserves over time. Ideally, we also go further into how to create a strategy that genuinely delivers these results – which, for us, means defining the big bets and decisions that will determine whether agreed objectives are actually delivered! Should forces invest heavily in data and technology improvements, or focus on culture change and workforce skills, for example?  

   All these choices are critical to shaping an appropriate focus on efficiency and culture change in strategic planning.    

   There are also choices about the priority-setting process itself. With Police Scotland, we engaged the workforce widely, which was hugely beneficial. All forces should emphasise public priorities and public engagement, and the Police Foundation have previously conducted valuable research on innovative ways of doing this.  

   Good strategy is both an art and a science. But a clear, structured process of objective setting is a necessary starting point for building high performance for the public. It’s something we’re deeply passionate about. 

   Please get in touch to discover how we can help your organisation make the big strategic choices required to cultivate high performance.