Policing as a performing art? The contradictory nature of contemporary police performance management

Traditional and advanced performance regimes

Although the term ‘regime’ might imply unity and coherence, we use it to embrace varying mixes of norms, values, priorities and forms of knowledge and information (Edwards and Hughes, 2012). Analysing performance regimes means examining sets of (more or less related) performance indicators, and the internal procedures, instruments and processes of internal accountability through which performance is defined, assessed and monitored. Police performance regimes can thus be defined in terms of the interplay between measures of police activity and how such measures are used through the various internal organizational processes to seek to produce particular organizational effects.

Police performance regimes may vary substantially. They vary significantly between nation states (de Maillard and Savage, 2012) and vary over time within nation states; they can also vary between police organizations. To capture such variations, we can distinguish analytically between ‘traditional’ and ‘advanced’ models of police performance regimes.

‘Traditional’ police performance regimes, typical of performance management in the earlier stages of development of PPM, are characterized by:

The perceived shortcomings of the ‘traditional’ regime, as seen above, seem to have been a driving factor behind the emergence of a more ‘reflective’ performance regime that we refer to as the ‘advanced’ police performance regime, characterized by:

These analytical distinctions between traditional and advanced PPM regimes relate to ways of thinking and behaving, cultural interpretations held within policing about which should be the priorities, and how performance should be measured.

To track potential changes of performance regimes, two dimensions, organizational and occupational, will be examined in the rest of this article. The former refers to organizational processes: how low-level police supervisors (sergeants) and middle managers (from inspectors to chief superintendents) may through their activities and orientations impact on the internal diffusion of performance management. The latter relates to professional subcultures: how do supervisors and middle managers understand and perceive performance management and use performance indicators?

Methodological note

This article is based on data gathered from two contrasting police forces in England, the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) with a predominantly urban population, the other a medium-sized ‘county’, or ‘provincial’, force with a mixed rural and urban geographical spread. We contend that findings from the study of the two forces can be generalized to policing nationally in England for two reasons. First, that the MPS alone accounts for around one-fifth of police officers in the country. Second, that policing in Britain has become increasingly standardized due to the influence of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and police chief associations (Savage et al., 2000).

Ideally, we would have wished not to identify either of our forces by name, but given the unique nature of the MPS it would have been obvious which force it was. In each of the two forces, the Police and Crime Commissioner and the MPS equivalent (the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime) had decided to maintain performance regimes incorporating clearly stated targets (see House of Commons, 2014: 15–18). Furthermore, in the case of the MPS, highly ambitious targets for local policing, captured by the slogan of the ‘20/20/20 Challenge’, were set out (Edwards and Prins, 2014; MOPAC, 2012): a 20 per cent reduction in ‘key neighbourhood crimes’; a 20 per cent increase in public confidence in the police; and a 20 per cent reduction in police expenditure (MOPAC, 2012).

We conducted a total of 70 semi-structured interviews, 35 in the MPS and 35 in the provincial force. In each force, we focused on two territorial areas (‘districts’ within our provincial force, ‘boroughs’ within the MPS). The interview population was selected on the basis of purposive sampling and included the most senior officers responsible for performance in each force, area commanders responsible for force divisional performance units and all ranks below that level through to constable. Most of our interviewees (57) were either middle managers or supervisors. The sample also covered a range of police functional units, including: safer neighbourhood teams; criminal investigation departments; first response/patrol teams; police staff with responsibilities for performance analysis; and interviewees from two police stations in each force. In the findings presented below, interviewees from the MPS are identified with the prefix ‘M’ and interviewees from the provincial force with ‘P’ and codified numerically accordingly.

Our interviews began with general questions on the content of the interviewee’s work, their daily tasks, prior to discussing more specifically the practices and perceptions referring to performance issues: how are work priorities defined and how do these priorities impact on their work? How is the interviewee’s work assessed and, if they are in a managerial or supervisory position how do they evaluate the work of subordinates? What kinds of tools are used to assess performance but also to record activity? Depending on the nature of the responses, we then asked questions around the existence of targets and extent of professional autonomy.

We chose semi-structured interviews as our primary research technique because of their capacity to obtain information on the perceptions, beliefs, professional identities and discourses of, in this case, police actors (Bryman, 2003). There are, of course, limitations to research of this kind: the information gained through interviews depends upon what the interviewee chooses to say or not to say, and on whether the individual concerned feels able to disclose what they might believe to be the case. In the context of the focus of our research, for example, police officers may seek to conceal certain practices, such as ‘massaging’ the figures and other various gaming practices, while conversely highlighting more ‘noble’ ones, such as more reflective and longer-term approaches to dealing with police performance data. As ‘outsiders’ in police research (Brown, 1996; Fielding, 1990) we were at risk of suffering the dilemma painted by Gary Marx (1988: xiii), when he stated ‘much of the literature on controversial police topics breaks down into two categories: uncritical work by well-informed insiders, and critical work by uninformed outsiders’. However, we contend that these concerns were at least largely mitigated by other factors. First, in addition to interviews, we conducted a number of observational exercises (approximately 20 hours of observations in each force) of performance-related events, including force performance group meetings, daily management meetings and team briefings. Second, we were able to ‘test’ our findings with well-placed insiders with whom we established a close working relationship. Third, we could to a certain extent cross check the information collected as we conducted around 15 interviews in each territorial area (see above). Furthermore, we were somewhat surprised by the candour of many of our interviewees who could hardly be accused of presenting a ‘corporate’ line!

Against this backcloth, we propose now to analyse the three dimensions of performance regimes mentioned above: numbers; hierarchy; and timing.

The centrality of numbers for police middle management: Believers and sceptics

An overriding picture from our research is the centrality of ‘working to numbers’ within the daily routines of police middle managers. As in other sectors, police performance data are routinely presented in corporate dashboard form, with a colour-coded system of ‘green, amber and red’, flagging the degree of fit with set performance targets. Monthly, even weekly, data-based objectives were still routinely present within both forces. In the provincial force, one chief superintendent stated in relation to senior management that ‘they were more interested in your figures than your plan… They look at the greens, they look at the reds…’ (P2). A detective chief inspector describes walking into the office and, rather than exchanging niceties with colleagues, his focus was on ‘figures’ and on what the computer reveals: ‘What is the priority? Computer. Oh! Red!’ (P12).

Comparisons between units within forces and between forces themselves had become internalized: managers define their performance relative to others. For example, a borough commander described his earlier concerns about public confidence in policing in his borough: ‘It was the lowest in terms of victim satisfaction rates in London. The quarrel with that is we are at the bottom of England and Wales so it was a bad position to be in’ (M4).

The prioritization of such target numbers can of course lead to a narrow perspective on policing priorities. For example, a chief inspector of a Safer Neighbourhood Team bemoaned the focus on figures rather than on actual ‘outcomes’: ‘A lot of times funding was specific around numbers, around positive or negative figures rather than positive or negative qualitative outcomes’ (M26). In a similar vein a detective chief inspector claimed that a focus only on crude numbers can distort decision-making:

Sometimes you have senior police officers in particular with a uniform experience [who] have a limited knowledge of investigation, they are focused on the ‘n’ number… you can have a superior that doesn’t understand what you do, they just see the reds and greens… and they criticize. (P12)

This statement reveals a form of schism within police management over the legitimacy of ‘policing by numbers’. There seems to be dissent among police middle managers and supervisors around the relevance of targets and more generally the use of performance indicators in the management of police units (Cockcroft, 2012). The reliability and relevance of performance data for police action is a matter of contention. In this respect, the divide within police organizational culture is more nuanced than the classic differentiation between ‘street’ and ‘management’ cops (Reuss-Ianni, 1983). Within management cops as such we would distinguish between ‘believers’ who see virtue in the ‘healthy competition’ which numbers and targets can create and the daily pressures this brings to improve performance, and ‘sceptics’ who are more guarded about what the pursuit of numerical targets can achieve.

Believers consider figures as reliable; to put it in the words of a detective sergeant who very regularly assessed his detectives, at the end of the day, ‘Stats speak for themselves’ (M6). On the contrary, sceptics would insist on the potentially misleading nature of figures and the dangers of reading them as straightforward signifiers of ‘results’. Competition between police units on the basis of performance also provokes different opinions: believers consider that some degree of competition is always healthy in an organization, whether between territorial areas, operational units or individual officers; sceptics are more concerned with the possible perverse effects of widespread use of comparison between units. Additionally, the effectiveness of police targets is contested: believers tend to consider that instituting performance targets holds the organization together and furthers a sense of ‘mission’, whereas sceptics underline the possible distorting and resource intensive effects of targets. What is at issue here is almost a divide about what constitutes ‘good police work’: on the one hand the believers who see ‘good police work’ as the attainment of numerical results and on the other sceptics who differentiate such results from ‘real’ police work, or at least do not reduce good police work to numerical indicators alone. What this amounts to is in effect a ‘mixed economy’ of both traditional and advanced forms of police performance management.

A mixed economy of performance regimes

There appears to be a discernible and ongoing shift within police from a simple ‘numbers game’ to a more reflective problem-solving ethos, particularly in relation to uniformed policing functions, in which data are used not just for the purposes of target-setting but as intelligence to be used for proactive management. Our interviews reveal a strong sense that the police performance regime has evolved in ways that were more creative than performance regimes of the past; the performance culture is shifting to one more characteristic of what we referred to earlier as an advanced regime. The increasing focus on problem-solving can mean that numbers are treated as signs of underlying processes rather than as significant in themselves. In the MPS, this is captured by a police performance (or ‘business’) analyst commenting on the direction of PPM: ‘The direction is that it should be more about processes and not so much about numbers. So if a borough is not doing great in terms of numbers… that doesn’t necessarily mean the performance is bad’ (M35). This means that judgements on the performance of policing units should involve an assessment of whether the processes attached to the numbers are appropriate or not. This entails a shift from the simple ‘primacy of numbers’ to one which treats numbers as signifiers of patterns and it is the significance of those patterns and solving problems they express which are becoming a more central concern. This problem-solving approach transforms performance data from being a totemic definition of what the police should aspire to, to being a source of intelligence for informed decision-making.

In turn this encourages a more intelligent use of data. In both forces middle managers talk positively about ‘balanced scorecards’, which involve linking different dimensions of performance to provide rich data for planning and decision-making. For instance, a superintendent links the use of this intelligence to new levels of support to his subordinates:

We introduced balanced scorecards, it will look at how a team performed, at their outputs and inputs, [they] will usually include the attendance level, how many crimes they deal with, how many crimes they solved, and so on… When you had a team with a low arrest rate for a period here of four months, the immediate reaction was ‘what is going wrong? I am going to set them targets for some more arrests’… for me it was more, ‘are you asking the right sort of questions?’… It could be because they were much more innovative in dealing with crimes, they could solve more crimes, while doing less arrests, because they were more innovative. (P7)

In summary, if some components of the traditional performance regime are still doggedly alive within the police organization, other features of PPM beyond the simple ‘working with numbers’ are now part of the PPM landscape. This is consistent with Crawford et al.’s (2005: 86, emphasis added) thesis that: ‘creative use of performance measurement […] [can] encourage officers to value certain aspects of their work, such as encouraging crime prevention, problem solving and community engagement’. This potential creativity leads to the issue of managerial accountability.

Invasive accountability for divisional commanders

Like in Compstat (Willis et al., 2007), divisional commanders, typically at chief superintendent level (or in the MPS at commander level) are at the fulcrum of the performance regime because they have to answer directly for the performance (or under-performance) of their geographical area to the chief officer team. In both forces monthly force-level evaluation sessions (CrimeFighters in the MPS, Force Performance Meetings in the provincial force) were set up and the senior management team utilize dedicated performance analyst teams to drill down into data and present profiles to be used to increase performance in the organization.

The Compstat programme, developed by the New York Police Department, was notorious for exposing police commanders to management review events where ‘their’ performance was subjected to hostile examination (Eterno and Silverman, 2012; Moore, 2003). In our research we did not find evidence of performance events of the intensity of the Compstat regime; however, we did find that ‘rituals of performance’ (see Manning, 2008; see also Manning, 1997 for policing ‘rituals’) were a key part of contemporary police performance, whereby individuals are exposed to particular events at which the performance of themselves or relevant others is presented, examined, challenged and at which they are called to account.

An important dimension in this respect is the punitive nature of performance assessments: the theatre of performance operates at least in part by a ritual of symbolically punishing ‘poor performers’. Commanders of ‘poor performing’ areas are asked to stand up and first explain why their figures were not ‘good’ and then go on to explain what they planned to do to improve performance. Performance rituals help create environments in which ‘naming and shaming’ processes can be set to work. These events are sometimes experienced by commanders as somewhat humiliating: ‘You don’t want to be the naughty boy… When we got worse [figures], I always remember that you felt like the class idiot… When they say that you don’t know what you are doing, it was a horrible feeling’ (Chief superintendent, P2).

Divisional commanders are expected to know often specific details about what is happening in their division and be answerable for decisions made under their command, even decisions right down to the frontline. One divisional commander in the MPS expressed this in terms of his own ‘accountability’: ‘I feel the most accountable person to the performance in all the Met other than the Commissioner’ (M23). The level of finely grained detail presented in the CrimeFighters meetings was resented as excessive by some commanders, as the same commander stated:

I have to get my head round what my subordinates are doing in relation to those things because they ask for a level of detail which I don’t think I necessarily need to know. I need to know things are happening but do I need the fine details of that? (M23)

These performance rituals were far more intense in the MPS than in the provincial force. In the MPS, divisional commanders never know fully what kind of questions they may receive from the senior officers, thus creating a form of permanent uncertainty, as the same commander again stated:

They pick on different bits each time and you go, ‘what the hell is that?’ and stuff you’ve not seen before… you are then given this thing and you think, ‘where has this come from?’ … figures that you don’t recognize and then you have to do a lot of work trying to work out what it is, where it’s come from and what they are looking for. (M23)

Furthermore, the most senior officer in charge of local policing for the MPS did not hesitate to challenge divisional commanders. An inspector recalls a scenario widely shared within the MPS: ‘You hear the story that a chief superintendent was being asked “who does that for you?”, ‘oh inspector x does it”, so he [senior officer] rings up inspector x there in the meeting’ (M7).

Commanders could therefore be explicitly questioned on their internal management. For a period (it had changed over time as we shall make clear later), the style of leadership of that senior officer, who was from outside the MPS and wanted to provoke, in his own words ‘shock and awe’, had been described as abrasive by some, brutal by others. In contrast, the performance rituals in the provincial force, such as the monthly performance meetings, were rather more gentle affairs, something apparent from our observations of such events. Chief superintendents can be seriously challenged but never to the degree seen in the MPS. One chief superintendent described the meetings as ‘not necessarily evil, but not helpful’ (P7).

This places divisional commanders in an often invidious position: they are both part of the senior staff of the force accountable for all that happens under their command and are often expected to know the detail of individual disposals of people arrested, charged and so on. Not surprisingly, this can create a highly pressurized environment for those concerned. For example, we were told about one district commander who had ‘sleepless nights’ before performance review meetings and even that his children were aware when such meetings were coming up because of his behaviour! Divisional commanders are at the helm of force ‘business units’ and where those units are the primary basis of intra-force performance comparisons it is they that are very much in the ‘firing-line’ within the performance regime, even if the pressure also goes down the line.

Transmitting pressure

We found clear evidence of what we would call the transmission of pressure from senior to frontline levels of the organization. This is where organizational performance targets are transmitted from senior management through to middle management and supervisors.

This cascading process may be translated through two quite varying routes. The first is the more formulaic definition and monitoring of numerical targets that are pushed down at every level of the organization through to frontline officers. Targets set ‘on high’ are translated into specific actionable objectives for individual frontline officers, leaving little by way of officer discretion in those areas of police activity. For example, one detective chief inspector, one we would classify as very much a ‘believer’, explained how she sets quite specific action targets for her inspectors and sergeants and sees that those targets are then handed down to frontline detectives, in order to help achieve targets for her force area. She also presents this in terms of generating ‘healthy competition’ within her team of detectives:

I’ll give everybody four objectives and they will give their detectives four objectives. One of those four objectives could be to detect four burglars per month but that doesn’t seem a lot. When you have a low arrest rate around burglary, that’s a lot, so it holds people to account… that does inject a little healthy competition. (M6)

Some specific operations express perfectly this form of top–down management by numbers. For instance, the MPS has engaged in events given the name of ‘Operation CUBO’, where activity right across the force is targeted for a single day at a particular offence, such as uninsured car drivers, in this case involving widespread stops of vehicles and arrests to substantially boost ‘performance’ in that area of policing. ‘CUBO days’ reflect what the chief officer had in a previous post called ‘Big Wing Days’ (named after the World War II Battle of Britain) – large scale raids and arrests of particular groups of offenders. On these days, every borough has clear numerical targets and is expected to attain them with close monitoring by the senior hierarchy.

However, the setting of such individual targets for frontline officers is not the most frequent option. Both forces had largely abandoned specific targets for frontline officers (even if differences may be observed within units depending on the style of supervisors, see below). This is where the second route, more indirect and diffuse, takes place: here there is no clear obligation to attain individual targets, but an increased, recurring, questioning and challenging of decisions made by individual officers working on specific crimes, particularly volume crimes. This is notably the case in investigatory units and is illustrated by these comments from a detective sergeant about the pressures around detections for burglary and robbery offences:

We are in a lot of pressure not to release people from custody that had been arrested for robbery and burglary without charging them… if that happens, we have to answer to the management team in the morning meeting. They want to know that because they look for the stats. And they go ‘Hang on, Joe Bloggs was in for robbery yesterday, and he’s released NFA [no further action]. Why was that? Why hasn’t this robbery suspect been charged?’ (M27)

In this case the intrusion of supervisors and middle managers into operational decision-making derives indirectly from performance targets: the officer is made accountable on a routine basis for his/her individual decisions, especially when they concern designated priority crimes. The process is therefore more indirect than the simple imposition of numerical targets down the line, and usually involves a scenario whereby, under pressure to attain targets, middle management reinforces its monitoring and challenging of the decision of subordinates. Through targets, monitoring procedures have been consolidated to form a tighter disciplinary framework.

Such a scenario leads to different reactions from police personnel. While some, almost reluctantly, recognize what they feel are near-positive aspects of this intrusiveness, referring to an enhanced level of interest shown by managers in what is happening down the line of the police hierarchy, most officers express resentment about the new forms of accountability as being ‘suffocating’, ‘unjustified micromanagement’ and time consuming.

Soaking up, negotiating pressure: Another role of the middle hierarchy

However, we would identify a number of qualifications to the straightforward ‘top–down’ performance scenario. Not all police managers and supervisors appear to take the position of simple ‘transmitter’ of performance pressures; some of them at least are prepared to act as a sort of ‘buffer’ for the pressures coming down the line. We found evidence that some middle managers and supervisors took a position where they would ‘soak up’ the pressure coming from above. Despite its rigidity, the performance framework leaves potential leeway for negotiation, interpretation and even forms of resistance within the police organization. This may be seen at two levels: divisional commanders’ relations with their superiors and supervisors’ relations with frontline officers.

Divisional commanders have over time it would seem been given degrees of discretion over the definition of their local priorities. The extent of this depends largely upon the intensity of performance at the force level. In the MPS, performance meetings have become less ‘brutal’ over time. A borough commander for example compared the ‘intimidatory’ performance meetings of the recent past, where ‘you were keeping your head down hoping they won’t ask you the question that you knew they should be asking you’ to one ‘where such events are not quite as aggressive as it was’ (M23). This appears again to reflect a picture of performance regimes which ebb and flow between ‘traditional’ and more ‘advanced’ logics. Performance regimes are a moving target, not set in stone. This may create possibilities for levels of autonomy within the force, escaping the ‘one size fits all’ rationale. A chief superintendent expressed this relative capacity to adapt locally to the force objectives:

Victim satisfaction is my first priority. It’s what I give to my staff. SAC [serious acquisitive crime] is probably the force number one priority. Victim satisfaction, I consistently since I arrived here said, ‘get your investigation right and everything else will follow through’. So, for me, it’s victim satisfaction and commission rates, reducing crime… And then it’s violence, sexual offences or whatever. So I interpret the force priorities into something that I believe people can sign up to and deliver on. (P10)

However, this degree of managerial autonomy is limited and conditioned by having to present good ‘results’: the same chief superintendent also mentioned that he is assessed on the basis of six performance indicators (including crime rate, detection rate, the management of his team and value for money). He has to reach four out of six targets if he is not to be considered ‘unsuccessful’. In other words, autonomy is conditioned by reaching targets, which may appear somewhat paradoxical!

Supervisors, normally sergeants, appear to have equivalent degrees of discretion. Performance management has prompted a new role for sergeants, by increasing that part of their work devoted to the monitoring of scoreboards and recording of their subordinates’ activities. However, styles of supervisory management vary. Sergeants often manage different types of constraints: reaching targets, but also protecting officers; respecting instructions, but also taking into account operational discretion. Some, particularly more experienced sergeants, may absorb the pressure at their level, protecting their subordinates from the full blast of the performance regime and thus moderating the effects of downward performance pressures, unlike some of the counterparts, who are much more ‘figures’ oriented:

That’s just the way I work as well, if you spoke to [sergeant named]… it would all be about community work; she likes the community side whereas I like the investigative side… she’s not worried about figures. She always moans at me because I’m worried about figures. (P32)

In the MPS, two detective sergeants, while regularly assessing the individual activities and caseload of the detectives, practise this performance monitoring on different timeframes, one operating on a short-term basis, the other adopting a more distanced and long-term approach:

Every month I run an inquiry on the crime reporting system, the CRIS system… An inquiry has been specifically created to look at performance, so I am able to tell who of my officers have got the most detections, the number of crimes they have investigated… And then at the end of the month, I will say to them, this is only compared with the evidence, it is a way of introducing competitiveness between the five… They may not like it but… (M11)

What I try to look for [are] trends because obviously, on a short term basis… Because the nature of our business changes so much on a daily basis. I mean, one day, you might get five burglaries. Another day might not be any. So you have to look at trends really, which is what I do and my team as well because I’ll keep an eye on them on a daily basis…. But I measure them, say, over three months or six months. (M27)

This leads us to consider the linkage between police performance and timeframes for police decision-making.

Shortening the time horizon

Terms such as ‘quick wins’, ‘fire-fighting’ and ‘knee-jerk reactions’ were used at various points by our interviewees to capture the short-term pressures that the police sometimes face under PPM. Under pressure to reach often politically sensitive targets (such as those for serious acquisitive crimes in the provincial force), senior management can at times issue edicts which require specific and short-term responses, time-limited targets and the like.

Short-term pressures are widespread. Some interviewees, particularly those attached to criminal investigation departments, refer to daily monitoring of performance. For example a detective inspector expresses it as follows:

I’m aware of my numbers every day. Every day in the meeting they bring up on the screen the current performance on a daily basis. You are measured against the previous year’s performance, so you are measured against the number of robberies whether they have gone up or down on last year. … if you hit below or above that target and if they are increasing or decreasing so that’s on a daily basis. (M8)

A strong impetus in this respect comes from daily management meetings where recent events are reviewed and objectives recalled. On priority crimes, close monitoring of cases and follow-up of figures are typical. One chief inspector even mentioned hourly pressure, if crime ‘spikes’ appear:

The pressure is almost hourly sometimes. We have performance meetings at 9.00 the locality, at 10.00 the area, 10.30 the force. Every day, seven days a week. Sometimes at the force level, you have some senior officers talking about low-level assaults. And that should be a strategic meeting. (P12)

Linked to this, pressure on improving performance against targets can shift from one area of performance to another: what are priorities at one time are less so at another, and with that the pressures for short-term returns can grow and with them the period for performance review can be shortened. However, this tells only part of the story.

Combining short-termism with more strategic problem-solving

Truncating timeframes can generate scepticism among police managers and supervisors who may be attached to a more nuanced conception of their role and activity. While seemingly loyal to their own organization, they seek to distance themselves from what they deem to be ‘knee-jerk’ reactions associated with some areas of PPM:

What I have always resisted is a knee-jerk reaction on the basis of quite superficial information and data, something that I have tried to resist… At times, I would be in conflict with my organization. … but the instruction is ‘Something has gone up, do something about it.’ It has been my frustration. (Chief superintendent, P7)

Yet even within this short-termist framework there may be some leeway for a more ‘strategic’ approach. Some managers put under pressure to return immediate performance results may be in a position where they can ‘buy some time’. In such cases, they are able to negotiate with their hierarchy a degree of room for manoeuvre in order to decrease, or manage, the pressure, as the same chief superintendent stated:

When I took over the district, we were bottom. I had quite a lot of pressure to do something about it. One of the first things I said, ‘you have got to give a hundred days to get my head round’. I have never commanded a district before. It was one of the ways to keep them at bay. ‘Give me three months and I will tell what the priorities are, and I will have a plan.’ (P7)

Such a statement draws attention both to the potential rigidity of the performance regime but also to the leeway that may exist within it. The same officer also mentioned the ‘low hanging fruits’ and ‘easy wins’, easy-to-reach targets that, when exploited, enabled him to ‘buy time’ and water down short-termist pressures.

This is related to an approach that holds it necessary to go behind and beyond the simple figures to assess underlying trends. A chief inspector compared this longer-term approach with the short-termism of the past:

We have a performance meeting every week. We are getting pushed around, not ‘why have figures dropped?’, and not looking at it from a week to week basis… but looking at the rolling 12 months and the current picture, and comparing the two together so that we understand the trend around it… asking questions around ‘what is happening?’, ‘how much do we understand what the problem is?’ (M25)