Policing is under pressure and scrutiny. Personnel sign up to make a difference but too often report going home unable to feel that they have; not because they haven’t been busy but rather the working conditions and systems are out of date and out of touch (Baker and Richardson, 2023).
Let’s just test some of the current presumptions. Performance management is not what is should be; it’s activity counting. Workload analysis counts what’s allocated, not what gets actioned. Understanding demand counts externally reported problems and is unaware that internal red tape is stealing most of the time. Productivity is not outcome productivity, it’s simply about the efficiency of busy-ness. In the interests of public policing someone has to declare quantity is not quality and call out the illusion that policing systems are driving improved performance. When in reality what is happening is managed decline.
Faulty Dashboard
Policing is keen to use metrics and systems but too often these end up being problems rather than solutions. Counting the number of jobs is a simple measure but can so easily get lost in real-world complexity and worse still can encourage perverse practice to chase quantity over quality.
Managerialism seems to understand machines more than people so in such terms imagine a car dashboard with a speedo and nothing else. Going faster without a rev counter can mean you get a spurt on for now but a burned out engine around the corner. Without a sat nav, going faster without a direction in no way resembles effectiveness. You end up nowhere with a broken car.
The price of busy-ness
Being busy without purpose is the most expensive thing you can do because the precious commodity of time can be wasted. Using every effort to relentlessly pursue quality means the investment return makes the job a little better and productive each iteration.
The proverb More haste, Less speed tells us being busy as the end goal often makes things more expensive in the long run, whilst pursuing solution oriented quality is a gift that keep giving because you get a return on investment rather than just repeating costs.
The cost of overloading
Under Road Traffic legislation, overloading means your dream of more profit evaporates when the lorry tips over and you get a fine. Similarly, pilling more on workers’ backs to the point they simply cannot pursue quality but rather just try to survive by minimising mistakes results in stress, burnout and sometimes total attrition.
Rather than a productive workforce you can end up with a toxic one that those inside, and outside, lose faith and hope in. It’s a very costly choice and in open market business means the whole thing will probably go under. Policing may be state funded but fundamental business principles still apply, even if they don’t get followed enough.
Be businesslike, not just busy
Professor W. Edwards Deming was an engineer who worked at Columbia’s Business School. He thought about things differently to his predecessor, Frederick Winslow Taylor, who advocated the efficiency of cogs in wheels. Deming instead advocated the pursuit of effectiveness through quality.
Florina (2017) comments that there is a choice over the low hanging, and ripe, fruit; in that chasing quick-win metrics of inputs and outputs can bear little relation to quality outcome results. In the policing contexts of incident attendance and crime clear up rates, might that explain why the service appears to be running at 110% whilst producing less than 10%?
Quality over quantity
The headless chicken approach to business is ill advised. No matter how fast the chicken runs. When Deming advocated his business principles he argued the workplace must be in control of systems, not the other way around in order to be purposeful about consistently achieving quality.
Workloads, according to Deming (1986), are systemic and should not be a reason to blame workers. The system should be designed for quality, not just a numbers game. To achieve this, the role of leadership is to remove system constraints, conflicting priorities, unreasonable timelines and poor tools.
Listening to improve
Deming noted that overloaded staff lose much ability to take pride in their work and trying to ‘press the pedal to the metal’ harder will achieve nothing other than burn out: if something needs changing it is the faulty system.
Deming is clear that it is the job of leaders to run systems otherwise the systems run the so-called leaders. To achieve that he advocated a clear understanding of the day-to-day realities of workers because the ones doing the job know best.
Don’t shoot the messenger
By listening in to those doing the job the time wasting, the red tape and the often ridiculous internal cul de sacs of process are all easily identifiable. Leaders should change the system to pursue quality rather than blame the worker for telling the truth about opportunities for improvement.
Poor management can instill fear leading to over‑reporting productivity and under‑reporting overload; when people feel safe, they are honest about workloads and that can release system improvements (Edmondson, 2018). Deming condemned managers policing workers but praised leaders for supporting them.
So, we all agree policing is busy and under scrutiny. But we’ve not got a workload strategy, we’ve just got a load of work and most of it is sucking the life out of policing. According to Deming the solution to this is in pursuing quality, not chasing numbers. We’ve tried chasing numbers and the numbers just get worse. Bear in mind quantity is often about size but quality is about outcomes: so bigger size forces might not translate into better quality all on its own. Time to listen to the worker and pursue quality for a change?
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