Chapter 8. Narrative:
The culture of London policing was transformed during the 1990s as the benefits of computerisation percolated through every aspect of the Met Police Service. After four decades of rising crime, the crime rate slowed down and then started to fall. Computerisation cut crime? Not on its own, but crime was falling across other western economies, so it’s an obvious candidate to explain a common trend across many different countries. Traditional police management grappled wih new ideas coming at it from the frontline - with mixed results.
At Brixton, I was called to a meeting about telephone answering rates, another statistic for my role at the Divisional Intelligence and Information Unit. Forty staff from South London stations were there to hear the project team outline the new telephone system. The wonderful attributes of the new phones were explained in exhaustive detail and I admit that my mind wandered off for a bit. Eventually, the Commander (Operations) signalled that the meeting was coming to an end, everyone had had quite enough of this dully presented dull topic. As he closed his folder and was putting away his pen, a few of the audience stood and started to head for the door. I realised that no decision, or even discussion, had taken place about which phones would be monitored and what a reasonable answering time might be. We were about to break up without any useful statistics being agreed. This was only point of having the meeting, and main point of the new telephone system.
I raised my hand, like Oliver Twist, “Excuse me, sir”, I quavered. The Commander was fully five ranks above my humble position in the organisation. The whole room froze, mid-flight, “Yes”, he said, jacket open, pen poised for insertion into his pocket. I explained the reason for my temerity. For a long moment, I was the least popular person in the room. Then he, and others, realised that an even worse prospect beckoned than an extension to the meeting. A second meeting would have to be held. He reopened his folder and took out his pen.
Telephone answer rates were to be monitored. Quite quickly, it transpired, the need to wait forever for the phone to be answered would become a thing of the past. Joking aside, this new specific “performance management” made a big difference to how the police were perceived; we were to be much more accessible to the public and much more efficient internally.
How senior management works
After five years on the front line I was sent to an office. Neither a punishment nor a reward, simply an experience encouraged for officers identified for Accelerated Promotion (see previous post). I arrived at the Divisional Intelligence and Information Unit. What do they do here, I wondered to myself as I met my three colleagues: a fellow Sergeant and two clerical support staff? Well children, the clue as to what they did in the “DIIU” must lie in the title, but as intelligence-led policing had yet to be invented, the answer was to provide information. Or more precisely, numbers. One clerk spent pretty much all her time inputting weekly and monthly data about reported crime from paper records onto the TOPSY computer. This was sent to HQ, weekly and monthly, obviously. Separating the weekly and monthly totals was actually hugely time consuming, as, obviously, months have different lengths during the year, and month-ends seldom coincide with week-ends. This was compounded by the need to calculate clear-up rates , all done by hand, checked and reconciled. Each type of crime was individually calculated and each group of crime types as well. There were four crime groups of broadly equal frequency. We knew the size because the original paper reports of A3 size were stored in the CID office in four large blue binders marked on the cover: Major, Burglary, Vehicle and Beat. ‘Beat’ was everything not in the other books and equated to minor crimes dealt with by ‘home-beat’ officers, meaning officers permanently assigned to a small geographical area known as a ‘beat’, which they could call home. It was a bit of a nightmare and every figure was calculated both weekly and monthly.
It was not really clear to me what was done with the two separate timelines of information so I asked permission from the Chief Inspector to go and find out. He was curious to know too, it’s fair to say. A few days later, at HQ, I spent a while talking to two HQ clerks. One spent all her time producing charts, graphs and reports on all the various types and groups of crime on a weekly basis. The other did exactly the same, only monthly. These were discussed and analysed by police senior managers across south London, sometimes weekly and, presumably, sometimes monthly.
In my innocence, I asked if this was really necessary to do this both weekly and monthly. The two ladies had their doubts about this, but this was the way it had been done for as long as they could remember, so it was not really a question for them to address. HQ, by the way, covered ten divisions so about twelve people were engaged in this duplication; if it was just done either weekly or monthly then six staff could be freed up to do something more productive. Indeed, as it was probably a Met-wide process, many more staff all over the capital could be freed up.
I went back to Brixton filled with enthusiasm for the art of management, there was a feather in the cap for the person who came up with this labour-saving suggestion, I was sure. On a technical point, we now call this stuff “efficiency-saving”, but generally these days it is just a euphemism for cuts, whether they result in efficiency is neither here nor there. This, however, was the real deal. My Chief Inspector felt that this would be a good introduction for me to find out how police senior management worked. He was absolutely right about this, though perhaps not in quite the way he intended.
So, at his behest I duly typed, one finger at a time, a report for him to minute. With his hand-written support, this winged its way from his office to the Superintendent and then to the Chief Superintendent, each of whom had individual offices next to each other, along the Corridor of Power. It then went by internal mail to the Staff Officer at HQ and finally to Commander (Crime) himself. Several days later my file came back. I read through all the supportive minutes until I reached that of the Commander. I was disappointed to read that changing the system would make historical analysis across previous years terribly difficult and for that reason it could not be taken forward. Ah, well. Nobody died. Worse things happen at sea, I thought.
Four weeks later routine instructions were circulated from HQ to all the DIIUs. A review had been conducted by Commander (Crime) and it had been decided that henceforth crime statistics were only to be collated weekly. Significant time savings were to be achieved by this decision to junk the monthly stats across South London, the omniscient Commander had wisely decided. There was no clue as to what had prompted the Commander’s review. This was my first lesson about how senior management works, it was to be followed by many more.
The annual appraisal system
My time at Brixton was drawing to a close. My last annual appraisal would be done by the same ex-miltary Chief Inspector who had solved the problem of locking himself out of his office, by opening the door from the inside. This was preceded by him climbing around the outside of the building at second-floor level and getting in through his office window. In full uniform, shiny shoes and all.
My annual appraisal form would review my personal and professional development in a number of different categories listed down the left-hand side of the grid. A mark towards the left indicated ‘bad’ and a mark towards the right indicated ‘good’. I could dress this up in modern management speak and say that ‘bad’ showed a ‘need for development or training’, but this was the early 1990s and police appraisals were direct and filled with personal opinion, justification was neither demanded nor expected. A major innovation, two or three years before, had been to alter the marking grid from five columns to six, widening the choice of possible grades. This had created considerable stress among supervisors, as you can imagine. Or can you?
Dear reader, you are probably a reasonable person who thinks that a whole year of an employee’s professional life demands some reflection and consideration. You may be imagining that the increased range of possible grades had added to the hours taken sweating over each Annual Appraisal. The truth is rather simpler. The change from five columns to six meant that it was no longer possible to put all the ticks down the middle; this had been the routine practice since the form had been created. No justification or real thought was required. Since the change, supervisors had to choose between ‘good’ or ‘bad’. This implicitly meant justification, which meant writing, and inevitably, thought. In many cases this started with trying to remember anything at all about the person to be assessed.
I was relieved to see that my form that year had ticks on the right-hand side. The text at the bottom allowed supervisors to summarise their assessment. Now everybody knows that all assessments of other people tell you more about the assessor than the person being assessed, but even I could see that this was an extreme example. I had hoped that my efforts to create ground-breaking performance measures or significant efficiency savings would get a mention. A more tangible development area had been identified.
“Tristram should pay more attention to polishing his shoes”.
New York, New York
Computerisation enabled a growing confidence among police managers that they could lead better by using the newly available information. They started to realise that they could direct staff to do specific activities and get back measurable results. It is important to realise what a big change this was. In the 1980s and before it had been extremely difficult for senior police managers to know what their staff were doing. The Brixton example in last week’s post is a good illustration; the senior managers were not surprised by the management information, they knew, as any good manager would have done, that things were awry. What they lacked was information about the scale of the issue and tangible evidence to support any management action. What was true for divisional management was even more true for the high command of the Met, an organisation with over 50,000 staff in well over 300 locations operating on a 24/7 basis.
The computerisation of internal management data was a major contribution to the ability of the Met to tackle crime. This was aided by middle-managers who were well paid and educated and a work-force that was also well-paid, loyal and vocational. It was a confident organisation able and willing to try new approaches. The 1990s was an experimental period for the Met. This was partly driven by “desperate times calling for desperate measures”. The crime rate had risen every year since the 1950s and it kept rising every year; although there was a sense that “Nothing works” there was also a willingness to try anything, just in case it did. Management information in the police was new and exciting and it was handled intelligently by sensible people, it existed to help operational performance and had not yet become a substitute for it. It took over ten, perhaps a dozen years for the regime to become sclerotic, self-fulfilling and lacking purpose.
Into this fertile ground in the mid-1990s came an idea from ‘across the pond’. The criminal justice systems of the UK and US are superficially similar. The veneer does not survive any close examination and the more one looks at the detail the more foreign, and in some cases shocking, the American system appears to English police professionals. To put it bluntly some common American police practices would be illegal in England. The differences are so great that a separate book is needed, but for now I just want to describe one remarkable and positive innovation that did make it across the pond.
New York and London are often compared, being coastal, cosmopolitan and of similar size. New York was in the police news in the mid-nineties because of its Commissioner, Bill Bratton, who had massively reduced crime there. Now comparing crime rates internationally is fraught with difficulties as anyone who has studied this topic can tell you, but as my boss of the day put it, the murder rate is a good comparator because you “can’t hide the bodies”. My boss was in position to know as he had been to take a look at one of the famous “Compstat” meetings in New York. He described how, on a monthly basis, Precinct Commanders were brought to a large hall and one of them was selected at random to be quizzed by Bratton about what they knew about their own Precinct. Bratton’s questions were based on computerised information collated centrally in real-time. It was a detailed, brutal and public examination and it was material to that Commander’s future job prospects. Commanders could not only be not promoted, but also demoted. My boss was keen to try it out on the unsuspecting Borough Commanders of South-East London.
So, it was that one autumn day in 1996 that I took the minutes of the first “CompStat” meeting in England. Up on the fifth floor of a modern office block, the mild autumn sun streamed through the windows. It was a gentle English affair compared to, what I imagined, was a brash New York spectacle, but it certainly concentrated some minds. My boss coined the term “intrusive supervision” to describe what he wanted his senior officers to achieve. The questions weren’t generalist ones about the crime rate, they were focused on specific crimes, incidents or crimes of note. This was possible only because of computerisation, HQ had suddenly become much closer to the frontline. My boss could browse specific events that had happened in south-east London from his desktop computer and then ask about them at the CompStat meetings. It required Borough Commanders to get specific briefings from their subordinates and the ripple of supervision went through the organisation from top to bottom. At the same time, it sent a clear message that the top of the organisation cared about and valued what the frontline were doing. Performance management of policing in a modern sense had arrived in England. In a year or two this style of management meeting had spread across the capital and across England. The use of management information to actually drive future performance was a logical step to its collection.
It would be a mistake to imagine that the English were completely in awe of the American Way. We were happy to take on good ideas from anywhere, it did not mean that we were adopting the Bratton philosophy as wholesale gospel. As my boss drily observed to me, on our way into that first London CompStat:
“Bratton has managed to massively reduce the murder rate in New York …. to only three times that of London”.
Fifteen years later Prime Minister David Cameron was thinking of bringing Bratton and his ideas to the Met Police as a potential Met Commissioner. Given that Bratton’s excellent big idea had been adopted, adapted and promulgated across English policing so long before, it seemed surprising to me that this fact did not crop up in the very public conversations at the time. I have never heard this fact mentioned in public before, perhaps the organisation forgot that they had paid for two Met officers to go to New York for a fact-finding mission and that their visit had transformed English policing as a result.
The CompStat meetings changed crime management, but computerisation was transforming every operational aspect of policing. Everything was changing all at once, looking back it was fairly seamless, but at the time it felt like chaos.
Narrative. Thanks for reading this far. If you have enjoyed these chapters I would like to appeal for your help. I had thought that publishing this book fortnightly might be easy for the reader and allow me to link past solutions to the current crisis in British criminal justice. I am, however, finding it gets in the way of commenting on the present crisis more directly.
As the book is already written but not published, I wondered if any reader would like to have the whole draft manuscript for free, in return for giving me detailed feedback. Then I can publish a better book and devote this site to direct observations on current policing issues. If you would like to help, please contact me on: tristram.hicks@icloud.com or by DM on here or LinkedIn.
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