Giving the Police Their Job Back.

Economy Some policemen
ViewsSeptember 26th, 2012

I have had the privilege to be working with the Police Force recently.  The Police Force is full of people keen to keep you and I safer, and working extremely hard to make this a reality.  However, they often work in a system that makes this very hard for them to do.  The same logics that cause difficulty in other public sector organisations exist in the Police Force.

It is widely publicised that unnecessary calls are received by emergency services.  However, the logic found in many organisations is to treat those receiving the calls as a different system to those to whom the calls are passed – in this case the police officers.

Those answering the phones may find themselves encouraged by the system to deal quickly with the call.  As such, they do not have the time to assess the appropriateness of sending an officer, and, therefore, just pass the call on for an officer to attend.  Standard procedures on how to deal with calls, although put in place with the best of intentions, contribute to this by de-skilling those answering the phone.  Again, this compounds the problem so officers are sent to unnecessary calls (for example, lots of people phone the police thinking something is a criminal matter, when it is actually a civil matter and the police are unable to do anything).  Interestingly, officers attending incidents often hear “I only wanted a crime number, I didn’t want you to call round”.  All this leads to less time for officers to track, solve and prevent crimes.

One Police Force has been experimenting by giving the person answering the phone the time to ask better questions.  The problem the force is trying to solve, is to increase the ability of the system to deal with issues at the first point of contact.  In addition to being given more time, sitting next to an experienced officer helps the call handlers learn better questions to ask – to assess if the matter is for the police, to start the investigation, and to gather the best information to pass to officers attending the scene.  Additionally, the call handler is given just one geographic area upon which to focus, whereas previously they had to cover one quarter of Wales.

The approach is overwhelmingly welcomed by officers, who report having more time to focus on crimes in the area, now they are not being sent to inappropriate incidents.  Additionally, the call handler and the officers share an understanding of the geography, making for much better decisions, and use of local intelligence.

With the additional time the officers are able to deal with far more incidents immediately (reducing costly extra appointments) and now have the time to focus on the prolific offenders and repeat problems in the local community – the issues, as citizens, we would rather they are able to tackle.

With this increased capacity, the officers are also being encouraged to break out of the standardised procedures and use creativity and ingenuity to tackle problems.  For example, every day, many young people are reported as missing from home.  The overwhelming majority of these are young people in the care of the local authority and are well known to the police and are predictably and frequently going missing from care homes.  Enormous resource is used in finding these young people and returning them to the care home.  By working with the care homes themselves to understand why the young people were leaving the home, rather than just responding, one force was able to reduce the number of missing from home incidents by 75%.  The positive impact on safety for young people, in addition to available capacity for the police, is enormous.

By challenging their assumptions and understanding the whole system, rather than treating the call handlers as a separate system from the officers, the Police Force is making dramatic improvements.

Spending the time understanding the entire system is essential for leaders – the worst that can happen is that you learn something extremely useful!

Change thinking.  Change Lives.

Simon Pickthall worked in the public sector in Wales for many years before forming Vanguard Consulting Wales.  He has been fortunate to have worked with many leaders in Wales to help them understand their organizations from a Systems Thinking perspective –  and improve them as a consequence.  Simon was privileged enough to work on the Munro Review of Child Protection, and is committed to helping the public, private and third sectors deliver social justice.  [email protected]

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