Police forces abandon Government targets to bring back common sense

Surrey Police is leading what is being dubbed a 'red-tape rebellion' against the Home Office targets and what it claims are stifling levels of form-filling and bureaucracy.

Staffordshire, Leicestershire and the West Midlands have all also signed up to the revolt against the performance measures.

Their police chiefs have declared they will give back power to the bobby on the beat so that he has discretion on whether to treat minor offences as crimes or not.

On the beat: The police may no longer have to meet crime targets under pledge

Under the Government performance measures, officers are obliged to record even playground fights as criminal offences.

But Mark Rowley, acting chief constable of Surrey - which was joint top of the police performance tables last year - said officers should be encouraged to use their initiative rather than pursue everyday incidents as though they were serious crimes.

He told the Times: 'Quite simply, local people's safety, confidence in police and their satisfaction when they call us for help are more important than misleading targets.'

The stance would inevitably mean the force falling from the top of the league tables because they would not be issuing as many penalty notices and cautions, he added.

But he said: 'Do we really want every teenager who does something stupid to get a criminal record? We know we are going back on the direction the Police Service has been going in for many years but we are restoring common sense and direction.

'This is not about going soft on crime; it's about giving our officers direction.

'When a minor incident is the tip of the iceberg, then it will be dealt with through the full weight of the law.

'But in many situations, the right response might be to tell people who have got out of the bed on the wrong side to calm down or to grow up and behave themselves.'

All four forces have undertaken to cut the levels of bureaucracy and reduce the importance of targets in response to growing public disquiet.

The pledge came in the wake of a damning report on the police target culture which found that large numbers of the middle classes fear officers will accuse them of manufactured crimes in order to meet their quotas.

As the Daily Mail reported yesterday, the document from the Civitas think-tank said police have been unjustly criminalising young people, neglecting real crime and acting with increasing rudeness towards the public.

Chief Constable of Staffordshire Police, Chris Sims, said he was alarmed at the gap between his force's high ranking in performance leagues tables and the public's dissatisfaction with how policing was working on the ground.

'We had reached the point in policing where targets had become an end in themselves,' he told The Times.

'Yes, performance is important but the pendulum has swung a bit too far and we became obsessed with numbers rather than delivering good policing.

'The only league table that really counts is what the people in my area think of their police force.'

Some senior officers have been distancing themselves from the target system since February, when a report by Sir Ronnie Flanagan into the state of policing said that officers had become 'risk averse'.

Sir Ronnie's report claimed that a fifth of officers' time was taken up with form-filling, and that targets were having a harmful effect on policing.