One, Two, Three, What Are We Still Counting for? Police Performance Regimes, Public Perceptions of Service Delivery and the Failure of Quantitative Measurement

Abstract

Timothy Shilston is Chief Superintendent of Northumbria Police and Visiting Professor in the Department of Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, University of New York. In this article he retraces recent developments in the design of police performance regimes in England and Wales and describes the growing importance of public perceptions of service delivery in such regimes. Whilst ‘traditional’ performance measures, such as crime rates, have increasingly been supplemented by attempts to capture public perceptions of the quality of service delivery, he argues that there has been a failure by practitioners and policy makers to revisit or challenge the historical dominance of quantitative methodology. Assumptions regarding the efficacy of quantitative measurement have simply been extended to assessments of public perceptions. Generalized surveys of public opinion, the overwhelmingly favoured method, cannot capture the dynamics of police/public interactions at the micro level, and fail to produce organizational or individual learning of any future worth. The author argues that qualitative approaches are more likely to yield insights of operational utility and urges further exploration.