David Blunkett has not been getting on too well with his chief constables. Last autumn, for example, the Home Secretary unveiled his brand new National Policing Plan, which is to guide the 43 constabularies of England and Wales in all their efforts to deal with crime and disorder.
The National Policing Plan runs to fifty six pages and requires all forty three police forces in England and Wales to produce three-year plans which incorporate ten Public Service Agreements with seventeen key performance indicators; four strategic priorities with ten core actions, seventeen local actions and nineteen more key peformance indicators; six performance domains with twenty one Best Value Performance Indicators; and three reform-priority areas with fifty one local planning points.
There were eighteen children in a classroom. All of them had three things in common: they were all studying Macbeth for GCSE English; they had all turned in essays to be assessed as part of their GCSE; and not one of them had written a single word of any of the essays, because their teacher (with a little help from her husband) had spent the weekend writing the whole lot for them.
The crime game has nothing to do with policing in the way in which the public normally understand it. It has little to do with reality at all. It is a devious means of pretending to win the war against crime, which happens to be fatally flawed by the fact that it allows criminals to escape unpunished and the victims of crime to be cheated of justice.
