Measure for Measure: New Public Management and Policing

Measure for Measure: Tom Peters and Goodhart’s Law

One of Herbert Simon’s students at Stanford Business School was a Vietnam Vet called Tom Peters. While completing his PhD, Peters joined McKinsey and Company as a management consultant where in 1982 he wrote a book exploring the art and science of management. Unusually for business books of that time, he used the evidence from several successful companies for case studies. The book was called In Search of Excellence and was a sensation, becoming the best selling business book of all time. Its influence on New Public Management cannot be over emphasised.

To get a flavour of the doctrine Peters was promoting, it is useful to re-read a 1986 column from his website, written after he had left McKinsey to found his own consulting company. In it, Peters wrote as a true disciple of Simon,

“I think the soundest management advice I’ve heard is the old saw; ‘What gets measured gets done.’ My own organization applies this dictum rigorously. … We quantify wherever possible. … We also urge every organizational unit in every function to develop key quality measures. Progress should be posted on charts in every work space, and a quantitative goal report should be the first item of business at every staff meeting, regardless of topic.”

Reaching these goals is to be rewarded:

“There should be at least ten celebratory acts each month, no matter how small – for example, coffee and danish for a project team that completed its work on schedule.”

and he ends with this exhortation to his manager readers:

“Why don’t you plan to quantify ten key areas in the next 30 days?  Even the process of quantification can be quantified.

Peters is performing a logical slight-of-hand here.  He moves from the unarguable common-sense use of measurements as diagnostic tool to shine a light on what is going on, to the more questionable use of measurement for target setting, complete with a reward system for hitting the target (and implied punishment for failing to do so).

He uses his enthusiasm to mask this lack of logic.  (And perhaps his enthusiasm allowed him to be somewhat cavalier with the evidence he was using: nearly twenty years after the publication of In Search of Excellence, when Tom Peters had become a revered management guru beyond all criticism, he was interviewed by the magazine Fast Company. In the interview Peters says, “For what it’s worth, okay, I confess: We faked the data. … You can always worry about proving the facts later.” )[1] *

Now when Archie Cochrane was measuring the relative health of the patients under his care on differing diets, it was purely for diagnostic purposes, to show up any regularities that would indicate how effective treatments worked under differing circumstances. When, later in his career he worked with miners in south Wales, he used statistical measurements to diagnose different causes of pulmonary diseases. He would never have confused the collection of data with the setting of targets. Evidence based medicine was used purely as a diagnostic tool.

Why is this point worth labouring?

In 1975,  in an essay on the problems of monetary management, the British economist Charles Goodhart wrote that,

“Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes”[2]

Now known as Goodhart's law, this has been translated into plain English as:

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

In other words, when a measurement is used as a target rather than as a diagnostic tool, sooner or later it will become so untrustworthy as to stop being useful as a measure.

But Goodhart's law does not fully help us see the absurdity of using a measure as a target.


Football gives us a wonderful example. It used to be a simple spectator sport with stars and character whom the spectators got to know over time. But in the modern game, mostly watched on television,  dedicated HD cameras and complex tracking systems* allow most aspects of a Premier League soccer player's performance during a game to be measured and recorded.

For example, we know that during the 2015-2016 season, Kevin de Bruyne of Manchester City averaged 0.28 goals per match, made an average of 45.08 passes per match and made 28 tackles of which 84% were successful.  However in the 2018-2019 season, he averaged only 0.11 goals per match, made an average of 38.16 passes per match and made 22 tackles of which 68% were successful.   [3]

You can see that for Mr De Bruyne, his manager or his agent these statistics could be useful as measures. But would it not be absurd to use them as targets? Can you imagine Pep Guardiola his manger saying at the start of a new season, "Kevin. welcome back. Now, for the new season, we'd like you to raise the number of successful tackles you average per game from 68%b to 72%, or else we'll fine you.  And we'll pay you a bonus if you pass more than 45 balls per match.” 

When we look at the use of targets in the management of policing in the UK., it becomes blindingly clear how destructive and how absurd these policies are

James Goodhart and Tom Peters

Centralizing accountability in the Police force

The badge of  Chief Constable

Until 1964 in England and Wales, it was local government who monitored the police in each borough. For all the system’s many faults and opportunities for cronyism, at least there was a sense that policing was done by local consent. But corruption scandals involving the Brighton and Nottingham watch committees in the late 1950s prompted the setting up of a Royal commission on the Police and, in 1964, the passing of the Police 1964 Act.

This got rid of the locally elected watch committees and reduced the number of autonomous police forces from 158 to just 49, creating a hierarchy that centralised accountability, taking it away from local, public scrutiny. This

“…moved the system of British police organization further from institutional accountability to the public, and towards a more centralized system…and this continued to be a source of on-going controversy.” [4]  

According to the Scarman enquiry, the Brixton riots were a direct result of police acting without any consultation with the community or the home-beat officers. Scarman recommended changes in training and law enforcement to take local contexts into account. However the Home Office did very little in this direction. As Barry Loveday writes, 

“In place of major reform, police services were instead made subject to an increasing range of performance measures.” [5] 

Rather than make policing more context aware, the Home Office chose to centralise control and devolve responsibility. When in 2001 David Blunket, Blair’s Home Secretary, said that before crime could be tackled effectively, it needed to be measured, it sounded so reasonable. But as the British Medical Association said, referring to evidence-based medicine, so much depends on what is being measured by whom and how that data will be used.

In the case of crime, the Home Office decided that the ‘what’ was to be crime level reduction and detection rates, and the ‘by whom’ was to be the police themselves. The Home Office would then use measurements to create the ‘performance indicators’ – targets.

The catastrophes in the NHS showed how dangerous it can be to turn measurements into targets. But where the NHS showed how it is possible to hit the targets and still deliver abysmal – even lethal – levels of service, the Police showed how easy it was for them to hit and even exceed targets by manipulating the figures to say whatever they wanted them to say.

The Police were – and still are – under considerable pressure to hit the targets set. Not just for Chief Constables, but all the way down the ranks, where every officer’s career, promotion prospects, and sometimes job security, depended and still depends on how successful they are at reducing the number of crimes recorded and increasing the detection rates. But since the recording of this data is left to the police themselves, and as the pressure to meet the targets increases, it is hardly surprising that so many cases have emerged of officers from the top down recording the evidence in such a way that the figures show what the politicians want to see. So prevalent has this become over the last twenty years, that the practice has acquired its own name – ‘Gaming’. But this ‘gaming’ is not fun and it is certainly not harmless. If we look more closely at how gaming takes place, we will see the extent and degree of destruction it causes.

Tampering with recorded crime levels: Cuffing

The detection rate is calculated as a percentage of recorded crimes. This means that if, for example, a police force records 1,000 burglaries and solves 500 of them, their detection rate is 50%. If the following year they solve the same number, but have only recorded 900 burglaries, the detection rate goes up to 55%.

So if a police force or department is worried about hitting its detection rate targets, it is very tempting to increase the ratio by simply reducing the number of crimes they record. How would they do this? The process is called cuffing, a term borrowed from conjurors hiding cards up their sleeve.

A trivial example of ‘cuffing’ was reported by the Daily Mail, citing a memo from a police inspector in Norwich, which announced that one of the targets for 2008 was to “Keep recorded crime down to 1,500” and that to achieve this, “

Rank-and-file officers in the Norfolk force have been told that incidents such as car vandalism should not be classed as an offence when there is ‘no idea how it happened’ ” [6]

But cuffing can involve far more serious crimes. If the police have reasonable grounds for disbelieving a woman who says she has been raped, they will not record it as a crime. It is ‘no crimed’

Now it is a fact that investigating a rape allegation can be time consuming. From 2006 to 2011 recorded crime in Kent fell steadily, and theKent Constabulary won plaudits for their achievement. On the face of it, they were doing better than many other forces.

In 2011 police forces in Gloucestershire, Humberside, and Devon and Cornwall ‘no crimed’ just 2%, 5% and 10% respectively of reported rapes. It turns out that in the same year in Kent, the police decided that as many as 30% of reported rapes were not crimes, and did not need investigating.

Is it really likely that women in Kent are fifteen times more likely to lie about being raped than women in Gloucestershire? If it is not, then we must accept that a great many victims of rape and their families were dreadfully let down by the police in Kent. The cost to society of rapists being allowed to go free in the name of hitting targets is appalling – as even the police admit. A 1998 Audit Report by Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary on the West Midlands Police said that

“The failure to record crimes prevents offences being investigated and offenders brought to justice. In a number of cases this has allowed criminals free rein to commit serious crimes, including murder”. [7

When Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary cracked down on ‘cuffing’ in the West Midlands in 1998/9, they found that some 16% of crimes were being recorded in unofficial crime registers, data that was not taken into account in official statistics. The following year, with ‘cuffing’ discouraged, the number of recorded crimes increased by 16%. [8]

False detection: TIC

Cuffing is not the only way the crime statistics are ‘gamed’ to make a police force’s performance look better. There is an administrative procedure whereby the police can invite an offender to admit to additional offences and to ask for them to be ‘Taken Into Consideration’. This process is called a TIC. The TIC was introduced for two good reasons: it reduces the bureaucratic burden on the courts, and it allows a prisoner to make a fresh start after serving the sentence for the original crime, without fear of arrest for a past offences.

But let us imagine a case where a police force has a backlog of unsolved crimes and a detection rate that is falling below the targets set. They have an offender on a quite serious charge, who would like it to be changed to a lesser one. In such a situation, it is not unknown for the police and the offender to come to an unofficial agreement: if the offender admits to having committed a number of previously unsolved crimes, the police will reduce the charge. Sometimes, the offender is not so easily persuaded. Over the last few years evidence has emerged of police offering drink, drugs or sex in return for these fictional confessions, including in Cleveland in 2002, offering drugs and alcohol; the West Midlands Police in 2003 offering drugs; the Greater Manchester Police, Stockport in 2004 offering access to relatives; the Bedfordshire Police in 2006 offering access to sexual encounters; in Merseyside in 2007 access to alcohol, and the same in South Wales in 2012. [9]

It is hard to say how many TICs are the result of corrupt practices, but when in 1995, for example, the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police clamped down on one kind of TIC, detection rates for car crime and burglary fell by two thirds. [10]. It would be reasonable to infer that some two thirds of some crimes were ‘solved’ thanks to TICs .

This was still going on nearly 20 years later: in November 2012 five officers from an offender management unit in Kent were arrested following allegations by another officer about the abuse of TIC procedures.

It also seems that there are no incentives to stop : in June 2013 Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary published the results of its investigation into TIC procedures in Kent, but said that an internal investigation carried out by the force failed to uncover any criminal offences.

Crime has become what is reported as crime. Falsifying the reports was not reported, ergo it was not a crime, and the criminals were free to continue.

 Neglect of duty: Skewing

To the extent that the Police are charged with reducing crime, we might have expected them to take action. But the inducements to take action selectively are great. In 1999 Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary reported that,

“There was evidence in one force that a divisional commander refused to allow his detectives to put more than minimal resources into a serious sexual crime investigation, preferring instead they concentrate their efforts on less serious crime such as car theft. This occurred because whether they solved a rape or the theft of a car radio, the division would only be credited with one detection.” [11] 

When gang warfare and related drug and gun crime became a major problem in the West Midlands in 2012, police were deployed to areas with crimes that were easier to solve. For example, in Derbyshire in 2012,

“Tarique Gaffur, a former Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service, suggested that a strategy to respond to the threat of gangs by concentrating police resources on the deprived areas of the capital had not been implemented as ‘it would have taken officers away from the politically favoured policy of neighbourhood policing’.” [12]

The kind of policing that the politicians prefer is one issue; the callous refusal to act on the difference between major and minor crimes is another:

“A police force failed to investigate properly the violent robbery of a show jumper which led to her murder because its officers were busy inquiring into stolen chickens.” [13]

This was not a one-off: Kirk Reid, a south London chef raped and sexually assaulted more than 71 women over eight years. He had been identified as a suspect for a series of sex attacks in 2004 and crossed the police radar at least 12 times, but no one pursued inquiries into him. He went on to attack at least 20 women. As Patrick says, “The investigation into the way the Met dealt with the handling of the serial rapist Kirk Reid also indicated that other performance-related priorities had hampered the case.” [14] The Independent Police Complaints Commission report on the case contained testimony from senior members of the specialised sex crime investigative Sapphire unit in Southwark which described a department in crisis because management - who were concerned with hitting national targets - considered car crime a higher priority than rape and sex offences.

A delegate at the delegate at the 2007 Police Federation of England and Wales Annual Conference who was an operational officer in the Metropolitan police, told Dr Roger Patrick the retired Chief Inspector of the West Midlands Police,

“Every borough is playing the game; those that are not are seen as under-performing. Policing has completely lost its way. We only investigate crimes that matter in terms of performance data.”[15]

The catastrophic effects of the culture of New Public Management had been pointed out well before: In October 1993, the then Deputy Principal of the London Business School, Andrew Likierman wrote warning of potential problems. In 1994, the Oxford handbook of Criminology said that,

“Criminal statistics had to be analysed as the product not of a neutral fact-collecting process, but of a… process which is geared first and foremost to…police aims and needs.” [16] 

 In 1999 Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary’s reported on police integrity, describing various types of ‘gaming’ it had uncovered. In 2003, the Chief Constable of Thames Valley Police warned the Public Administration Select Committee that police gaming had become ‘administrative corruption’ .

Roger Patrick the retired Chief Inspector of the West Midlands Police, was asked in 2014 what the true level of crime is. His answer was that we simply do not know. He gave two reasons. The first is that

“The police data is being manipulated to such an extent that it amounts to little more than sophistry. [17] 

The second is that the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) only covers a limited range of offences such as burglary and vehicle crime and is reluctant to include such white collar crime as credit card and internet fraud.

When finally the Public Administration Select Committee published its report on crime statistics in April 2014, tellingly it had the title, Caught red-handed: Why we can’t rely on police recorded crime statistics. In it, they said,

“The attitudes and behaviours which lead to the misrecording of crime have become ingrained…leading to the subordination of data integrity to target-chasing.”[18]

and later

“The Home Office, which claims credit for abolishing national numerical targets, should make clear in its guidance to PCCs that they should not set performance targets based on police-recorded crime data as this tends to distort recording practices and to create perverse incentives to misrecord crime. The evidence for this is incontrovertible. In the meantime, we deprecate such target setting in the strongest possible terms. Police-recorded crime data should not be used as the basis for personal performance appraisal or for making decisions about remuneration or promotion. We regard such practice as a flawed leadership model, contrary to the policing Code of Ethics.” [19] .

But as happened over and over again, this advice is being ignored: In October 2014, Mark Simmons, Deputy Assistant Commissioner, Territorial Policing proudly told Boris Johnson the Mayor of London,

“At the start of the year we set Lambeth a 7% reduction in burglary as their staging post…. Merton, for example, had a 5% reduction target. For Richmond we set a 9% reduction target on burglary.” [20] 

Of course the Police have to be accountable and their performance assessed. But the introduction of New Public Management theory to the management of the Police has resulted in a situation where no accurate performance assessment is possible, where no one knows any longer how much crime is being committed, where criminals are bribed to confess to crimes they have not committed, where resources are deployed to solve easily detected minor offences at the expense of serious crimes, and where rapists and murderers are allowed to continue to rape and kill.

We have to ask, why it is that all this has been reported and acknowledged at the highest levels, and yet virtually nothing has been done, indeed is being done, to make change happen.

Again, it must be argued that this behaviour, flying in the face of all logic and evidence, ignoring the bigger picture, is absolutely consistent with what we expect of cults.

What is artificially stupid about this behaviour is measuring performance out of the broad context in which it occurs . I'll look at the significance of this in a later post.  Meanwhile, I am reminded of this old joke. 

One night my friend sees a drunkard on his knees under a streetlamp feeling the ground with his hands. “What are you doing?” asks my friend. “I ’ve dropped my car keys and I can’t find them.”  “Where did you drop them?” asks my friend. “Over there.” says the drunkard pointing away into the darkness.  “Well, why are you looking for them here?” “Because the light is better here.” 

[Go to next chapter   NPM and Education]

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* Peters would later deny that he said he had faked the data, although he admitted to approving the text of the interview in which the phrase appeared.

**  See The Technology Behind the World Cup's Advanced Analytics published by Vice magazine  in June 2014.  The technology has advanced significantly since then.  
Much of the information in this post is derived from A Tangled Web: Why you can’t believe crime statistics’ by Dr Rodger Patrick, formerly Chief Inspector of West Midlands Police and published by CIVITAS in December 2014. His PhD was originally going to be an assessment of the impact of Performance Management on police effectiveness. However, when it came apparent that the data was virtually meaningless because it had been so distorted by gaming-type practices, the focus of the research then shifted to the identification, categorization and measurement of ‘gaming’ practices and the implications for the governance and regulation of the police.



[1] Peters, Tom J “Tom Peters’s true confessions” in Fat Company at https://www.fastcompany.com/44077/tom-peterss-true-confessions November 30 2001 Accessed December 28 2019

[2] Goodhart, Charles “Problems of Monetary Management: The U.K. Experience” in “Inflation, Depression, and Economic Policy in the West.” Courakis, Anthony S. (ed) Barnes and Noble Books, Totowa NJ USA 1981

[3]   Football Association Premier League Ltd,  https://www.premierleague.com/players/4288/player/stats?co=-1&se=79   https://www.premierleague.com/   Accessed 12 February 2020

[4] Williams, C. A. (2007). Rotten Boroughs: the crisis of urban policing and the decline of miunicipal independence 1914-64. In J. Moore, & J. Smith (Eds.), Corruption in Urban Politics and Society, Britain 1780-1950.UK: Ashgate.

[5] Loveday, B. (2006). Policing performance: The Impact of Performance Measures and Targets on Police Forces in England and Wales. International Journal of Police Science & Management, 8(4), 282-293.

[6] Levy, Andrew. “How police plan to cut crime: They won't count vandalism.” 6 May 2008.Mail Online. 15 March 2015 <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-564109/How-police-plan-cut-crime-They-wont-count-vandalism.html>.

[7] (Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary 1998) (Patrick, A Tangled Web: Why you can’t believe crime statistics 2014)

[8] Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary. (1998). Audit Report on the West Midlands Police.West Midlands Police. HMIC

[9] Hansard. (2002, March 6). Publications and Records.Retrieved May 22, 2015 from http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200102/cmhansrd/vo020306/debtext/20306-32.htm

[10] Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary. (1997). Greater Manchester Police : 1997/98 primary inspection report. London: HMIC.

[11] Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary. (1999). Police integrity : England, Wales and Northern Ireland ; securing and maintaining public confidence.The Home Office Directorate.
[12] Leppard, D. (2011, August 14). “Met scrapped plan to swamp rioters” . The Sunday Times.

[13] Foggo, D. (2006, December 10). “Police too busy chasing chickens to stop murder”. The Sunday Times

[14] Patrick, R. (2012, June). Home Affairs Written evidence submitted by Dr Rodger Patrick [IPCC 03].Retrieved April 5, 2015 from www.parliament.uk: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmhaff/494/494vw03.htm

[15] Patrick, Roger. A Tangled Web: Why you can’t believe crime statistics. London: CIVITAS, 2014

[16] Maguire, M. “Crime Statistics, Patterns, and Trends: Changing Perceptions and their Implications.” in Maguire, M, R Morgan and R Reiner. The Oxford Handbook of Criminology. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1994.

[17] (Patrick, R  “Home Affairs Written evidence submitted by Dr Rodger Patrick [IPCC 03].” June 2012. www.parliament.uk. 5 April 2015 <http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmhaff/494/494vw03.htm>

[18] Public Administration Select Committee. “Caught red-handed: Why we can’t rely on police recorded crime statistics.” 09 April 2014. www.parlianament.uk. 15 April 2015 <http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/public-administration-select-committee/news/crime-stats-substantive/>

[19]   idem

[20] Mayor's Office for Policing And Crime (MOPAC) Challenge Quarterly Performance Review October 21 2014 at https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/14-10-21_mopac_challenge_-_performance_vwi_transcript_formatted_2.pdf accessed December 28 2019