Police forces ready for action on slashed budgets

Simon Jenkins constructs a straw man to knock down on police funding ( Ignore this howl of protest – the police are ripe for cuts , 21 July). Compared to the arts lobby and many other pressure groups, policing has accepted the economic reality and forces are getting on quietly with preparing for harsher economic times but also seeing that adversity may well produce opportunities. The Police Service was told by various commentators and thinktanks that it needed league tables, a target culture and performance bonuses, all of which produced a managerialist culture which has created a gap between the police and the public, and sucked many staff into feeding the audit and performance machine and reacting to recommendations from reports and public inquiries. We have rightly seen our mission grow into protecting more and more vulnerable people involved in domestic abuse, mental illness and social breakdown. Our work is far more complex than just bobbies on the beat, and much is invisible to the public, but we have seen a political obsession with measuring the effectiveness of policing by the number of police officers, not on what the total workforce is achieving. While all this has been going on, we have introduced neighbourhood policing teams across the country, largely protected the UK against an international terrorist threat and made significant inroads into organised crime. The Police Service will get through this because we have a workforce which has a particular vocational commitment to the public service, and is alongside people in some of the worst moments of their lives. We have a belief in the minimum use of force, as was shown in the Raoul Moat case. Back in 1829 Sir Robert Peel laid down that the measure of police effectiveness should be the absence of crime and disorder, not the evidence of police activity. Economic adversity may allow us to return to that principle. Peter Fahy Chief constable, Greater Manchester police • Her Majesty's inspector of constabulary's report on police resources may cause undue concern as suggesting some new situation of inadequate policing. The fact that it requires 10 officers to be employed in order to have one officer "on the beat" at any given time, however, is nothing new. As the HMIC explains in his report, this is explained by "the organisation of resources (workforce allocated to functions other than response and neighbourhood, for example, investigation and intelligence); shift systems to meet 24/7 needs; and the inevitable attrition through annual leave, sickness absence, restricted duties, court attendance and training arrangements". This does not imply that coverage "on the beat" is inadequate, or that it has deteriorated in recent years. In fact, with the introduction of police community support officers, police "presence" on the streets has probably increased. Professor Philip Stenning Keele University