Moving from punishment to learning will be a policing positive

A MOVE towards a learning culture, and away from punishment, ahead of changes to the way misconduct is resolved is positive for police officers, South Yorkshire Police Federation has said.

The new police performance system is anticipated to reduce the number of police officers going through misconduct cases by 80 per cent, and enable more issues to be resolved by managers, rather than professional standards departments.The Performance Requiring Improvement (PRI) system is due to come into force later this year.

Steve Kent, Federation Chairman, said: “This is positive news for us, because it gives managers more options to manage performance and discipline at the low level. The default position has always been that they tend to refer it straight up to PSD and that then tends to take it out of managers’ hands.

“For me, managers, in line with Home Office guidance, should be managing low level performance and discipline issues. So this is a good thing because it gives them the power to do things appropriately, and it will hopefully keep things out of the world of the Professional Standards and the Independent Office for Police Conduct.

“This will place the emphasis on learning. If people make genuine and honest mistakes, these new regulations give them the opportunity to learn from them rather than to be punished for them. So it has to be seen as a positive thing.”

Steve said misconduct issues were currently taking an “unacceptable” amount of time to resolve, and that the new system should ensure issues are resolved more quickly.

The complaints process has come under criticism for being unwieldy, time consuming and unnecessarily stressful for police officers and their families. More than 70 per cent of misconduct cases are eventually classified as ‘No Case to Answer’.

He added: “If these things are dealt with and as long as they’re dealt with at the appropriate level, they can be sorted quickly which is obviously better for the officer, it’s better for the manager and, let’s be fair, it’s better for the person potentially making the complaint as well. It’s better for all parties so at the moment I can’t see any negatives to it.”