“Leadership critical in improving police crime stats”

POOR supervision and leadership rather than institutional corruption have been blamed by Her Majesty’s Chief Inspectorate of Constabulary for manipulated police crime figures.

Tom Winsor (pictured) predicted that the current inspection of crime data and integrity – which will publish an interim report in April and a full report in October – would reveal how widespread the issue is and the kind of crimes it is affecting.

Giving evidence to the Public Administration Select Committee Mr Winsor said that he did not believe the inspections of 43 forces in England and Wales would find evidence of institutional corruption.

Mr Winsor told MPs: “The quality of leadership in policing is absolutely critical. The behaviour of the person at the top of a police force affects the whole culture, the whole approach and integrity and honesty of their operations. If they (officers) believe their leaders are misbehaving in some way then that will affect the performance and culture.”

He said misrecording of crime by officers and forces could be due to failures in leadership and lack of training.

Mr Winsor said: “Mistakes can be made and things can go wrong for a variety of reasons. It can be mistake, misunderstanding of roles, error of the processes or dishonesty.

“Depending on the extent to which we find these things, I have no evidence or present expectation that what we are going to conclude is institutional corruption.

“The real issue is, is crime truly falling or are the statistics being manipulated to make it appear to be falling? A lot of it is about poor training, poor leadership, poor supervisions and misunderstanding. Some will be about dishonesty.”

In response to a question about what could influence a frontline officer to misrecord crime, he said: “If they believe that their senior managers don’t care about the honesty and accuracy of the crime recording and they are only interested with the figures and not the truth.”

Speaking to the Home Affairs Select Committee on 7 January, Lord Stevens, who ran the Met Police for six years, said officers on the ground had warned him that massaging of crime statistics is the “biggest scandal coming our way”.

He said: “Ever since I’ve been in police service there has been a fiddling of figures.”