APACs up your troubles in your old kit bag ....
Saturday/08/Dec 2007 Filed in:
Local
Partnerships and Administration
Home Office | Police | APACS - Consultation
(Remember APACS is the new performance management system for Police and Community Safety. It contains a number of measures against which our progress to meeting PSA 25 (the drug and alcohol one) will be assessed.)
I say consultations because there are two of them. One will last for 12 weeks (responses required by February 29th) and will cover the strategic issues relating to APACs. This includes issues such as how we can best mitigate concerns around the reliability of data collection techniques; the appropriate balance of qualitative and quantitative measures; what the role of the Home Office, CDRPs and Police Authorities should be in assessing and measuring performance. The other will cover the technical aspects - ie the details in each measure - and will last just 6 weeks (responses due by the 18th January).
This is a far better put together consultation than the drugs strategy one (which the ACMD - a Home Office Sponsored Body - called "self-congratulatory and generally disappointing" this week) and identifies a clear set of proposals against which comments can be made. Its important because its the home of the targets (one set of them at least) which are going to be used to evaluate the value for money of our spend on drugs and the effectiveness of the strategy. In fact, with the exception of the retention target and the numbers of young people using drugs that are included in the local government indicators these are the ONLY indicators that look at drugs. So if the public or politicians or even BBC Home Affairs editors are concerned with what the impact of our work in the drugs field is in future this is what they're going to be able to measure us against.
The technical consultation looks at the specific measures against which progress in promoting community safety and reducing crime will be assessed. For drugs these are a mixture of Key Performance Indicators (single measures like community perceptions of rowdy or drunken behaviour or the rate of assault with injury per 100 population)and Key Diagnostic Indicators (most of the existing DIP measures for example - whatever we now know about their usefulness and their sometime perverse impact on system performance). Interesting is the inclusion of a measure that looks at the criminal activity of a large cohort of drug offenders who will be tracked through the criminal justice system (one wonders if this will be the cohort who've already been gripped in the DIP evaluation and/or the Arrestees Survey or a whole new as yet ungripped band of brigands). The ACPO Drug Committee have also proposed a measure that looks at "Class A supply offences as a proportion of acquisitive crime". I must confess I don't understand this. I might be being really dense, but is Class A supply an acquisitive crime? If it is, does knowing the proportion of overall acquisitive crime it makes up help us understand anything better? If anyone out there can shed some light on this for me I'd be grateful.
More on this later in the week anyway - and if you have any comments about this or any other aspect of performance management I'd be really pleased to hear from you. Hit the link at the bottom of the page ...