> >We are therefore asking for narrative accounts of counter-productive
> >systems that people have encountered as a preliminary source
> > of data. We
> >are sure there are plenty in universities. Two examples may help to
> >illustrate what can happen .....
>
Ho hum. One of many (I'm going to start a Fantasy Government league table
game soon), but I couldn't let it pass.
Up until 1998 attempting to steal a car was a crime, as was criminally
damaging it (as was actually stealing it). But there was another category,
"vehicle interference", which didn't count as a crime. Without being too
specific with the details, if the police managed to determine that a
particular offence was a vehicle interference, it had a rather spectacular
effect on the crime rates to the benefit of the police recording the crime.
Quite what it did to the Crime Pattern Analyst's work depends entirely on
the nature of a given police force's IT. The only way this isn't
counter-productive would be if minimal effort was going in to analysing
vehicle crime in the first place. And then there's the question of how
crime rates impact on funding formulae.
I wouldn't like to slander anyone by speculating as to how well various
suggestion schemes may have reacted to personnel who made this suggestion,
and how that may compare with less tangible suggestions that, however
speculative, had some potential for helping joe public.
It's reassuring to know that there are some hardened cynics in the Home
Office who decided in 1998 to count vehicle interference as a crime. And
it's even more interesting to note since then how incidents with this
classification declined dramatically, to be replaced in equal numbers by
offences of "attempting theft" and "criminal damage".
Paul Hewson
Torbay Council
Disclaimer: These comments are entirely personal and do not reflect the view
of the esteemed organisation by whom I have the pleasure to be employed.
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