Budget cuts are a certainty for the police. The question now is, how should they be implemented? Is there a way of reducing police resource which minimises the impact on front line effectiveness? Standard budget cutting approaches will not work: they tend to focus on cutting out “non-core” activities such as relationship or neighbourhood based approaches, reducing “non-essential” items, such as training budgets, and requiring managers to implement an across the board reduction by a given percentage. Peter Latchford outlines an alternative perspective.
Child Protection, Reviews and Trust in the Front Line
It was no great shock that the new Government should announce an independent review into child protection and social work services in England. The stamping out of serious neglect is a proper objective for any government, and should be pursued with real energy. But the question is how? – how should that objective be achieved? It is not immediately obvious that a review will help. Data collection, analysis, assessment, recommendations… these are the stuff of reviews. But will all this stuff make even the smallest difference? In a very real sense, we already know the answer is, No. Peter Latchford outline alternative perspectives.