WHITES OVERLOOKED!

Ken Jones

Chief constables last night complained about rules which pander to ethnic minority groups.

The Association of Chief Police Officers said some of the performance scores published yesterday by the Home Office gave cause for 'strong concern'.

Police are judged to be doing badly if whites are happier with their local force than the black and ethnic minority population is.

The scoring system was drawn up in the wake of critical reports such as the Macpherson inquiry into the racist killing of black teenager Stephen Lawrence. (Whites Overlooked)

The row came as Home Office figures revealed that officers spend more than a third of their day sitting in meetings, preparing evidence or dealing with bureaucracy.

Ken Jones, president of Acpo, claimed the rules on performance scoring could lead to flawed results.

"Acpo has strong concerns on how some of the gradings are achieved," he said.

"For example, if your local white and BME [minority] population reports 40 per cent satisfaction you could receive an excellent rating.

"However if you strive for excellence and receive an 80 per cent rating from your white population and, say, 75 per cent from your BME population you may be rated as poor."

He said the system might also penalise a force for shifting resources away from an area rated as excellent to one in which it was doing less well.

"The framework is of a complex nature, somewhat bureaucratic, costly for forces to administer and is open to misinterpretation," Mr Jones added. "Apparent successes and failures do not take into account the operationaland moral challenges for both police and their partners.

"Centrally-compiled statistical returns cannot hope to fully reflect concerns that communities may have or the wider complex threats to society."

The figures revealing how much time officers spend off the beat fly in the face of ministerial pledges to cut police red tape.

Only 54.2 per cent of time is spent on patrol, preventing crime or catching crooks.

The figure is only a 0.6 per cent improvement on last year.

Police Minister Tony McNulty admitted curbing bureaucracy remained a 'work in progress' but insisted the ten per cent of time spent filling in forms related to criminal activity should be counted as front-line policing.

Shadow Home Secretary David Davis said: "The public will be dismayed to see that, despite all the rhetoric about slashing red tape, the amount of time police spend on the front line has stayed stagnant."

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