Comparing performance: the development of police performance management in France and Britain

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Comparing performance: thedevelopment of police performancemanagement in France and BritainJacques de Maillard a & Stephen P. Savage ba Faculté do droit et de science politique, Université de VersaillesSaint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, Franceb Institute of Criminal Justice Studies, University of Portsmouth,Portsmouth, UK

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To cite this article: Jacques de Maillard & Stephen P. Savage (2012): Comparing performance: thedevelopment of police performance management in France and Britain, Policing and Society: AnInternational Journal of Research and Policy, 22:4, 363-383

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Comparing performance: the development of police performancemanagement in France and Britain

Jacques de Maillarda and Stephen P. Savageb*

aFaculte do droit et de science politique, Universite de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines,France; bInstitute of Criminal Justice Studies, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK

(Received 29 July 2010; final version received 1 March 2011)

Performance management in some form is now a global feature of policing inboth developed and developing countries. Under the steer of ‘new publicmanagement’, cultures of performance and the instruments of performancemanagement are increasingly a part of the landscape of twenty-first centurypolicing. However, there has been little by way of comparative analysis of thedifferent regimes of police performance management, despite the wider expansionof scholarship on comparative policing. This article seeks to address this gap bycomparing police performance management in Britain and France. It examinesthe relationship between the rise of police performance management and thewider politicisation of ‘law and order’ in both contexts. It then discusses policeperformance management in the two states in terms of comparisons ofperformance regimes around the themes of ‘centralisation’ and ‘localism’, thedimensions of policing which form measurements of police performance, the roleof ‘transparency’ and exposure of data in performance management and the roleof ‘consumerism’ the police performance regimes. It also considers the extent towhich senior police representative bodies have shaped or resisted the performanceagenda. In conclusion, the article locates variance in police performancemanagement between the two states within the fundamental differences ingovernance, structure and ethos between the two policing systems.

Keywords: policing; performance management; comparative; politicisation

Introduction

Police reform has been a focus of activity of many states in recent decades. In an

environment of contested legitimacy, whether in relation to tensions between the

police and minority communities, scandals in relation to the excessive use of force,

police corruption or declining detection rates, the spectre of weakening trust and

confidence in the police has loomed large in many countries. A response to this has

been the launch of a variety of types of police reform programmes, directed at such

targets as police governance, police effectiveness and police accountability. One key

dimension of police reform in this context is around police management, and most

typically the application of the rhetoric and instruments of ‘new public management’

(NPM) (Ranson and Stewart 1994, Pollitt 2002) to the public police sector, processes

otherwise known as ‘managerialism’ or ‘managerialisation’ (McLaughlin 2007). The

discourse of NPM has gathered pace within political circles internationally, and has

*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

Policing & Society

Vol. 22, No. 4, December 2012, 363�383

ISSN 1043-9463 print/ISSN 1477-2728 online

# 2012 Taylor & Francis

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been furthered by the work of cross-national organisations, auditing bodies,

management consultancies and segments of the civil service, in a way which has

arguably transformed the way traditional public bureaucracies operate and achieve

their tasks. Inspired by new managerialist thinking, public administration has

witnessed the introduction of new forms of budgeting, quasi-market techniques,

performance-related payments, outsourcing and the expansion of internal and

external contractualisation, including the closer involvement of the private sector.In this regard the measurement of performance, and with it the search for efficiency,

has become core to administrative reforms. In due course, the agenda of performance

management has taken hold internationally in the field of public policing, admittedly

with a higher degree of caution and not inconsiderable resistance from within police

hierarchies themselves. In this context, this article attempts to contribute to the

understanding of the growth of performance management and performance culture

within policing by offering a comparative analysis of police performance management.

Whilst comparative work has been conducted extensively in the general field of

public management reforms in western countries (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2004,

Suleiman 2005), it is less the case with specific regard to the police. In the latter field,

research has operated primarily along national lines, with relatively little by way of

comparative study, other than studies which present nationally based discussions

coupled with comparative reflection (e.g. Stenning and Shearing 2005, see for

exceptions, Pollitt and Bouckaert 2009, pp. 101�134 and Jones et al. 2009). This

article attempts to help bridge this gap by presenting a comparative analysis of policereform in terms of performance management in France and Britain. The

comparative evolution of the police in these two countries has not been thus far

the object of any systematic research, although their comparison seems particularly

heuristic, for two reasons. First, policing in these two countries is typically presented

in terms of fundamental variance. France would be emblematic of the ‘continental

model’ of policing, based on centralisation, a very broad policing mandate and

policing mission (with a multitude of ‘administrative’ tasks) and with a direct

accountability towards the state, whilst British policing presents the ‘Anglo-Saxon

model’, more decentralised and fragmented, a more limited mandate with less in

terms of ‘administrative’ functions and, despite what will be examine below as a drift

towards centralised governance, a more dispersed accountability with relatively

stronger accountabilities to local governance and the public/community (Mawby

2003). Indeed, according to some historians, France could be seen as an historic

alternative model of policing at the point of the effective formation of the British

police in the nineteenth century, even if this image has been qualified (Emsley 1996)

and given that some recent historical research has underlined processes of cultural

transfer of the ‘British Bobby’ during the second half of the nineteenth century(Deluermoz 2008). Moreover, both countries have undergone similar tensions over

the past 30 years or so, often associated with and expressed by periodic outbreaks of

public disorder targeted at the police (Jobard et al. 2009). Moreover, as a result of

reform agendas, both countries have undergone changes in the organisational

structures and the dominant doctrines associated with policing, which make

contemporary comparison potentially revealing in terms of degrees of variance

between the two policing systems. As noted, the British police have for a number of

decades been subject to processes of centralisation (Savage 2007a), although the

formation of the Coalition Government in 2010 may have served in time to have

364 J. de Maillard and S.P. Savage

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countered some of those tendencies. In France, conversely, there have been various

processes of reinforcement of local authorities: the position of the municipal police

has been enhanced, and partnerships between local authorities and police forces are

now a common feature of local policies. This issue of centralisation/decentralisation

is key to the question of managerialisation (McLaughlin 2007): in the UK, for

example, centralisation has accompanied managerialisation such that to a great

extent the two have tended to go hand in hand.

We propose to look comparatively at France and the UK (more specifically,

England and Wales), by focusing on two main questions, both of which relate to the

issue of police ‘performance’. First, what are the historical and political contexts

within which police reform has emerged and which have in turn shaped that reform?

Key in this respect is the comparative extent of the ‘politicisation of law and order’ in

political discourse, the role and level of intervention of central government in the

reform agenda, and support for or resistance to police reform from police

representative associations. Second, what are the primary mechanisms and instru-

ments which police reform has forged for the institutionalisation of performance

management in policing? Our concern in this respect is with such key issues as the

comparative extent of a ‘citizen focus’ within police performance measurement and

performance indicators, the degree of transparency and publicity over performance

data and the machineries for monitoring and acting upon any apparent ‘under-

performance’ of the police.

The first two sections will focus on the institutionalisation of managerialism in

England and Wales and France, respectively, and the variations therein. This will be

followed in the third and concluding sections by a comparative reflection on the

wider contextual framework of the major national variances thus outlined. Prior to

all of this a note of caution: there are significant differences in the degree of official

information available and level of academic research undertaken on police manage-

ment between England and Wales on the one hand and France on the other. This

relates in part to some of the observations we shall make about the very different

climates of governance the two countries exhibit. Nevertheless, it does account for

much of what we confess in advance to be the somewhat asymmetric comparison

which follows.

England and Wales

Political and historical context

Police performance management in the British context effectively took root in the

mid-1990s when the first extensive sets of performance matrices were drawn up by

police regulatory and inspection agencies. However, the ethos of performance

management which underpinned that development was laid down a decade earlier

with wider reforms of the public services under the Thatcher governments of the

1980s, around what was then called the Financial Management Initiative (FMI). The

FMI was the first concerted attempt to inculcate the virtues of what is known in

English as the ‘3 Es’ � ‘Economy, Efficiency and Effectiveness’ � within public sector

organisations, and was linked to the political imperative of addressing what

government held to be the excesses and waste across the public sector. What was

then labelled the ‘new right’ agenda (Gamble 1981), aimed to dismantle the ‘post-war

Policing & Society 365

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consensus’ accepted across the political spectrum, which valued state management of

the economy and the notion of a welfare state (Marwick 1990, p. 45), and shift to a

more fully marketised economy and a trimmed down and streamlined public sector.

If the privatisation of former public utilities was to be the hallmark of the

marketisation process, the FMI was to be the primary initial instrument for the

‘reform’ of the public sector. A central element of the FMI was performance

management, including the measurement and assessment of organisational ‘outputs’against organisational and managerial objectives (Savage 2007a, p. 86).

However, despite the FMI agenda, the police, for political reasons as much as any

(Savage 2007a, pp. 167�172), were protected from the full blast of the new ‘value-for-

money’ ethos then being vented on other public services. Indeed, it has been widely

acknowledged in both academic and political circles that the police sector had, for

much of the 1980s and part of the 1990s, enjoyed a ‘privileged’ status relative to other

parts of the British public sector (Patten 2006, p. 69, Jenkins 2006, p. 181, Loader

and Mulcahy 2003, p. 289, Morris 1994, p. 308), with favourable annual financial

settlements and a ‘light touch’ � if not ‘hands off ’ � approach from government in

terms of regulatory governance. The FMI was indeed floated in the mid-1980s as a

basis for on-going review of policing policies and decisions but, apart from the

stimulus it gave to such measures as the ‘civilianisation’ of former ‘police’ roles and

functions, for example, press office work (Savage 2007a, pp. 94�95), it had not led, as

it had in other public services, to the wider penetration of the performance

management culture within the police sector.The deeper permeation of performance management within the police sector had

to wait until the early 1990s, when the Conservative Government, now free from the

(direct) clutches of the Thatcher leadership, began to reverse its approach to the

police and adopt strategy much more directed at police reform. Stimulated by a

growing concern at senior levels of government that the police were not delivering

‘returns’ on their privileged levels of expenditure (Baker 1993, p. 450), a programme

of police reform was launched which embraced constitutional change and funda-

mental reviews of police pay, conditions of service, rank structures and police ‘core/

ancillary’ functions � the latter with a view to handing over former ‘police’ tasks to

other agencies or types of employee (Savage 2007a, pp. 174�178). Embedded within

the reform programme, although not as controversially as the other reforms, were

steps to institutionalise performance management within policing. More specifically,

the government consultation paper outlining the reform plans (Home Office 1993,

pp. 18�19) proposed increased monitoring of police performance at both national

and local levels; amongst other things, this meant the production of police

performance ‘league tables’, an instrument already long in place for monitoring ofschool and hospital ‘performance’. Just as schools can be compared on the

performance of their students in terms of nationally based examination scores, so

police forces could now be compared on such things as the crime rate, detection rate

and public satisfaction rates for their policing services.

The notion of league tables of police performance has a distinctively ‘British’

flavour to it: it reflects the fact that policing in Britain is undertaken by

constitutionally separate local police forces whose performance can (in principle at

least) be compared, if not exactly on a ‘like for like’ basis. Of course, the capacity of

citizens to act on the information contained in any such league tables in the policing

context is much less than, say, in the case of schools. With schools there is at least a


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degree of parental choice over what school parents send their child to, which

information on school performance may shape; there is no such ‘choice’ over

policing services as police forces are essentially a ‘monopoly’ provider of at least most

policing services. In that respect the core rationale for police performance tables is

more a reflection of a strategy of ‘naming and shaming’ � an attempt to drive up

performance by identifying the best and worst performing police organisations.

Leaders of those police forces, or organisational units within forces, deemed to beperforming less well than others and exposed through league tables as such, will

according to this logic feel under pressure to improve their performance accordingly.

Central to any development of police performance league tables, however, are the

dimensions around which police performance can be measured, assessed and

compared: performance indicators. Historically the primary if not sole indicator of

police ‘performance’ in Britain, as elsewhere, has been the official crime rate, based

on police records of offences. Not only is this the crudest of indicators � not least

because the majority of offences are not even reported let alone recorded (Reiner

2007, pp. 53�57) � it is highly questionable whether crime rates themselves, however

accurately assessed, are a measure of police performance as such. This is rather like

judging the performance of doctors by the rate of heart disease in the community �like crime, disease is an indicator of so many other things than professional

intervention. An only slightly less crude indicator of police performance emerged in

the 1960s, when police response times � the speed of response to emergency calls �began to be measured and monitored as part of the shift to motorised patrol andaway from foot patrol at that time (Weatheritt 1986, pp. 88�89). At least this measure

was closer to some form of ‘performance’, however narrow.

However, what emerged in the late 1980s was a much more nuanced conception

of police performance indicators, which owed much to the work of the Audit

Commission. The Audit Commission was set up in 1982 to audit and monitor the

work and expenditure of local government authorities and local public services but

did not begin its work on the police sector until the mid-1980s. The Audit

Commission has been concerned both with audit itself but also, importantly, with

policy development, because as well as undertaking the financial auditing function of

local authorities it has also carried out a series of studies of organisational decision-

making and practices, with a view to developing best practice (Hale et al. 2004, p.

295). It has been this role which has seen the Audit Commission helped steer the

police ‘mind set’ towards greater acceptance of the ethos of performance manage-

ment (Savage 2007a, pp. 97�101), including the principles underpinning the

development and use of performance indicators. As the Commission had played

such a key role in the development of thinking around police performance indicators,it was to them that the Conservative Government turned when it sought to fully exert

a ‘value-for-money’ culture within the police sector in the mid-1990s; the Commis-

sion was charged to produce the first set of statutory national performance indicators

for the police, which it duly published in 1995 (Audit Commission 1995).

One of the themes of this paper is the balance, or lack of balance, between

‘quantitative’ and ‘qualitative’ measures of police performance. The response from

senior police officers to the Commission’s initial set of indicators was that it was

skewed too much in favour of the former and insufficiently in favour of the latter. The

Commission had prioritised such quantitative measures as: speed of response to

emergency calls; total volume of crime; detection rate; numbers of officers available


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for operational duty and cost of policing per head of population. The Association of

Chief Police Officers (ACPO) challenged this framework and the league tables on

which it was built on the basis that it understated important qualitative issues, such as

levels of public satisfaction with policing standards � perhaps on the basis that police

performance might appear better on these lines, drawing perhaps on the seemingly

high levels of public support for policing in Britain. The Audit Commission soon

responded by extending the suite of indicators to include such dimensions as: thepercentage of people satisfied with police responses to emergency calls; percentage of

victims satisfied with the initial response to their crime and percentage of people

satisfied with the level of foot patrol (Savage 2007a, pp. 103�104).

The statutory police performance indicators were to become a focal concern of the

annual inspections of police forces by the police inspectorate, Her Majesty’s

Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC). HMIC began to work closely with the Audit

Commission both in the development of the suite of indicators itself and with the audit

of police performance against those indicators, through its own inspection and

reporting processes. In relation to this in 1997 HMIC were to make an important

contribution to the utilisation of information on performance indicators by creating a

scheme of ‘families of forces’, groupings of seven or eight of the 43 forces of England

and Wales with similar geographical and social environments (Hale et al. 2005, p. 5) in

place of a single league table of forces, so that more meaningful comparisons of police

force performance could be made. HMIC was becoming a central instrument in the

‘enforcement’ of the police performance management agenda.The incoming Labour Government of 1997 would inherit an elaborate frame-

work of police performance indicators and mechanisms for force-by-force compar-

ison, and rather than distance itself from the emerging agenda Labour embraced it if

anything with even more enthusiasm than their predecessors. Labour’s particular

take on the value-for-money ethos was labelled ‘Best Value’, a measure to serve on

local authorities and local authority services the duty, in the words of the Local

Government Act 1999, ‘to make arrangements to secure continuous improvement in

the way [their] functions are expressed, having regard to a combination of economy,

efficiency and effectiveness’ (Clause 3.1). The Best Value agenda, amongst other

things, laid emphasis on comparing police performance in certain areas of activity

with those of other service providers � for example, fire and police services � and of

regular consultation with local tax-payers and service users in setting performance

targets. The emphasis on local consultation is interesting from a comparative

perspective because it signified that Labour was to lay greater emphasis than its

predecessor government on community engagement � the term to emerge in Labour’s

later police reform agenda � and (more) active citizenship in the police performanceregime. Although ‘public satisfaction’ measures, as we have seen, were already in

place within the performance indicator framework, Labour was to go much further

along the path of consumerism in its philosophy on performance management, as

shall be made clear later. Another feature of Labour’s approach, linked to this, was

on fair access to policing services. The Best Value Performance Indicators, or

‘corporate health indicators’ (Long 2003) published by government, included such

(more predictable) dimensions as levels of crime, efficiency and service delivery

outcomes, but also ‘quality’ indicators, such as public and service user satisfaction

levels, and ‘fair access’ indicators, which cover in particular the experiences of black

and ethnic minority groups in gaining access to policing services, such as dealing with


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racist incidents (Boyne 2000, p. 8). The quality and fair access indicators are very

much steeped in what would later be specified as Citizen Focus, the orientation of

policing towards: positive experiences of policing across the community; localised

neighbourhood policing; community engagement and public awareness and under-standing of policing.

The rise and rise of British police performance management

Labour was to raise the stakes in police performance management with the launch of

its wholesale police reform programme in the early years of the new millennium. The

government prefaced this with a discourse on an apparent ‘crisis of performance’ of

policing, based on a number of claims (Home Office 2001, p. 102), which included:‘too high’ levels of crime; ‘too high’ levels of fear of crime; ‘too low’ detection rates;

too much variation in performance between individual police forces and falling levels

of public confidence in the police, particularly within minority ethnic communities.

The Police Reform Act 2002 was the first consolidated attempt to address these

apparent shortcomings of the police service. The Act constituted a major shift

in the continuing centralisation, or ‘nationalisation’ of British policing (Jones 2003,

pp. 613�616; Savage 2007a, pp. 111�118). It established the first National Policing

Plan which could set out a framework within which Best Value Performance Indictorscould be determined and forces ‘ranked’ in terms of performance. The Act also created

the Police Standards Unit � later to be renamed the ‘Police and Partnership Standards

Unit’ to reflect the more inter-agency based approach to performance management

which was to emerge (see below) � which was to regulate the performance of police

forces and sub-force operational unit, or Basic Command Units.

The ‘enforcement’ role of HMIC was also enhanced when it was charged with

drawing up the ‘Police Performance Assessment Framework’ a comparative

performance framework which used HMIC ‘baseline assessments’ of policeperformance across the ‘families’ of forces to judge how well forces were performing

in the ‘performance areas’ such as tackling crime and serious crime, protecting

vulnerable people, satisfaction and fairness and resource and efficiency. Each force

was judged along a scale of ‘poor/fair/good/excellent’ and on whether their

performance in terms of direction was ‘deteriorating, stable or improving’. This

framework was subsequently recast to incorporate the inter-agency approach to

crime reduction which Labour had earlier stimulated with the Crime and Disorder

Act 1998, which formed Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships which broughttogether local authorities, police and other services associated with crime reduction

and community safety under joint strategic frameworks. The new assessment

framework was to be named Assessments of Policing and Community Safety

(APCS) (Home Office 2007). This was some attempt to tackle what is a generic

problem with police performance management: that the ‘outcomes’ pursued by

police performance regimes often depend on the ‘performance’ of other agencies as

well. For example, crime rates in Britain are related amongst other things to the work

of local authority crime prevention bodies, responsible for such things as theinstallation of closed circuit television monitoring in towns and cities.

Taking all of these measures together there would seem to have been a

fundamental shift in British police performance management from performance

‘monitoring’ to active performance management as such. Central government had


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developed a veritable ‘command’ structure through which its own strategic plans for

the policing service, actually delivered by a multitude of formally separate police

forces, are translated into complex suites of performance indicators, which were then

monitored by the central inspectorate, with ‘underperformance’ first exposed then

challenged. A central instrument of this command structure has been performance

targets, another signifier of the active management of police performance in the

British context. Government had not rested on the capacity to determine nationalpolicing priorities and define the criteria by which police performance along those

priorities was to be measured; it had also sought to specify the distance which actual

performance against those measures is to go and what levels of performance were to

be achieved. Targets for year on year reductions in such areas as anti-social

behaviour were matched with targets for year on year increases in performance in

areas such as public satisfaction levels, and at one point it was calculated that there

were almost 300 indicators and targets applying to the APCS (Home Office 2007,

Golding and Savage 2008, pp. 752�753). The political commentator Simon Jenkins

labelled this sort of ethos as ‘targetisis’, an obsession with centrally driven targets for

locally delivered services, all part of an apparent ‘target culture’ which stems from the

inability of recent British governments to avoid the temptation to interfere with even

the most minor levels of public service delivery (Jenkins 2006, p. 280). On a more

established conceptual level it could be seen as a blurring between the ‘steering’ and

‘rowing’ levels of public service delivery (Osborne and Gaebler 1992, p. 34). If NPM

(Pollitt 2002, p. 276) was to prioritise the separation of the ‘steering’ and ‘rowing’

functions, with the state being responsible for the former, others for the latter, thenthe ‘target culture’ complicates that division. In place of ‘governing at a distance’

which the ‘new regulatory state’ (Braithwaite 2000, pp. 49�54) is thought to embody,

the intricacy and reach of the target regime within British police performance

management offered more the scenario of micro-management, if not ‘governing the

front-line’ of service delivery. This was precisely where the dilemma of centralism vs

localism arose in the British context.

The increasingly centralised nature of British police performance management sat

uneasily with the traditionally ‘local’ ethos of British policing, given the extent to

which the central governance of performance measures and targets within them

diminishes the degree of local variation and discretion in police decision-making.

However, the dilemma of ‘centralism vs localism’ was even more evident in the

Labour Government’s stance on police reform because it sought to advance both

centralism and localism simultaneously (Savage 2007b). Whilst the Police Reform Act

2002 introduced a range of ‘centralising’ measures, some of which were referred to

earlier, Labour’s subsequent reforms prioritised ‘localism’ in a number of ways

(Savage 2007a, pp. 195�201), including neighbourhood policing, reassurancepolicing � aimed at reducing fear of crime � and the policing of ‘anti-social

behaviour’, including extending the authority of the police to dispense ‘summary’

justice in the forms of fixed penalty fines. Underpinning this ethos was the goal of

enhancing the role of localised concerns in the setting of policing priorities in the

sense of a ‘citizen focus’. The paradox has been that this latter aspiration was heavily

constrained if not compromised by the rigidity of centrally set plans, performance

indicators and targets. Local variations in public concerns and priorities were

difficult to register within the command framework of the British police performance

management framework, and the localised exercise of police discretion necessary for


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flexible responses to community preferences sat uneasily with the ‘one size fits all’ of

that framework (Golding and Savage 2008, pp. 745�747).

Some recognition of this paradox appeared evident in later reforms emanating

from the Labour Government. In its consultation document outlining the future

direction of the police reform programme (Home Office 2008), the government

stated ‘We will step away from centralised performance management . . .’ (HomeOffice 2008, p. 3). It talked of a ‘new deal’ which would be rooted in ‘. . . local

priorities set by local people . . .’ and ‘. . ..with future performance being measured

more frequently and at a more local level’ (Home Office 2008, p. 11). This apparent

rebalancing of the centralism/localism axis would involve two measures. First a

greater role for local police authorities in the police performance regime; government

would pull back to a more specifically ‘strategic’ role, leaving the police authorities

with primary responsibility for calling forces to account through the performance

regime. Second the ‘simplification’ of the performance target framework from the

lexicon approach of the recent past to the formulation of just one Home Office

national target for police forces: ‘to improve public confidence’ (Home Office 2008,

p. 39). This was also further confirmation of the key role of a ‘citizen focus’ in British

police performance management.

One possible reason for the Labour Government’s apparent shift in emphasis

away from centralism and towards localism was the growing opposition within senior

police ranks to the growth of ‘target culture’ within performance management (seeGolding and Savage 2008, pp. 754�755) and the ‘distortions’ in policing activities

and in the exercise of police discretion which that culture was deemed to involve. One

of the salient features of the development of British police performance has been the

degree of support across senior police ranks, and within the ACPO, for the principles

underpinning performance management. Indeed, ACPO took a full and active part

in the debates about the first set of national police performance indicators in the mid-

1990s mentioned earlier (Savage 2007a, pp. 103�104). If the performance regime was

driven by government, that regime had willing participants in the chief officers. The

small but significant movement amongst some key chiefs against the ‘excesses’ of the

regime threatened to challenge the legitimacy of Labour’s stance on policing and

police reform. The reorientation of performance management towards a simpler, ‘less

bureaucratic’ and more locally based framework seemed to in part a consequence of

this threat.

Whatever the direction in which the Labour Government was heading on police

performance management, the General Election of 2010 resulted in the new

Coalition Government of the Conservative and Liberal Democratic Parties. Thenew government’s stance on the issue of police performance culture in one sense

exhibited a significant reversal of what had gone on previously, when it declared that

even the one remaining national performance target for policing, around ‘public

confidence’, was itself to be abolished (Home Office 2010, p. 3). This could at face

value be taken as a major departure from the ethos of performance culture that had

developed over previous decades. However, despite an evident ‘cooling’ of central

governance of police performance management, two measures outlined by the

incoming government as part of its package of police reforms, made it clear that

performance itself, even if with a renewed local dimension, was still very much the

order of the day. Firstly and most controversially, the government confirmed its

commitment to create locally elected ‘Police and Crime Commissioners’, as part of


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the enhancement of the ‘local accountability’ of the police (Home Office 2010, pp.

10�12). Clearly influenced by policing systems in the USA, and in particular New

York (see later in the French context), the Commissioners � civilians not police

officers � would be elected on specific crime and policing ‘tickets’ and have the

authority to set policing priorities for their local chief officers to work towards.

Central to this role would be directly ‘holding forces to account’ for the use of their

resources, in other words, their performance (Home Office 2010, p. 14). Secondly,and linked to this, there would be greater ‘transparency’ of local police performance,

with the publication of more frequent (now monthly) and more detailed information

(now street level) on crime and disorder (Home Office 2010, pp. 15�16). This was if

anything an accentuation, rather than a diminution, of the performance culture for

policing.

However, it was the wider financial climate prevalent immediately before and

after the new government took office, and the new government’s determination to

make quick and dramatic cuts in public expenditure � and this time the police were

not to be treated as a ‘special case’ (Home Office 2010, p. 8) � which was above all to

ensure that police performance management was to remain a central feature of

British policing. With the mantra of ‘more for less’, the ethos of value-for-money was

becoming an even more fundamental driver of policing policy and practices than it

had been in the past. Almost in anticipation of this renewed focus of value-for-

money, and emblematic of it, was the introduction by HMIC in 2010 of ‘value-for-

money Profiles’, comparisons of police forces in terms of their performance onefficiency and effectiveness, that is the extent to which they are demonstrating that

they are delivering value-for-money. With the prospect of facing budget cuts as deep

as 25% as it entered the second decade of the twenty-first century, the British police

would not in any sense be relieved of the burden of performance management.

Indeed in 2012, the Coalition Home Secretary made apparent the close linkage

between emergence of Police and Crime Commissioners and the ethos of value-for-

money when she announced that ‘Commissioners will . . .want to squeeze every

penny of value out of police spending’ (May 2012).

To summarise, in comparative terms police performance management in Britain

may be captured as follows. First, performance management has been highly

centralised with nationally determined and nationally monitored measurements of

police performance, although a more recent shift to more localised performance

frameworks is evident. Second, the performance management regime has involved

not just the monitoring of police force performance but the active national

management of performance, in the sense that bodies have been created whose

function it is to challenge ‘poor performance’ and actively drive up performancewhere it is deemed necessary. Third, British police performance operates within a

highly elaborate framework of performance-related agencies and a complex matrix of

performance indicators, with many areas and aspects of police activity coming within

the gaze of performance management. Fourth, and in relation to this, a key and if

anything expanding role is played by a citizen focus and a consumerist ethos as

regards what areas of police performance are held to be of value, coupled with a

strongly transparent approach to police performance data. On this basis, it is

arguably the case that Britain has developed the most elaborate framework of police

performance management in Europe and one of the most elaborate frameworks of

managerialism in the policing world.


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France: external pressures and internal constraints

Political pressure and global administrative change

In France, managerialism has been introduced within the police through a rather

circuitous process. Changes were firstly introduced at the turn of the 1990s, in the

context of a global reform of public services initiated by the Prime Minister, M.

Rocard. The National Police and Gendarmerie1 would introduce elements of

‘participatory management’ and new services projects within their administrative

systems. The National Directorate of the National Police had devised several

innovations, particularly in relation to the creation of performance indicators related

to specific targets (Roche 2005, pp. 241�242). During this period new management

courses were launched within the National High School of Police (Ecole nationale

superieure de la police in charge of the training of commissaires) and they were

supported by the recruitment of associate professors of management. However, this

momentum slowed down after time as the 1990s progressed, only to resurface at the

end of the decade, now associated with the emerging doctrine of the ‘police of

proximity’. The latter was based on a mix of a community policing philosophy

(a proactive police based on the contact with citizens) and managerialist thinking, as

was exemplified by the diffusion of participatory management tools and ideas such

as the ‘decentralization of responsibility’ at all levels of the police hierarchy and

‘management by objectives’ involving ‘teamwork’. The national gendarmerie had

also developed its own managerial instruments. In particular, an ‘audit bureau’ was

created in 1998 (which was renamed in 2007 as the ‘Audit and Quality Bureau’). If

these processes had begun to introduce the managerialist ethos within police

institutions, two further developments, mainly emanating from outside of the police,

accounted for the adoption of more assertive managerialist norms and techniques

within the French police.

The first development was linked to the more global transformation of French

public administration in general. The main impetus for this was introduced in 2001

through a paradigmatic change of the finance framework governing the French

administration. The loi d’orientation relative aux lois de finances, Organic law on

finances laws (LOLF) was reformed by a law adopted in 2001, and implemented from

2006. Broadly speaking, this new financial framework aimed to change the way

public spending is organised within the central state, by departing from line item-

budgeting towards performance-sensitive frameworks. These new budgeting rules are

emblematic of the circulation of the NPM ideas and techniques within French public

administration (Bezes 2008). They divide the budget in 32 global missions (one of

them being the ‘mission security’) and 132 programmes. Through this new procedure,

programme managers and ministers have to make commitments to meet specific

objectives and targets (see below for the police). Managerialism has been recently

given a further impetus by another global package of reforms, the Revision generale

des politiques publiques which is a process of audit of missions fulfilled by the central

state. This process relies on evaluations of ministerial actions conducted by ‘teams’,

mixing together members of ministerial inspectorates and consultants. In the case of

the national police and the national gendarmerie, it has recommended the further

civilianisation of the police and the outsourcing of non-essential responsibilities. In

other words, French public administration, despite its resilience, had not escaped the

global spread of new managerial techniques within public policy, something which in


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turn impacted on public police services in terms of redefining the administrative rules

under which their administrations work.

The second development, also external to the police, came more directly from

political actors operating within the Ministry of Interior since 2002. When N.

Sarkozy was the Minister of the Interior (2002�2004 and 2006�2007), he adopted a

dual strategy. On the one hand, he was highly supportive of the police in general

terms, by adopting and representing a discourse of ‘tough on crime’ and by adopting

laws that gave new powers and extended budgets to the police. On the other hand, he

paid very much attention to the need for the police to be accountable and regularlyevaluated. For instance, the adoption of the law on internal security (loi d’orientation

et de programmation pour la securite interieure, LOPSI) in 2002 meant an increase in

human and technological resources for the different state police organisations as well

as new constraints in terms of accountability of the police: He stated that:

An ambitious policy of decentralization and globalization of the means at your disposalwill be implemented. It will have a natural counterpart: the empowerment andrecognition of achievements. You will have to set annual targets for improvingefficiency. (Sarkozy 2002)

Throughout this period, the minister adopted a political discourse stressing

the importance of a ‘culture of results’ and, later, a ‘culture of performance’

(Roche 2005, Monjardet 2006, Mucchielli 2008). This new orientation has meant a

constant pressure exercised by the Ministry of Interior on the police to tackle crime,

and focused the measurement of ‘results’ or ‘performance’ on two crude indicators:

the clear-up rate and the official crime rate.

These two dynamics (global managerial change and political pressure) share a

common characteristic: both are external to the police, and were imposed on the

police by global rule-changes and the ideologies of political actors within the

ministry. In comparative terms, there are similarities here between the French and

British experiences, in the sense that the managerialisation of policing was driven by

political agendas which embraced both the discourse of ‘tough on crime’ and the

ethos of NPM in a form of ‘pincer’ movement. In the words of Bayley (2008), they

have been outside�inside and top-down innovations. However, at this pointdivergences rather than convergences appear, in terms of the penetration and

‘internalisation’ of NPM instruments and techniques and the extent they have

changed police organisations.

The institutionalisation of performance management within the French policing system

The notion of performance is now pervasive within the discourse of and within

French policing, with an overall emphasis on achieving ‘results’ rather than

administering processes. Indeed, a change in the title of the central law in this field

is emblematic of this shift: in 2002, as has already mentioned, the law of ‘LOPSI’ was

enacted but by 2009 that law had been retitled as loi d’orientation et de

programmation pour la performance de la securite interieure (LOPPSI).

This change is not only rhetorical. It has meant new responsibilities, tasks,

payments, appraisals and training within the police. The setting of explicit targets

and performance indicators to enable the auditing of efficiency and effectiveness is


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now a key part of the work of police and gendarmerie top management. From now

on, each director of programme within the framework of the LOLF must elaborate

an annual performance plan, by defining objectives and performance indicators.

Although programme managers have greater autonomy to choose their preferred

means to reallocate budgets, they are also subjected to greater scrutiny (in particular

by the finance ministry and the parliament) on their results and their ability to meet

targets. At the local level, the use of ‘dashboards’ is now commonplace. Thesedashboards are constituted of three series of indicators: indicators of situation (the

evolution of different types of crime), indicators of activity (in terms of criminal

investigation, road policing or scientific policing), and indicators of available

resources (in terms of presence in public spaces). These new dashboards are made

possible by the introduction of new technological devices that favour immediate

reporting of their activity by subordinates. These various dashboards exist at the

level of each circonscription.2 There are also dashboards at the level of the

department, that include a comparison of the results for each circonscription (in

terms of situation, activity and resources). This is accompanied by new methods of

payment for police officers: in the national police, performance-related payment has

been in place since 2004, with a budget of 5 million euros devoted to individual and

collective rewards. Some commissaires (in the framework of ‘contractualisation’) may

benefit from specific conditions of employment and get individualised objectives and

rewards. Also since 2004, the processes of appraisal of commissaires have changed:

appraisals now come closer to the appraisal methods and skills assessments of

private sector management.Managerialism has also been more prevalent in the pre- and in-service training of

managers (officiers in the national gendarmerie, and officiers and commissaires

within the police nationale). Such training now combines particular technical aspects

of performance management (measure of performance, use of indicators, measure of

efficiency) and more relational skills (working in a collective setting, leadership, etc.).

In the case of commissaires, traditionally, legal and administrative matters were

prominent within pre-service training regimes; that has since changed. Now

managing the police organisation is seen as the key dimension of the training of

commissaries. Commissaires for example are given specific sessions on ‘steering a

police unit’ (about 70 hours in total). The objectives of the sessions are to prepare the

commissaire to lead a unit, to explain its objectives, to allocate resources, to use

different tools in order to evaluate the actions, to analyse the individual actions of its

collaborators, and so on. However, the focus on management is even more important

with regards to in-service training, as evidenced by the types of sessions. Of the 35

sessions proposed by the National High School of Police for the in-service training of

Commissaires, 15 are on ‘managerial issues’.3

The development of the measurement of performance in the French context has a

paradoxical link to the traditionally highly centralised French police system. Overall,

in France, managerialism within policing has been conceived of and implemented

very much within a centralised framework. Goals, performance indicators and

training courses have all been determined by central administration. Contrary to

initial expectations that foresaw a greater room for manoeuvre for local police

managers, the introduction of managerialism seems only to have reinforced

centralisation, by setting up instruments for the further control over local police

units. The latter are required to provide detailed reports and accounts of their


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activities and interventions to the centralised administration. Indeed, where local

police organisations did traditionally benefit from a degree of (informal) room for

manoeuvre, they must now enter into formalised procedures defined at the central

level. This situation has been criticised by commissaires who have expressed concern

over the failure to realise the potential of devolved management that was supposedly

offered by the implementation of the LOLF, and the lack of coherence between the

LOLF and actual police activity (La Tribune du Commissaire 2007, p. 14). Thepressure on performance is exercised en cascade through different levels of hierarchy:

the Minister of Interior on prefets, the prefets on the departmental chiefs of police,

the latter on local commissaries and so on.

The growing pressure on results for the police and the gendarmerie cannot be

dismissed. The on-going and constant pressure on ‘results’ has had some effects on

police practices and organisations. Indeed, studies have exposed some of the perverse

effects associated with the implementation of various practices of police officers to

conform to political expectations and ‘results’. Police officers, put under pressure by

their hierarchy along performance lines, have developed many informal practices in

order either to reduce the statistical levels of crime or to increase the clear-up rate

(Matelly and Mouhanna 2007). Various police unions have expressed criticisms of

this new focus on results. For instance, a communique of the syndicat des

commissaires de la police nationale, the commissaires’ union, in 2006 challenged

the constant pressure exercised on public security services by the pursuit of ‘results’.

In these respects at least the French experience has something much in common withBritish experience: pressures on ‘performance’ are seen by police leaders themselves

as potentially distorting the policing mission, however defined.

Despite these shifts in the discourses on and over French police management, one

may however question the extent of the actual penetration of new managerialist

thinking and the novelty of these measures. A number of factors come into play in

this respect. Firstly, the new organisational goals and suites of performance

indicators were grafted on to the existing instruments and frameworks rather than

as part of a sweep of new institutional forms. Roche has shown that the programmes

and actions were in reality ‘new names given to old structures’ (2008, p. 335).

‘Programmes’ are divided between the national police and gendarmerie and ‘actions’

are divided between the various central directorates of the police administration.

Within the national police for instance ‘Action 1’ (public order and protection of

sovereignty) supports the public order forces and intelligence services, and ‘Action 2’

covers the domain of the central directorate of public security (direction centrale de la

securite publique), etc. The introduction of the new managerial framework has not

involved as such any radical organisational change in the distribution of responsi-bilities neither between nor within the national police and the gendarmerie.

Second, there is little by way of a citizen focus dimension in the various goals and

performance indicators which the new French police performance regime has

presented. If we consider organisational goals and performance indicators for the

gendarmerie, there is only one where a reference to the ‘public’ is made (Goal 4,

‘Adapt the presence on public spaces to the needs of the population and the

delinquency’). Even in this case, the three performance indicators (evolution of the

effectiveness of supervision over local crime, rate of involvement of field units, rate of

interventions in a period greater than twice the average time) do not measure in any

manner citizens’ perceptions of police performance. It is implicitly considered that the


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best way to measure police performance is to use existent indicators that do not take

into account the public preferences over police activities.

Third, a high degree of secrecy exists within the French performance management

model. Only performance data aggregated at the national level is made public; there

is no data available (with league tables for instance) at the sub-national level. The

relative performance of the various police organisations, such as the territorial units,is not made public, even if that information is available to the national police or the

national gendarmerie. Transparency is not high on the list of priorities of the French

police performance regime. Information remains located in police and gendarmerie’s

offices.

Fourth, managerialism, particularly when attached to police performance, has to

a great extent a political and expressive function. A good example of this expressive

dimension was the decision of the Ministry of Interior to convene prefects on a

monthly basis to examine developments in tackling crime in their department,

explicitly inspired from the practice of New York Police Department (NYPD) under

the ‘Compstat’ regime (Golding and Savage 2008). However, the difference between

New York and French policing policy is significant: whereas in New York Compstat

is focused on the operational dimension of the police and the treatment of local

problems, French practice was characterised by a symbolic display of the involve-

ment of national politics at the ‘local’ level. Compstat meetings of the NYPD are

weekly, involve focused work on specific areas of crime and a thorough anddemanding review of local strategies of the various precincts. Meetings organised by

the Minister of the Interior were monthly, chaired by the minister and took place at

the national level, which made realistic operational thinking near impossible.

Furthermore, whilst the New York meetings have the teeth of enforcing dismissals,

demotions or promotions of police managers according to their ‘performance’, the

French ‘equivalent’ has no attachment to the career management of policing officials

(de Maillard and Le Goff 2009).

Fifth, very much contrary to the UK where there is a powerful framework of

auditing institutions for monitoring performance, there is no elaborate organisa-

tional basis for auditing police performance in France. The Police nationale general

inspectorate (inspection generale de la police nationale), the functional equivalent of

the HMIC, plays only a minimal role in such matters as it remains largely focused on

the administrative and technical control of services. Its audits do not concern the use

of performance indicators by the police. The general directorate for public security

(direction centrale de la securite publique), in charge of all forces in the field of public

security, is thinly staffed (200 agents for 80,000 agents to manage) and is focused onreaction to emergencies rather than on steering performance (Monjardet 2004).

To summarise, there is a ‘French flavour’ in the introduction of managerialism: it

is imposed by the central state, focused on hard statistical measures and does not

take seriously a citizen focus, data are controlled by police officers and bureaucrats

and are not shared with the public. At the time of writing, one may speculate whether

the new government elected in May 2012 will change this situation. There are early

signs within the ministry of a determination to develop ‘better counting’ mechanisms

and of a wish to focus more than its predecessors on qualitative rather than simply

quantitative dimensions of performance measurement; in which case we may be

witnessing the beginnings of a degree of convergence with the British system of

performance management.


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Comparing police performance management: convergence and divergence

Our comparison of police performance management in Britain and France exhibits

points of both convergence and divergence. British and French policing systems have in

recent years been recast as sites of performance management with an overarching ethos

of a performance, or ‘results’, driven mission, to be realised through managerial

instruments of goal setting, performance measurement and performance monitoring

and review. In both cases, a significant if not fundamental shift in organisational

culture appears to have taken place. In relation to this, a common feature of both

policing systems has been the power and drive of political imperatives to place pressure

on the police to improve ‘performance’ by reducing crime, and this helps deliver the

promises and commitments made as law and order policies have become more and

more politicised. In both countries, this political driver for performance management

has meant a high degree of increased centralisation of policing and police decision-

making. In these respects processes of convergence of British and French policing

seems evident. However, similar policy instruments may be adopted for different

reasons and operate in different ways. The broad convergence masks a number of quite

specific divergences between the two policing systems, divergences which should urge

caution in reading off managerialisation as a simple, globalised, process.

First, that whereas the spread of the performance culture within British policing

has involved a degree of ‘ownership’ by police actors, most notably ACPO, which has

over time at least gained some form of control over the shape taken by British police

performance management, the spread of the performance culture within French

policing tends to have been more exclusively due to centralised ‘top-down’ policy-

making process, with little by way of a formative, shaping, role by police actors.

Second, despite that degree of ‘ownership’ by police actors in the British model,

performance management itself has been furthered by strongly interventionist

‘enforcement’ agencies, such as HMIC, which play an active role, through audit

and inspection, in the maintenance of performance management and are in

themselves, a key part of the managerialist policing architecture in Britain. In

contrast, in French policing, although a performance framework has been set out for

police organisations to follow, there is far less by way of active audit of the

performance management process and more by way of an ‘aspirational’ approach

from the centre. Thirdly, in relation to this, there is a great deal of variance in the

degree of transparency between the two policing performance systems. One means of

‘enforcing’ the management of performance in British policing has been the use of

public exposure of such matters as variable ‘performance’ by different police forces �through league tables and so on. Other than at the national levels, in France the

‘performance’ of sub-national policing units is not made public, if indeed that sort of

information is actually available. Finally, in terms of the values placed on what

dimensions of policing are deemed relevant as measures of police performance, it is

clear that in Britain ‘qualitative’ dimensions, and in particular those associated with a

‘citizen focus’, occupy much greater status in the police managerialist culture than is

the case in France. Whilst in both countries measuring performance itself is highly

valued, what types of ‘performance’ are measured differs significantly.

Our analysis is in line with more general research on global public management

reforms undertaken in France and the UK. If both countries have been subject to

reforms inspired by NPM and managerialism, comparative studies have underlined


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that the impact of reforms differs across the two states (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2004,

pp. 96�99). In terms of broader public policy, if France could be said as belonging to

the group of ‘modernizers’, promoting changes in the administrative system through

decentralisation and flexibilisation, Great Britain has been part of the ‘marketizers’,introducing more competition and market-inspired instruments within public policy

and public service delivery. However, our sectoral cases offer qualifications to these

global diagnoses: for instance, contrary to other sectors of the French administration,

one has not witnessed any decentralisation associated with the managerial reforms

within the police. The common thread of these divergences seems to be ultimate

variance between the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Continental’ systems of policing. Unlike the

latter, the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ model permits a significant degree of (relative) autonomy of

local policing from central government, even if a process of increased centralisation,or ‘nationalisation’, of British policing has been evident in recent decades. It is the

tension and ‘push and pull’ between centralism and ‘localism’ in the British case

which accounts for at least some aspects of the distinctive forms taken by

performance management in Britain � such as the ‘citizen focus’ and the league

table ethos. In contrast, although traditional bureaucratic administration within the

French system has given way somewhat to the challenges of managerialism, the more

direct accountability of the police towards the state in the Continental model (Mawby

2003) has shaped the way managerialism has been realised in French policing; thenear absence of ‘citizens’ from the managerial gaze perhaps best illustrates that

feature. Cognitive and normative frames are here central: for French civil servants or

police leaders, the perception of the police by the public is not seen as a crucial

dimension of the evaluation of the quality of the police service. This is linked to the

conception of the relation between state, police and society, and more specifically to

the distinction between the Rechstaat and public interest conceptions (Pierre 1995).

French public administration is dominated by the Rechtstaat conception, where the

state is held to be a central force for social integration, the functions of the state beingfirst and foremost focused on the preparation and implementation of the law. In such

a conception, the missions of the police are defined primarily by the state rather than

through any ‘public mandate’ (such as ‘policing by consent’). The maintenance of

secrecy and the development of instruments mainly based on internally driven

measures are therefore more prevalent in the French model of police management. In

contrast, British public administration is more wedded to the public interest

conception where the state is less prevalent in civil society and, relatively speaking,

public officials occupy more the role of ‘public servants’ � as such externally oriented,measures of police performance and effectiveness sit more easily. Such ‘macro’

comparisons help us to explain structural variations in the two national frameworks

in the mode of evaluating police performance. Further research, however, is necessary

to track how those structural variations in performance regimes are translated

(or not) into ‘front-line’ policing activity and behaviours � research which the authors

of this article are now undertaking.

Conclusion

In this article we have mapped and compared the development of managerialism and

performance culture within British and French policing. We would conclude that

whilst we find common dynamics in both countries (the spread of performance


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indicators, the rise of the performance language within administrations, competition

between police units, etc.) in the general context of politicisation of law and order,

these changes differ considerably in their extent as well as their nature. The

instruments of measurement (more internally centred in France and more diversified

in Britain), the degree of transparency (more marked in Britain), the monitoring

(strammering in France) differ quite radically in both countries.

Our argument complements research recently conducted in comparative penal

policies that stress the numerous divergences between policies conducted in various

western countries (Cavadino and Dignan 2006, Newburn and Jones 2006, 2007,

Tonry 2007), differences that are anchored in institutional variance (institutional

division of powers between executive and legislative, between central and local

institutions), constitutional vartiance (more or less autonomy given to the judiciary),

media pressure, the more or less consensual political culture and the relative

insulation of professionals from political pressures or the national political economy.

In our studies, differences may be explained by long-standing and deeply ingrained

political and administrative traditions. Both countries present specific configurations

of change anchored in structural factors in the relation between police, state and

society (see also Ferret 2004). Ultimately, whatever the globalised force of the

managerialist movement, fundamental variations in relationships, constitutional and

cultural, between the state and the police organisation, govern the shape manage-

rialism will take within specific nation states.

If this article has attempted to set out the broad basis for a Franco-British

comparison on police performance management, more work is needed to better

understand the institutionalisation of performance measurement and management in

police institutions. In particular, more research needs to be conducted on how these

tools are implemented into specific organisational practices and how they affect the

day-to-day work of police officers. The obstacles and resistance facing the

implementation of reforms are numerous: opposition coming from various

hierarchical levels (top management/intermediary management) depending on their

organisational interests, opposition from the unions/associations, opposition from

street level officers, contradictory demands made by the public (asking for more

efficient interventions and better quality of police work), change in political

leadership, and so on (see Skogan 2008). This work should involve the concrete

analysis of how police leaders frame their local strategies in relation to new

managerialist pressures and how the reforms translate through different functional

levels of the organisation, and at what point they meet opposition, resistance and

‘filtering’. Such work would extend in productive ways the comparative framework of

police performance management offered here.

Notes

1. There are two national police forces. The national police (police nationale) are in charge ofurban areas and the national gendarmerie dedicated to rural and semi urban areas. Since2002, the national gendarmerie, for missions of internal security, is under the responsibilityof the Ministry of Interior. In 2007, there was 145,820 staff for the national police and85,389 for the national gendarmerie.


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2. Circonscriptions are the basic territorial divide for the national police. There exists 420circonscriptions.

3. These include the following: ‘Analysis of a service’, ‘Management by objectives and cultureof performance’, ‘Global management’, ‘Management and leadership’, ‘Evaluation ofterritorialized policies’, ‘Inspection function’, ‘Cycle for top management executives’,‘Monitoring individual employees and culture of results’, ‘Quality: an approach to supportthe modernization of the public services’, ‘Support a team and collective management’,‘Feedback and debriefing’.

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Comparing performance: the development of police performance management in France and Britain

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