THE PSNI will strive to provide “personal policing” while its officers will be gradually freed from bureaucracy to spend more time on the beat, the new chief constable has said.
Matt Baggott used his first appearance before a public session of the Northern Ireland Policing Board to outline his vision for the service as he takes over from Sir Hugh Orde, who quit last month.
Mr Baggott, the former head of Leicestershire police, said it was necessary for individual officers to build relationships with citizens and to ground their work in the community.
He also promised to reduce the PSNI’s internal bureaucracy and to ease the culture of form-filling. This, he said, would allow more officers to patrol visibly and boost the service’s crime clear-up rates.
“I think bureaucracy can be a very helpful comfort blanket,” he said. “You can show success by filling in a form well – that doesn’t necessarily mean you are doing the things that matter.”
Central to this policy will be an initiative allowing officers new powers to deal on the spot with low-level crime and anti-social behaviour rather than resort to report filing.
“When the bureaucracy takes you away from having the space and time to deal with victims appropriately, then the bureaucracy must be wrong,” Mr Baggott said.
“I have seen many, many colleagues in my years of service who have suddenly been liberated from the tyranny of too much red tape suddenly rediscover their passion and commitment for policing.”
His initiatives follow the leaking last month of the PSNI’s internal strategic review, which faulted the service for spending more than 60 per cent of officers’ time on form-filling.
Mr Baggott, when asked about the threat from dissident republicans, said the security risk was “high” but dealing with it was only one of several key priorities.
Community and anti-terror policing were not at opposite ends of the scale, he added. “Instead, they are linked.”
His officers were working to narrow the ground on which terrorists operated and this would take public co-operation and consent, he said.