The evaluation system of the activities of departments and certain employees of the militia (now – police) on the basis of statistical indicators that reflect the amount of completed work of a certain kind (the “quota system”) is one of the most challenging problems for the reform of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The tendency of employees at all levels to adjust their activities to the “good” indicators results in several negative consequences: upward distortions in reports, the striving for “good” indicators to the prejudice of the purpose of work, evasion of registration of certain offences and fabrication of evidence in case of others, formal approach to certain responsibilities, and neglect of those that do not influence the accountability reports.
The “stick” issue is especially salient in cases of the criminal militia, where the relevant indicators are the number of registered criminal cases, of solved cases, and of detected criminals. In terms of fighting crime, the “stick system” brings forth the following disadvantages:
• Denials of registration of applications filed by the citizens that fall under the categories of crimes that are complicated to solve, or those that often remain unsolved – for instance, burglary).
• “Detection” of non-existent crimes, or the hunt for certain types of offences, as well as the ignoring of others, depending on the correlation of the reality and the “plan”.
• Use of illegal methods of work with the goal of speeding up the process of solving the case, and reduce the efforts of the officer.
• Concealment of information on unsolved crimes.
• Overload of the employees with paperwork.
• Indifference of the superior employees (and often even a direct interest) towards manipulations of the accountability reports, performed by the subordinate employees.
• Distortion of the final image of crime dynamics.
As the international experience has shown, complete renunciation of the “stick system” as an instrument of administration is almost impossible in large police units. The only viable alternative is a full renunciation of centralized administration and municipal subordination of police units. In large cities, where the number of policemen cannot be low, such an approach proves to be ineffective. The disadvantages of the “stick” system are also
rather universal and are not subject to full elimination; these negative effects are cumulative and cannot be eliminated by the police leadership, and the demand
mechanisms of external control of police activities for restriction and prevention of development.
In this policy paper we suggest the following measures, which are capable of – at least partially and temporarily – mitigating the situation.
• “Nullification” of the already existing indicators, reflecting the results of implementation of the aforementioned fallacious practices, and beginning the count of the crime dynamics anew.
• Elimination of the “integral” indicators of quality of department work, when statistical data functioning as a criterion of evaluation for subordinate departments
is summed up directly into the statistics.
• Strengthening of the procurer’s control over legality throughout the investigation.
In order to achieve this, the procurer’s office must be freed from superfluous functions.
• Re-orientation of the internal security service towards the struggle with illegal investigation methods and report manipulation.
It is abstract in English of Russian-language text by Ella Paneyakh and Kirill Titaev.
You can download this abstract (PDF) and full text in Russian (PDF)