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- The University Of Birmingham (UBir)
Lecture notes of 30 pages for the course Management accounting at UBir (-)
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Critical Perspectives on Accounting 17 (2006) 57–86Costing police services: The politicization
of accounting夽
Paul M. Collier ∗
Aston Business School, Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK
Received 10 August 2002; received in revised form 4 January 2004; accepted 10 February 2004
Abstract
This paper explores the implementation of ‘activity-based’ costing in policing in England and Wales.
The 2-year study focused on interviews and analysis of costing data in six forces in an environment
in which there are concerns by government about the relationship between cost and performance.
The paper concludes that ‘activity-based’ costing is rhetoric rather than reality and is as much a
political as a managerial process. The politicization of policing is seen to involve a shift from a moral
panic about crime to one of financial panic over the cost/performance of police. The paper identifies
the potential tension between costs and values but argues that the adoption of an accounting technique
has been political in that, by overlooking problems of calculability and interpretation of the numbers,
it has made certain activities and resource allocations visible, while others—notably the redistribution
of police services—have remained or become invisible.
© 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Police; Activity-based costing; Performance measurement
1. Introduction
This paper is a study of the introduction of activity analysis and the costing of police
services in England and Wales. It describes the results of a study over 2 years at a national
夽 Earlier versions of this paper were presented to the 5th Management Control Systems Research Conference
at Royal Holloway, University of London and to the 3rd Asia Pacific Interdisciplinary Research in Accounting
Conference in Adelaide.
∗ Tel.: +44 121 359 3011x5082; fax: +44 121 333 5708.
E-mail address: p.m.collier@aston.ac.uk.
1045-2354/$ – see front matter © 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.cpa.2004.02.008
,58 P.M. Collier / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 17 (2006) 57–86
level of the introduction of activity costing and the experience of six forces, gained from
interviews and the analysis of costed activity data. The introduction of what the police
service calls ‘activity-based’ costing is aimed at increasing visibility about what the police
do, based on the assumption that the resources allocated to policing by government should
be reflected in measurable performance improvement, despite crime being only one element
of what police officers actually do.
The research is an investigation of the design, underlying assumptions, political impli-
cations and the experience of early adopters. It provides an ex ante understanding of the
introduction of activity costing into policing set within a broader milieu of the politiciza-
tion of policing during the second half of the 20th century. The politicization of policing
is seen to involve a shift from a moral panic about crime to one of financial panic over the
cost/performance of police. The paper identifies the potential tension between costs and
values but argues that the adoption of an accounting technique has been political in that,
by overlooking problems of calculability and interpretation of the numbers, it has made
certain activities and resource allocations visible, while others—notably the redistribution
of police services—have remained or become invisible.
The paper is arranged as follows. The first section introduces the milieu of politicization
of the police. The second section summaries the literature on costing for police services.
In the third section, the research methods are described. In the fourth section, the paper
describes the context of change, the emphasis on cost and performance in policing and the
early implementation experience of six police forces with activity costing. The fifth section
discusses the findings of the research.
2. Milieu of politicization of policing
The police service provides an important public service. The public relies on the police
for protection against crime and pubic disturbances. The public also expects the police to
reassure them that they are safe from injury and loss of property. However, what the police
do, and how they do it, is largely presented to the public via press reports that construct
a milieu in which crime is increasing, in which abuses of police power take place, and in
which the failings of the police receive much more attention than do their successes. It is this
press attention to policing, and its impact on the electorate, that largely drives the political
response that is the subject of this paper.
The political attention to policing cannot be divorced from changes in society. Morgan
and Newburn (1997) traced the growth in prosperity in Britain during the second half of the
1990s, noting that this prosperity was not equally shared. Society became more polarized,
both economically as long-term unemployment increased and geographically as households
with the lowest incomes clustered together. These changes led to the marginalization and
alienation of whole sections of the population, but most notably ethnic minority groups.
Morgan and Newburn (1997) commented on the “socially disorderly consequences . . . of
spawning and then ignoring the aspirations of large and increasingly concentrated disad-
vantaged communities denied a reasonable share of the growing and flaunted prosperity
enjoyed by the majority of people”. Morgan and Newburn noted the increase in the rate of
offences from 1 per 100 of the population in 1950 to 10 per 100 of the population in 1993.
, P.M. Collier / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 17 (2006) 57–86 59
However, they also commented on the difficulty of measuring crime rates over long periods
due to changing recording and statistical practices, a point this paper returns to later.
An in-depth case study of one example of this was carried out by Hall et al. (1978)
who described the rise in ‘mugging’ as a crime in the UK in the early 1970s as part of a
wider ‘moral panic’ about rising violent crime. However, the authors demonstrated that the
perceived crime increase was not based on statistical evidence. Hall et al. focused on how
statistics were interpreted by the police and reported in the media via the new ‘mugging’
label, and the official government and judicial reaction which was out of proportion to the
actual threat.
Hall et al. (1978) showed how “the selectivity of police reaction to selected crimes
almost certainly serves to increase their number . . . in the form of a cluster, or ‘crime
wave’ ” since the more resources are concentrated, the greater the number of recorded
crimes. This culminated in a “description of associations” between race, crime, housing and
unemployment from which emerged the problem of “anti-social, black youth” (p. 101–102).
Hall et al. concluded that crime and the law were products of antagonistic social relations
and one of the principal means by which class domination was secured. Mugging could be
seen, at least in one respect, as a conscious, political challenge to the prevailing social and
political order as it became “a defensive base for new strategies of survival amongst the
black community as a whole” (p. 353).
A more recent example of social relationships and policing is found in the Stephen
Lawrence Inquiry (Cm. 4262, 1999) in which the police were strongly criticized for their
handling of two separate investigations into the murder of a black teenager in London in
1993. The Inquiry found that there had been a combination of “professional incompetence,
institutional racism and a failure of leadership by senior officers”. The Inquiry found that
police officers exhibited behavior founded in stereotypes. As a result of the Inquiry, there
have been changes in crime recording practices for racist incidents, to the treatment of
victims, victims’ families and witnesses, and the training of police officers in race awareness
and cultural diversity.
It is arguable that resource limitations coupled with the pressure of meeting an increas-
ing public demand for police services and a performance culture based on financial and
non-financial performance measurement may have contributed to the failures described in
the Lawrence Inquiry, although these matters were not addressed by the Inquiry report.
However, Collier (2001a) described how the performance culture “may lead to tensions and
failures in the qualitative aspects of police performance”. Collier (2001b) concluded: “The
appearance of rationality is satisfied by the publication of statistics on expenditure, objec-
tives, performance and crime. The public may believe that these are inter-related. However,
despite the value in any individual measures, there is an absence of rationality because of
the absence of understanding about the relationship between input, behavior, output and
outcome, i.e. the lack of understanding of cause and effect relationships”.
Reiner (2000) described the politicization of policing in the UK since 1959 through
corruption and malpractice scandals, the latter including the release of a succession of
convicted persons as a consequence of tainted evidence. At the heart of malpractice was
the violation of the ‘Judges’ Rules’ that laid down procedures that protected the rights
of suspects. Further politicization took place through the use of the police in riot control,
especially to break the 1984–1985 miners’ strike and the 1990 anti-poll tax demonstrations.
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