Are Performance Metrics the Equivalent of a Remedy for Public Order?

According to press reports, the Executive Yuan's public security meeting has approved a "Project Evaluation Plan for Enhancing National Public Security," which from July this year establishes a so-called "color-coded early warning mechanism" rating each city and county's public security with five colors—blue, green, purple, yellow, and red—with results published every three months. If a jurisdiction is rated C for two consecutive periods, receiving the worst red light, its police chief will be given a major demerit or even transferred as punishment. The Executive Yuan's purpose in implementing the mechanism is clearly to achieve results on public security; the intent of pushing the police to devote themselves fully to maintaining public order is in itself understandable. But what ordinary people worry about is that this reward-and-punishment mechanism is still an evaluation system driven by performance metrics. Will it lead police units, in pursuit of good ratings, to resort to evasive tactics such as "burying cases"? Or to treat cases unequally, focusing only on the types of cases that score high?

In my own experience, a few years ago my car was stolen. About a month after I reported it to the police, it was found abandoned by the roadside. When the police notified me to complete the paperwork, I discovered that because officers must reach a basic performance score each month to be rated A, they deliberately pick the task of finding stolen vehicles to earn points, and they do it as a team: points earned by Officer A for finding a stolen car are transferred to Officer B, who lacks enough points, so that the credit goes to B. Under such a metrics-driven system, it is no wonder that we keep seeing news stories like officers, to pad their performance, staging thefts with relatives and friends by falsely reporting stolen scooters—resulting in the absurdity of one scooter being "lost and recovered" more than a hundred times over eight years; officers, hunting for points, treating scavengers who picked up stolen vehicle parts that had become scrap metal as thieves; and even, upon catching a suspect, "inflating" results by declaring all similar cases in the precinct solved.

For example, under the criminal investigation performance scoring standards set by the National Police Agency of the Ministry of the Interior, each robbery case is worth 15 points, each rape case 10 points, each assault case 3 points, and each stolen car 5 points (when no offender is caught). The police performance system thus seems to "pick the soft persimmons": finding three stolen cars on the road earns as many points as a hard-to-solve robbery, which easily creates a false picture of peace and order. Although the public feels the pain of theft more directly, the police cannot emphasize theft cases just to manufacture public security results, forcing frontline officers to "bury cases" or chase cases that easily earn points. How does that benefit the people? In reality, an officer's performance should depend on whether he works conscientiously and responsibly and on the quality of his casework. If an officer diligently patrols rather than going off in full gear to drink tea and chat, conscientiously handles the public's reports, pursues criminal investigations tenaciously, verifies evidence carefully, and sees offenders convicted, can he be called lazy or irresponsible even if his performance score is not high? How can points on paper reflect the true quality of such performance?

With elections approaching, those in power naturally want to step up their public security record. Yet for years no good remedy has emerged for the abuses produced by the police performance system, and the new "color-coded early warning mechanism" still uses performance scores as its rating standard. Whether it will end up caring only about appearances rather than substance, let us wait and see.

* Published in the Liberty Times.