Lets try and focus.

Whilst on my travels a little while back, I ended up in the canteen/restaurant area of one of our Divisional HQ's and found myself sitting at the next table to a couple of quite senior officers. They were chatting away as they do about targets and the vagaries of statistics on Divisional 'basket of crime' figures, when one of them announced that 'we are aiming to be 'customer driven'. This caused me to pause over my sausage and egg roll as I had this notion that the finances had become that bad that the victims of crime were expected to call at the station and pick US up and take us to the scene of the crime/incident.

But no..... what I think he was talking about is now firmly entrenched in the notion of Citizen Focused policing.

There is a definition..'its a way of working in which an in depth understanding of the needs , experience and expectations of individuals and local communities is routinely reflected in decision making, service delivery and practice'.

Citizen focused policing is very much the baby of the Diversity and Citizen Focus Directorate.

The Met has a Directorate for pretty much everything these days.

There is quite a lot at the Directorates web site but I dutifully ploughed through it. There are some nice charts, diagrams and list of aims etc..

It is all very worthy stuff.. and it would appear, on this little number, that there are more 'stakeholders' than a Peter Cushing film compilation.

However I can but think that your average Citizen would really want us to Focus on three main things....keeping the streets safe....detecting and solving crime.... and arresting offenders.

I cannot knock the aims of this approach but it tiptoes around our core roles rather than actually talking about them.