Costing police services: The politicization of accounting

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.