CPS IS A VICTIM

The story continues:  otherwise known as the decline of the CPS as an effective organisation.  Television companies are always seeking effective ways of providing programmes at lower costs without losing audience share.  One of the first such programmes now included in the genre "reality TV" was in 1964, when the Granada Television Company produced "Seven Up";   broadcast interviews with a dozen ordinary 7-year-olds from a broad cross-section of society that inquired about their reactions to everyday life. Every seven years, a film documented the life of the same individuals during the intervening period, titled the Up Series, episodes include "7 Plus Seven", "21 Up", etc.; it is still ongoing. One of the most recent reality TV shows was ‘The Prosecutors: Real Crime and Punishment’ broadcast on BBC last month. This blog has made its own view of the CPS  quite clear in the last couple of years and many times previously at its now defunct site.   Just as with all the similar programmes in various disguises on the police service and other organisations  the objective of the subjects is to show themselves in the best possible light considering the circumstances under which they work.   For them it is cheap propaganda. But propaganda can go only so far.  Yet again the failings of the CPS have been highlighted this time in a BBC report  and this in the week when another group of alleged rapists has been acquitted owing to failures of the police and prosecution to make required use of information at hand.  They must have been blinded by the myopic approach under their so called victims` charter to pursue the alleged perpetrators.  

The problem IMHO lies in the CPS operating what in so many words seems to be a "target" culture.  We have seen such principles in public services before.  The NHS was [is?] notorious for outcomes to have been distorted by such a culture.  Police forces have been thoroughly discredited for such a means to an end.  At lower levels of importance town councils and their employees have used the same approach with traffic management as their excuse for the imposition of all manner of restrictions and offences. 

The methodology at the CPS when government has a non cabinet member as Victims` Minister is hardly likely to change in the near future.  Sensible outcomes of convictions and improved efficiency will come about only when such a ridiculous ministerial post is abolished and the balance of justice is allowed to take its course without the state i.e. the CPS being deprived of funding, being sidelined, pushed, cajoled and  pressurised from such sources.  Indeed one might comment that the CPS itself is a victim.