Police discretion, outsourcing and performance management: 999 emergency calls in the Lincolnshire Police-G4S Strategic Partnership

This article explores police discretion and performance management in the Lincolnshire Police-G4S Strategic Partnership: a landmark £229 million outsourcing arrangement which ran from 2012 to 2022. Interpreting original qualitative and quantitative data relating to 999 emergency call handling through a structure-agency lens, it advances three key findings: (1) the local contract-based 999 performance management structure enabled some degree of police discretion, allowing police actors to turn-up performance metrics to maximise G4S service delivery and turn-down these metrics to accommodate public demand (this is termed ‘contractual police discretion’); (2) this structure also constrained police discretion, preventing police actors from responding to public need when their proposed solution necessitated a redrawing of the contract (this is termed ‘non-contractual police discretion’); (3) to circumvent these constraints, police actors played their ultimate discretion card – exiting the contract altogether. These findings contribute to scholarship on discretion, outsourcing and performance management and reveal some of the key successes and failures of the Lincolnshire Police-G4S Strategic Partnership.