A former Barnet police officer has accused the force of encouraging arrests, fines and stop and searches by giving cash and alcohol rewards to officers.

Simon Wilson, 37, claims he felt pressured into “getting his figures up” in order to win a bottle of wine or the £100 ‘officer of the month’ award — a prize given to the highest-performing officer on the core response units, which deal with 999 emergency calls.

Barnet police admitted giving cash rewards, but refused to release the names and performance figures of the past 12 award winners.

They said the awards were only partly based on statistics, with more weight given to how well officers dealt with individual crimes and paperwork, or specific acts of heroism.

Mr Wilson, who left the force 18 months ago, claims he felt uncomfortable because he “did not fit into the figures mentality”.

He said: “I didn’t exactly leave on good terms, but what partly caused my downfall was that I didn’t agree with the figures culture.

“To win the cash you had to show evidence of high numbers of arrests, penalty notices and stop and searches.

“If you didn’t get those you were shown charts comparing the different teams and boroughs and told you were not performing.

“I worked extremely hard, but it was only possible to seek promotion or progress in your career if your stats were up to scratch.

“It was like a competition that took all the correctness out of the procedure.”

Team performance packs, produced every six weeks, list the number of arrests made by each officer during that period, the number of stop and searches, and the number of people charged, cautioned, released or fined.

Acting Superintendent Phil Halsey, in charge of performance, stressed these figures needed to be documented because the force was accountable to the public — but he insisted the data only played a small part in deciding cash rewards.

“This analysis is very simplistic,” he said. “The reason these rewards were brought in was because there are lots of benefits to not being on a core response team.

“They have to do night duty and are often put in positions of danger, so we do anything we can to keep them on.”

Supt Halsey said one of the most effective ways to assess performance was via community focus reports, based on surveys of people the officers had recently dealt with.

He also stressed that officers could not arrest, fine or search people without good cause.

“With stop and searches we assess all the data and check the ages and ethnicities of those stopped tallies with the demographics of the borough,” he explained.

“With arrests there are always two officers present and we always check afterwards what happens to the person arrested.”

However Mr Wilson remains unconvinced.

“You should just be encouraged to do a good job, develop a sound knowledge base, be smart and enthusiastic,” he said, “not be obsessed with figures.”