The home office yesterday unveiled its blueprint for reforming the police which promises the biggest organisational shake-up for 50 years; the frustration about this announcement is that it should have been a Labour home secretary making it.
The home office yesterday unveiled its blueprint for reforming the police which promises the biggest organisational shake-up for 50 years. The proposals are contained in Policing in the 21st century: reconnecting police and the people and, among other things, will see the creation of elected Police and Crime Commissioners in each police force area from 2012.
In a completely new constitutional departure, commissioners will be responsible for setting a force’s priorities and budget and have powers to recruit and dismiss chief constables. Police authorities, which date back to 1964, will be scrapped entirely. Meanwhile a new Police and Crime Panel will oversee the commissioner’s budget, hold public meetings and produce an annual report.
The frustration about this announcement is that it should have been a Labour home secretary making it. Although crime levels fell a staggering 43 per cent under the last Labour government, the police went virtually unreformed and the otherwise estimable shadow home secretary, Alan Johnson, is completely off the pace in his opposition to this issue.
In responding to home secretary Teresa May, Mr Johnson said elected police commissioners were an “unnecessary, unwanted and expensive diversion”, claiming that the idea amounted to the politicisation of policing.
But of course one person’s ‘politicisation’ is another’s ‘public accountability’. For a service which was recently exposed for having just one in every ten police officers available to tackle crime at any one time – despite year-on-year budget increases over the past four decades – a bit more scrutiny is probably long overdue.
And when more democracy is seen to be a problem, then it’s a funny old world. Indeed, there seems to be a resistance from some progressives about elected police commissioners because they fear it ushers in the “frightening” prospect of BNP bovver boys getting elected.
Let’s be clear: you cannot run a democracy on the basis that the wrong person might get elected. You fight to make sure the right one does. No-one seriously argues that because housing and children’s services are sensitive matters we should scrap elections to councils in case the BNP takes control of them too.
Neither is it the case, as the Local Government Association inexplicably argues, that elected commissioners will “weaken the ability” of the police and local authorities to cut crime. They will put a dent in the expenses of their members who currently sit on police authorities, but that is hardly the same thing.
The role of elected Police and Crime Commissioners is similar to that of a council leader to their chief executive. They are a democratic lead ensuring the public’s voice is heard throughout the organisation; while operational independence to run the force remains in the hands of the chief constable.
But the value of elected commissioners is that the very act of voting someone into office will stimulate greater debate about key local crime and disorder issues. The police will become more responsive simply because the buck will now stop somewhere to ensure the public’s priorities are delivered. The police will stop being a top-down, take-it-or-leave-it-service and get with the programme about how modern public services are run.
The simple truth is that nothing ever changes in large organisations unless the job of someone at the very top is on the line. But chief constables are virtually regal figures. They are untouchable. The system can only benefit from someone looking over their shoulder. And the bottom line is that the police force is the ultimate failing public service – unresponsive, unreformed and very expensive – and long overdue for a sharp kick in the pants. For so many years they have been immune from change because of lax corporate governance and their own low cunning in keeping politicians’ tanks off their lawns. These reforms will help sweep away that rotten culture.
In fact, the faster Labour reverses out of the intellectual cu-de-sac it now finds itself in on police reform, the better. It feels a bit like the Conservatives’ reaction to the creation of the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly 12 years ago. Not so much implacable opposition, more a case of foot-dragging begrudgery. It will make it harder to elect progressive figures to these crucial roles if Labour is still pulling its face about whether they should even exist.
Good riddance to flaccid police authorities. As the consultation document puts it, they are “too invisible”. They are window-dressing; pseudo-democratic cover for feudal chief constables. Their democratic value is negligible. There is no direct connection to the public – only 8 per cent of wards elect councillors who sit on police authorities. And a third of their members must be magistrates – people who, with the greatest of respect, are part and parcel of the same insular, arcane system as the police. Rather than tribunes of the people they are vassals of the constabulary.
The fact that greater democratisation of the police service was a clear manifesto commitment of both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, means that this reform is going to happen, despite the police being adept at shutting the window on the winds of change in the past.
The response of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) is markedly more diplomatic from the previous silly sabre-rattling of their president, Sir Hugh Orde, who predicted that chief constables would resign in protest if this reform went through. ACPO now says it needs to “examine in detail the government’s proposals for maintaining operational independence against the practical reality of directly-elected Police and Crime Commissioners”.
Meanwhile, the usually excitable Police Federation which represents rank and file officers, is even more sanguine, saying:
“The Federation is not against the proposal for elected commissioners but we would urge detailed consideration and a firm business case.”
Tellingly, the Association of Police Authorities has not been able to steel itself to comment yet.
In our post-ideological political times ideas become increasingly fluid. There are still many issues to oppose this government over. But elected Police and Crime Commissioners should not one of them.
39 Responses to “Progressives should be supporting Elected Police Commissioners”
Tim Mullen
What absolute rubbish, and another example of why so-called “progressives” have no place in the Labour Party.
May I draw Mr Meagher’s attention to the largest (and to my knowledge only) country to elect police commissioners/chiefs/sherrifs, call them what you will, the United States: here you have Sherrif Joe Arpaio of Maracopa County, Arizona, who seems to find it aceptable to introduce racial profiling (currently the subject of legal action by the ACLU) and is under investigation by the Department of Justice and FBI for bogus arrest and prosecution in order to inflate his “success” rate. On the other side of the fence we have former Sherrif Brad Ellsworth of Indiana, who after three terms in the US House of Representatives is now the Democratic Party candidate for US Senate in November.
There is no public demand for the election of Chief Officers of Police, there is no logical reason for them to be elected, other than the deluded ramblings of people like Mr Meagher, who having tried to destroy local government through the failed policy of directly elected Mayors, moved on to destroying the comprehensive education system through the introduction of Academy Schools outside the control of Local Education Authorities, and now want to destroy the independence of the police forces by politicisation. These people are totally out of touch with the real world, and to borrow a phrase from our American cousins should get off their butts and smell the coffee.
We do not want them, we have no purpose for them, and I trust that all five candidates for the Labour leadership will continue Alan Johnson’s policies and will repudiate this ridiculous and dangerous proposal.
Mr Meagher, there are still some vacancies on the Conservative benches, perhaps you would like to join them, as you obviously have no sympathy for, or understand of, the traditions, policies and values of the Labour movement.
George
America has elected judges, and look what happened. The electorate never ceases to demand tougher and tougher action on criminals, so elected law makers create tougher and tougher laws in an effort to appear tougher than the last guy, while elected judges give longer and longer sentences to also appear tough. Is this the road we want to go down? We already have a plethora of wide ranging, widely defined catch-all criminal offences on the statute book, thanks mainly to Labour being in power over the past 13 years. Police chiefs, in a bid to secure their next election will clamp down on as many people as they can to appear competent, to the detriment of all of us. Nobody should support this.
Shamik Das
Anon, if you’d ever been out canvassing you’d realise Johnson was 100% correct – it’s the Westminster Village liberals who are out of step with the public on cctv & the dna database. The public, especially those who live in high crime areas want MORE not less cctv, not that Cleggy and Cameron give a damn what they think.
Tom Miller
RT @leftfootfwd: Progressives should be supporting Elected Police Commissioners: http://bit.ly/9EzyjI
Tom Miller
I’m not sure if this is good or bad, but even on the bits where I agree with the Tories, LFF agrees with me.
There is only one thing you have ever been wrong about, and that’s open primaries.