Police Commissioner Elections, 15th November
Liane Langdon questions what it is we are voting on and is it a good idea anyhow …?
In little over a week the people of West Yorkshire will be asked to elect the first Police Commissioner for the West Yorkshire Police. Now, I don’t know about you, but when I think police commissioner the only image I am getting is of Commissioner Gordon fluctuating between Gary Oldman and the guy in the 1970s ‘kapow’ Adam West era Batman. This is not helping me engage in the decision making process.
We are being asked to select a commissioner to “hold to account” the chief of police, so this person will not be running the police, but is an elected post who is supposed to make sure that the policing of the county reflects the priorities of the electorate. Now, I am all for holding public services to account, after all this is our money they are spending, but surely this is the job of the chair of the police authority? This is a post which already exists. Admittedly I had no idea who this was until the elections, but we didn’t have to fund an election process to appoint them, and the job description looks pretty similar to me.
If I am to engage in an election I need to understand what the position is for and what influence it has, why electing the person makes a difference and what the candidates stand for. The official government website is pretty superficial, but the Policy Exchange Think Tank asks a wider range of questions and lets you compare and contrast the candidates.
Now, whilst I will be exercising my vote, I would really prefer the option to vote on whether having an elected police commissioner makes any sense, or whether selecting from (predominantly) a range of local councillors is an acceptable candidate pool for this role. One candidate offers ‘because I was asked’ as his reason for standing and one chooses not to expand outside of his two paragraphs from the government website carefully scripted to vacant blandness by the campaign manager.
If we are electing these police commissioners to address the ‘democratic deficit’ in the police, then the premise is as flawed here as it is in the recent changes in the NHS. We fund public services for specific reasons: they are only viable when provided on a large scale; where the need for the service is not well aligned with the ability to purchase that service; or where we understand at a macro level that society needs a service which few individuals would find a personal motivation to purchase (or ability to purchase). It is a fallacy that there is a stronger public mandate for such services through local elections than that created through the implementation of public policy held to account by government. More people vote in national elections than local ones, and parliament, or even local councils, offer greater challenge to idiosyncratic personal agendas than a lone police commissioner would be susceptible to.
Decisions taken by locally elected officials on whether we should fund skate parks, swimming pools or weekly rather than fortnightly green bin collections are materially different than those decisions on how long you should wait for a new hip or whether your police force should have officers trained in supporting victims of sexual assault. Social services already feel on the wrong side of this line to me, why would we move police services across the line too?
How is the policing approach required to address the needs of West Yorkshire a local party political decision and not one of a blend of public policy, understanding of appropriate and effective interventions established by experience and review and informed analysis of crime and disorder statistics?
Many of the candidates say that they will give greater voice to the victims of crime, including allowing them to determine community penalties or utilisation of reparations paid. Our legal system is built on the premise that society as a whole passes judgement through the proxy of a judge implementing the law as laid down by our duly elected parliament. This mechanism specifically and deliberately excludes the victim from determination of the verdict or the punishment, and with good reason. As a society we do not believe in the death penalty, but as the relative of a murder victim we may well feel differently. We speak of inmates ‘paying their debt to society’, not to individuals. I am troubled when our local police commissioner nominees are proposing to take our local policing away from our social model of justice towards one of personal retribution.
Victims of crime have an important voice in bringing perpetrators of crime to justice, in building deeper understanding of the nature of crime and disorder in our communities and in shaping preventative responses. If our candidates can harness these voices along with those of the wider community and translate this into a way to shape the delivery of national policy that best serves West Yorkshire, well then they would be getting the job done. Still, I keep coming back to the same question, couldn’t the chair of the police authority make this happen?
The important thing to note is that they are Police and Crime Commissioners, and everything so far has been quiet on what the role of a Crime Commissioner is. If their role is to commission crime, then there is a certain logic to knowing who is commissioning and carrying out the crimes. This may open up a can of worms corruption-wise, but also could increase crime (a full time job, sitting there, commissioning crime) as well as reduce it (looking for efficiencies, where crimes can be commissioned more easily). Now, then question of how viable a publicly known and elected mafia boss, with the dual role of keeping an eye on the Police, actually is.
I also want to vote for maintaining the status quo, as I’ve not seen an argument for how this new way would be better, aside from the £3 million in extra salary costs alone (OK, that may be chickenfeed to Government, but when you see public services cut for the want of less…)
Quite simply, jobs for the boys, the commissioner will do nothing but look at his red phone hoping batman comes to his rescue.
Why does every force need one anyway, if there is to be an independant watchdog of the police surely we only need one?
Like the mayoral vote we should as a local community have been given the choice.
Localism only suits the government when it means they can pass the buck and blame councils for anything that doesnt work and claim the kudos when it works.
Liane, why will you be exercising your vote when, as you show, this is all so vague?
I’m also concerned about the idea of giving the ‘victims of crime’ a greater voice within the justice system. Part of this is antipathy to the whole idea of ‘giving a voice’ in the first place. Nowadays, it seems that the great-and-the-good are all for ‘giving a voice’ to people – which is as patronising and worthy as it sounds, and usually means giving themselves the voice to speak on behalf of others they don’t actually represent. But there’s greater dangers with giving the victims of crime a voice, the first of which you allude to – and that is that the justice system should be dispassionate. But the other is that giving ‘the victims of crime’ a voice actually gives greater powers of arbitrary punishment to the state and justice system – who are ultimately the ones who grant that voice, decide which voices to hear and to interpret them.