Let the people police the police - The Sunday Telegraph, 14 September 2008

Senior police officers appear to have adopted the modus operandi of their political masters: plots, public attacks on colleagues and secret briefings.

The racism row at the Metropolitan Police has revealed a fractious high command, apparently more intent on pursuing legal action against each other than criminals. As Ian Johnston of the Police Superintendents' Association said last week, the police hierarchy is becoming dangerously distant from the public and rank and file officers.

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s police commanders have pleaded for greater resources and more powers, most recently the ability to detain terrorism suspects for 42 days without charge.

Thanks to politicians keen to garner the "crime vote" they have succeeded. The UK spends more on criminal justice as a proportion of GDP than any other developed country, overtaking the US in the past decade.

Hi-tech has replaced high street as officers have come to rely on speed cameras, distant patrol bases and complex computer models. Crime is about social disorder and very human failure, but we are using machines and tick box forms to replace the human judgment that was once a hallmark of British policing.

Through the imposition of ever more targets, politicians have made the police beholden to them rather than to the public.

Top police officers can play their different bosses off against each other - the weak local Criminal Justice Boards and their national political paymasters, who are both desperate for good headlines and instant results. You are more likely to see a senior police officer lobbying in the corridors of the House of Commons than tramping the mean streets of Clapham.

This turbo politicisation has alienated people. The public outcry over cases such as the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes reflects growing disquiet at the lack of accountability. The public have become passive, believing that it is the police's job to deal with anti-social behaviour (76 per cent believe this compared to around 45 per cent in France and Germany) and not being satisfied with the results.

The number who rate the police as doing a good or excellent job fell from 64 per cent in 1996 to 48 per cent in 2004-05.

This month Reform released The Lawful Society, a report that called for the public to take a more active role in criminal justice. The postbag in response was crammed with letters from frustrated people who wanted to get involved or had reported incidents to the police, only to find themselves ignored or, even worse, accused. People simply do not believe that the police are on their side.

What should be done? First, we need to wrest power from the hands of politicians and senior officials and place it back in the hands of the law-abiding public. The police could, for example, get out of their patrol cars and make it easier for people to talk to them about what is going on in the locality. We could have police boxes as they do in Japan, where people can drop in and report incidents to a local warden, rather than ringing a remote call centre.

The police should be made directly accountable through the abolition of national targets and controls and the election instead of local justice commissioners, responsible for policing, prosecution, legal aid and correctional services within a local authority area. These commissioners would be directly elected every four years, with operationally independent forces accountable to them.

It would be their decision how crime would be deterred, detected and dealt with, subject to the scrutiny of local people.

Further, the public should have access to detailed information about what crimes have been committed in their area, what action was taken by the police, whether anyone was caught and prosecuted, and what the sentence was. If they had helped to identify a mugger they could watch the trial on local TV and observe rehabilitation progress made in prison or during high visibility community service. This would prove to people that something was being done and that it was worth getting involved.

Justice funding would come from local taxation with a commensurate reduction in national tax (with some redistribution to deprived areas). We would have the power to question the costs of policing and to demand better results. If a police chief commissioned a volunteer force, incentivised people to take part in crime fighting or used parking wardens to pursue low-level crime such as missing tax discs, taxpayers' bills could be reduced. Breaking the national monopoly of the unions would enable the introduction of different types of justice employees, from wardens to crack hit squads that could be hired in for a specialist problem.

Before any unwanted decisions were taken, views about crime fighting would be heard via the internet or phone-ins. In the US, policing and prosecution strategies are a matter for local debate, visible on the internet or television, and this has led to vastly different attitudes to teenage drug abuse between, say, Massachusetts and Alabama. This could easily translate to Britain: those living in areas of high youth crime could call for highly visible community punishments, so youths were influenced not to get involved by seeing their peers sweeping the streets or cleaning up the river.

Public input would be much more immediate and direct rather than having to rely on whatever influence they could exert on national politicians. People could boot out a justice commissioner who failed to achieve results or followed an unpopular crime-fighting strategy, without having to subscribe to a candidate's policies on healthcare, education and park-keeping.

The creation of justice commissioners would also allow for greater separation of national and local policing. As Andy Hayman, former Assistant Commissioner for Special Operations at the Metropolitan Police, has pointed out, if everyone is competing to give their view on drunken teenagers in Liverpool or vandalism in Luton, terrorism and serious crime do not get the attention they deserve.

A national bureau of investigation would fix this problem. It would have an operational police force to deal with serious national crime and would also be responsible for high security prisons and offenders.

The Home Secretary would therefore have a mandate for only national and strategic issues, instead of dividing time between Asbos and al-Qaeda.

We need a police service that operates in the interests of the people rather than the squabbling ranks of senior officers. Separating the national and local roles is critical to this, as it would ensure the public has a direct, immediate relationship with local police, whilst national security can be given the attention it deserves. It would mean that rank-and-file police officers would once again feel connected to the public, not part of a complex, political hierarchy. It would make the police "our police service".

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