The BBC is reporting that the Stevens review of policing in England and Wales is recommending that Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) should be abolished and replaced by a new system.
The review, set up Labour and led by the former Met Police Commissioner Lord Stevens who was handpicked by Labour’s shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper, said PCCs, introduced in 2012, should be scrapped in 2016 and more power given to local councillors and local authorities. Irony of ironies, this is what Labour wants and what every police Chief Constable wants.
While the public overwhelmingly ignored the opportunity to vote for PCCs, the problem with this recommended return to the previous structure is that it control over policing is blurred and the ability of chief constables to run rings around local councillors as they work in cahoots with local government officers to pursue an agenda separate to that of ‘elected representatives’.
Councillors, who would be appointed to the ‘local’ police authority in return for additional cash and expenses, would be as ineffective as they were previously under the new regime. But just to make sure the ‘local’ police ‘service’ can walk its own path with minimal interference from the police authority, Stevens says the current 43-force structure is “untenable” and that some police forces should be merged – an act that will further erode the notion of local policing.
In a classic example of the double speak that infests the public sector, Lord Stevens said there were 37 “radical” recommendations, including a commitment to neighbourhood policing as the “building block of fair and effective policing”. Yet the concept of genuine neighbourhood policing is incompatible with the resulting larger forces that would be brought about through the recommended mergers.
Stevens is just another politicised plod, working to an agenda that relegates crime detection and prevention, and policing according to local priorities further down the police’s list of focus areas. This becomes abundantly clear as while Conservative Home Secretary, Theresa May, believes the police service’s primary role is to cut crime, Labour supports Stevens’ view that police have a wider “social purpose” too, improving safety and well-being in communities – language right out of the Marxist-inspired Common Purpose playbook.
So if Labour wins the next election we can expect another change to policing that will be made without any reference to the public that has to foot the bill and put up with poor performance, low clear up rates and police ‘managers’ who choose to focus on soft target offences and thought crimes, while serious offences all too often experience low grade investigations and a failure to convict the offenders.
And people still vote because…?
Autonomous Mind 
Very bad news. EU + BBC + Islam = Satan’s Trinity
What’s the betting that the same people who resigned from being chair of the former Police Authorities in order to stand as “independent” PCC’s, will now conveniently become councillors, if and when the latest system comes into force?
Talk about “revolving doors”…
Dear Autonomous Mind
Circa 1973 the then 147 or thereabouts police forces were reduced to the current ‘untenable’ 43. The EU (bless them) are only interested in ‘one per region’ of everything, including police. They (our beloved EU) have divided the United Kingdom (our kingdom) into twelve (12) of their ‘regions’, of which Northern Ireland (but for how long?), Wales and Scotland the ‘Independent’ are three and good old England is to be carved into nine (9) regions, of which ‘London’ is one. This means that all ‘government’ services will be coalesced into 12 ‘regional’ bodies – police, health, education, fire brigade and anything else they haven’t got round to inventing yet. Scottish police have already been ‘regionalised’ per the EU agenda, showing how ‘independent’ they really will be after ‘independence’, should the Scottish people actually vote in favour.
Fire and ambulance services are being piecemealed into regions – e.g. some county services have already been ‘piecemealed’ into ‘south east coast ambulance service (SECam as they are lovingly known – http://www.secamb.nhs.uk/). ‘Regional’ fire centres are being lovingly constructed by our benevolent and beloved ‘regional’ ‘authorities’, so that the people on the other end of a 999 call don’t know the area you are being burnt in.
The police, fire and ambulance ‘services’ will not exist to serve us, but will be executive arms of the EU to enforce EU regulations upon us: the police to inflict random EU punishments, the fire brigade (as was) to tell us off for letting our homes catch fire and the ambulance service to ask us whether we smoke and if we do, to laugh as we die of non-smoking related emergencies.
Oh happy days.
For some.
DP