Police Authorities And Elected Commissioners

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Police authorities are too bureaucratic, overburdened and weak to hold the service to account, but elected commissioners would have a tough job ahead.

A yesMinister report on the accountability of the police service in England & Wales has determined that local police authorities, the bodies tasked with setting the strategic direction of police forces and holding them to account, are not fit for purpose.

Coalition plans to disband them in favour of elected commissioners address a real need for change, but the government still faces huge challenges in reconnecting ordinary people with the police.

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The report’s writers, Dr Floyd Millen and Dr Mike Stephens, argue that police authorities lack the power to assert themselves against the police service and the home office, the latter of which hold the balance of power in what is supposed to be a tripartite system. Police authorities tend to defer to chief constables on important issues and lack the right knowledge and training to properly investigate matters that come to their attention. Police authority members themselves recognised that public awareness of their work was low – nearly 80% of them believe that citizens don’t even know of their existence. They were also critical of the training they received, with many arguing that it was insufficient to prepare them for the tasks they were expected to undertake.

The coalition government’s plans to replace ineffective police authorities with directly elected ‘police and crime commissioners’ in May 2012 are laid out in the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill currently passing through parliament. Success would go some way towards making police forces more accountable to citizens, but elected commissioners would have a tough job ahead of them to bring about the kind of root and branch reform that the system needs.

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