Police Elections

I would guess I’m not the only person becoming increasingly confused about police commissioner elections. 

When it was announced I figured it was probably an irrelevance, lip service to the localism agenda. But on the plus side it might provide a useful prop against the influence of the unaccountable private company ACPO who increasingly control our police service.

But as time goes on I find myself more confused. All the noise about it, all the political fuss but nobody seems to have any idea who the candidates are. There has been nothing through the post, no official information at all. You can find out who is standing on the internet if you hunt around, there is a web site that tells you,  but it’s of little use. In my area I got a short write-up about a conservative candidate and a note that a labour candidate is standing but has failed to provide any information (she now has I notice).

Obviously hardly anyone will bother to vote so what’s the point? Our rulers never do things without a motive so there has to be a motive or agenda behind the scheme, what is it? Someone will get elected as no doubt there will be a handful of voters, but I can only conclude that TPTB don’t actually want real public involvement, all they want is to get a political party person into the position.

It would be nice to think that the point is to neuter ACPO, and it may do that to an extent, but I can only conclude that this ‘stealth’ election is primarily designed and intended as the first move in bringing the police under direct national political party control. To that end they don’t want people to know anything about the candidates and make an informed choice, what they need is just a few political party activists to vote for one of the party candidates and suddenly we have a directly politically controlled police force and the main national parties have stretched their tentacles into another area of society, pushing out the authority of the local councils.

It may be better than ACPO, but equally well might be akin to jumping from the frying pan into the fire.