Thursday, April 05, 2007

What It Did For The NHS, It Can Do For Policing

For those few folks out there still believing that the Cameroonatics are a bunch of geniuses who just play idiots on TV, I’ve got some really bad news.

I mean, really, just look at these proposals. In so far as the Tory plans are distinguishable from those of Nu Lab, it’s because they take already stupid ideas and push them that idiotic bit further.

Take the question of meetings between police and members of the communidee. Where doesn’t that already happen ? Police management love to spend their time on community action forum planning group committees, it’s actual law enforcement they can’t stand. Now, they’ll have a whole new herd of white elephants to spend their time on and for what ? Community involvement sounds like a good idea, but who really wants policing priorities to be decided by the type of people who’d go to these meetings ?

As it happens, we already have a whole infrastructure to provide local accountability – if, indeed, local government can’t control the police properly, then that surely speaks to a more profound failure of government ?

Come to think of it, even the Tories don’t seem to like the idea of local control after all. Hence, this:
It suggests that the 43 police forces in England and Wales must either co-operate more on serious crime or a national serious crime force should be established.
So, more local accountability, but also more centralisation. Cake, have/eat, much ? Ditto, with the idea of a national, super-special, elite, serious crime force, and besides, in which universe exactly are police management reluctant to set up special task forces. Again, special teams they got, it’s the day to day policing they don’t want to do.
They also want stronger local accountability, with directly elected police commissioners to replace police authorities.
Can the Tories finally have stumbled across a sensible policy ?
The elected commissioners would control budgets, target setting and policing plans, while chief constables would be in "operational control" of their force
That would be a 'No' then.

Isn’t that just like a bunch of Oxbridge graduates ? You can almost hear them now, explaining how their ‘policing plan’ was just brilliant but those idiots in blue bungled it. Just what the country needs, another tranche of highly-paid managerial babblers, busily drafting vision statements and nudging the elbows of the folks doing real work.

But think this one over. The Tories idea for bringing more accountability into policing is to parachute in a whole bunch of folks who don’t have any actual responsibility for policing.

No, what it’s all about is what it’s always about with Blu Labour. The Saddam thing.
Tory police reform spokesman Nick Herbert said… increasing the accountability of the police was important, as was the need to "drive up performance" of the police by modernising work practices.

"We need to recognise that policing has changed and society has changed and we need a differently shaped workforce to respond to today's needs."
Change, change, change! Quick everyone, let's re-engineer our core processes for the opportunities of the new century. Or, alternatively, why not stop screwing around and let the police police ?

Yep, things have definitely changed, in the sense of getting much worse. But isn’t that just typical for the Tories. They start yapping about accountability and the like, but it always turns out that the problem is with the worker bees.

So there you have it: the Tory vision for law enforcement. More Potemkin communidee input from the bored, the mad, the political hacks and the single-issue fanatics, plus a whole new class of managerial bloodsuckers, employed to administer regular floggings to the folks who actually do the work. What could go wrong ?

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