For the avoidance of doubt, I am in favour of police authorities – which should be entirely made up of politicians (politically balanced) – being able to hire and fire police chiefs. What I’m not in favour of is a situation whereby a police chief has to answer to a single person, directly elected.

What that leads to is patronage and that is corrupting. I’m not suggesting this happened for a second in London, but it would mean that essentially the mayor would be able to exert pressure on the police chief to not investigate something which the mayor might find politically embarrassing.

I also think there needs to be a much stricter delineation between community policing, which has always been the police’s main function, and things such as organised crime and terrorism. In the US, that would be handled by the FBI, and for all its faults that is a much better system in my view. Currently, the police – particularly the Met – have to deal with a mixture of the two and that confuses priorities. It also means that Home Secretaries can justify meddling in the affairs of local policing when they should be limiting their interests to national policing issues.

Stoke have been able to get rid of their Mayor because they – uniquely – went for the ‘Mayor and Council Manager’ option when they established their mayoral system. That’s no longer going to be allowed as a governance strucutre so they faced choosing between the elected-mayor system the other blighted authorities have, or switching to leader and cabinet.

More info here: http://www.stoke.gov.uk/ccm/content/csec/ds/stoke-on-trent-governance-commission—final-report.en;jsessionid=bWBn6yFP9VFd

Cheers

Brian

Why? Why not say that a mayor, elected directly by the people, can decide which police officer should be in charging of executing* his criminal justice priorities?

* Probably an unfortunate choice of words there.