Labour police and crime commissioners will have the chance to prove how Labour can achieve results in tough times and demonstrate that we are the natural party of law and order.
Labour’s record on crime is something that we can justly point to with pride. In 1997, we inherited a situation where the Tories had a fatalistic attitude to ever increasing levels of lawlessness, despite claiming to be the party of law and order.
Overall, crime fell by 43 per cent under Labour because we simply didn’t accept that it would inevitably rise. We invested in frontline police officers and we innovated by introducing neighbourhood policing and Community Support Officers. In law we made genuine attempts to give the police and communities the tools to tackle the scourge of anti-social behaviour. ‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ resonated with voters and was an early sign that we would no longer cede this issue to the Tories.
Inevitably we left office with much more still to achieve, although the direction of travel that we set remains the right one. The police service needs to be primarily oriented to serving the particular needs of local communities, whilst contributing to dealing with national priorities such as terrorism and organised crime. The frontline services must take absolute priority.
The administrative support services within our police forces must therefore deliver what it says on the tin. They should support the officers and PCSOs on the beat, helping them to spend as much of their time as possible doing what they do best, preventing crime, catching criminals and making us feel safe.
While Labour is in opposition nationally, along with our local councillors, Labour Police and Crime Commissioners will have real responsibilities to fulfil on a critical issue to voters. In the campaigns for the elections in November, we have the opportunity to take our message to all parts of the force areas, which cover several parliamentary constituencies, rural as well as in towns and cities.
It will be an ideal opportunity to engage and mobilise our traditional support but also to reach out to new and former supporters. In usually safe Tory areas within the catchment, Labour supporters have the rare opportunity of casting a vote that could realistically affect the result.
So what should our message be? The straitened economic climate that we can expect in coming years, will throw into sharp relief the different approaches taken by elected Labour and Tory PCCs.
We will have to demonstrate that we can make the tough choices required. But we need to make them with fairness and effectiveness as our priorities, contrasting unthinking Tory cuts with a targeted and fair Labour approach.
In reacting to 20 per cent lower police budgets, the options are most likely to involve:
- Re-organisation – including shared services through partnerships between forces and outsourcing of back office functions
- Technology – improved use of information systems to support policing processes
- Cuts – simply cutting police and support staff numbers
Of course these three options are interlinked and probably some combination of all three will be attempted in most areas. If option three is to be minimised then options one and two need to be well designed and implemented.
Partnerships between forces are fine in principle but the detailed plans in each force area will need to be scrutinised carefully and monitored closely during implementation.
Systems of intelligence gathering and crime data collection are critical to enable police resources to be most efficiently deployed. They are vital also to be able to measure the concrete results of policing initiatives taken in specific areas to deal with specific problems.
This means that the implementation of police force technology-led projects, has to buck the trend of too many government (and private sector) projects of this kind. In the UK, we simply have to get vastly better at ensuring that our improvement projects actually deliver improvements, without wasting scarce funding.
Labour initially opposed the introduction of PCCs due to the cost, the suitability of potential candidates and concerns about lack of accountability. It will be up to Labour PCCs to address those concerns by pro-actively engaging with all the stakeholders in their force area. Building strong working relationships will be essential, starting with the chief constables and the new police and crime panels, but also with local authorities, community groups and charities.
A particular focus on anti-social behaviour and on supporting victims of crime has to be a continuing Labour priority. Our PCCs will be ideally placed to lead the development of more meaningful and effective relationships between the police, the public and government agencies, where communities are empowered to influence and shape local police priorities in the fight against crime.
Labour PCCs will also have the opportunity to demonstrate our intolerance of inefficiency, reducing meaningless ‘non value-added’ activities in police work wherever possible.
We can demonstrate that, when it comes to leadership, competence and the determination to tackle crime in our communities, Labour is the natural party of law and order.
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John Fisher is a Progress member, a council candidate in Redditch and is on the Labour Future Candidates Programme
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Agree with most of what is said.
There are massive savings to be made on things like restructuring shift patterns and other costs including simple things like the “How did we do survey?”
That said it is becoming more and more clear that dealing with anti-social behaviour will understandably be one of the deciding factors of if the PCC has achieved their success. To deal with ASB any PCC will not just don’t just need to have “effective relationships between the police, the public and government agencies, where communities are empowered to influence and shape local police priorities in the fight against crime” the PCC will need the power to deal with any members of the partner agencies, who are failing, just as much as they will need the power to replace a failing Chief Constable.
The reality is that most anti-social behaviour can be dealt with without much Police involvement by, for example, completely fulfilling Community Safety Strategy objectives which includes provision but also dealing with things related to broken window syndrome, like the removal of graffiti but it as much the role of local authorities to achieve these objectives as it is any local PCSO, CBM, Neighbourhood Policing team and ultimately Chief Constable.
For a PCC not just to be able to challenge why an anti-social behaviour officer at a local council is failing but able to instruct a Council Chief Executive to remove them and also have the power to deal with that Chief Executive as well could just generate another scapegoat that the political classes can blame for failure and my concern is that despite warnings the party has allowed that to happen.