Technology | 2008.12.26
Martin Kettle: The real question is how the relationship between politics and policing can best prosper
In the argument about politics and policing, the issue is not whether to reform but how. No one can seriously argue that policing is somehow above politics. One person\'s police politicisation is always another\'s police accountability. So let\'s put the silly part of the argument aside and concentrate on the serious bit. The real question is how the relationship between politics and policing can best prosper, not whether it should exist at all.
Police accountability in this country is in a mess. Home secretary Jacqui Smith has got herself in a tangle over the issue, first promoting direct election to the police authorities that govern local policing, then backing down under police pressure and blaming Boris Johnson for poisoning the well when he sacked Ian Blair. But the Tories are in a tangle on policing too, proposing directly elected police commissioners across the entire country, each with the power to sack the chief constable. More Borises, not more bobbies, on the beat is not an easy sell.
How did we get here? Until a generation ago, policing was a political no-go area. Fifty years ago, London\'s first postwar police commissioner could write that there were never any differences of opinion between the Labour and Conservative home secretaries under whom he served. "Their different political views were never allowed to influence their approach to police questions," recalled Harold Scott, "and we in this country can count ourselves very lucky that the police have always stood right outside the political scrimmage."
It was a self-deceiving culture in many ways, and it was unsustainable in changing times. But the police\'s discomfort about political accountability, and the bipartisan reluctance to address the mounting problems in policing, survived a long time. In 1981 the former Labour home secretary Merlyn Rees, unable to attend a conference on policing at which he had been due to speak, could still send a speech by the Conservative home secretary Willie Whitelaw and say it expressed his own view too.
All that has long gone. Margaret Thatcher did her bit, saying the police needed support not criticism while politicising the police function in the miners\' strike. Lord Scarman, demanding reform of London\'s policing after the Brixton riots, played his part too, as did Ken Livingstone in both of his eras in charge of the capital. Michael Howard, the first truly partisan home secretary of modern times, was crucial. Jack Straw and David Blunkett then tarmacked the trail that Howard had blazed.
Politicians got involved in policing because police weren\'t up to the job. Until Scarman, the police wrote their own job description. They hived off the things that bored them, like parking. Instead they spent lots of money on cars, kit and wages, but not much on community relations or effectiveness. There were never enough police to deal with domestic burglaries. But there were always enough to deal with young black men in shopping centres. Police violence was not the norm but when it occurred it often went unpunished.
The key change in the modern era is the recognition that policing can be part of the problem. We have to hang on to that because it is still true. The previous generation of police always talked as if the law was historically passive; they were simply there to clear up society\'s mess. Politicians connived in that approach. Today there is far more acceptance that policing involves choices about powers, spending and technology, and that wrong choices can contribute to the mess.
The old consensus broke down, but no new consensus has yet replaced it. Reformers have concentrated almost exclusively on trying to curb police autonomy rather than setting intelligent goals for policing. The political parties, meanwhile, have become locked in a stupid bidding war about who could be tougher on crime. Both are of limited value in the strategic reform of policing.
Actually, these strategic issues were and still are fairly straightforward: focus on neighbourhood policing; wider recruitment of better trained and more representative officers (especially women and minorities); reform of police powers; better redress for complainants; improved accountability to local communities; and independent oversight to enable a raised level of public debate and understanding. Some of this has been partially achieved. But the Home Office role under New Labour has been stifling not stimulating. It always wants to do more, not less.
Smith\'s green paper in July contained some good ideas - like local election to police authorities. But it was chaotically argued and sacrificed clarity for presentation. The document was riddled with 76 different acronyms that made it incomprehensible except to initiates, and a seven-page glossary was needed just to explain them. Just as a healthy tree can be strangled by ivy, so police reform has become strangled - apologies for repeating the incisive phrase used to me by an insider only yesterday - by "management bollocks". The green paper is a mess because those who wrote it do not understand what they want and are therefore incapable of expressing themselves. They fail to understand that management is about implementation, not setting strategy. No wonder John Reid said the Home Office was not fit for purpose.
Most policing, like most politics, is local. Unless and until the Home Office lets go and allows local police authorities to take real responsibility for policing, rather than wrapping them ever more tightly in centralised objectives and suffocating them with jargon, the reform process will be stalled.
Yesterday I heard a Liberal Democrat from Haringey explain with enviable clarity why spending more government money on child protection will not in itself prevent tragedies like that of Baby P. "You can make very bad use of a lot of resources and you still don\'t sort the problem," he said. "The problem here is about transparency and openness, whether the council is embracing its critics, how open it is with its residents - it\'s not just about how many people there are on the ground doing the job."
He might have been talking about policing. Every word applies with equal force to a policing reform process which seems to have almost entirely lost its way. It would be nice to think David Blunkett, learning from his mistakes, will help guide Smith out of the maze. But I think the man from Haringey may have a clearer idea of what is needed.
martin.kettle@guardian.co.uk
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/19/police-politics
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