Paul McKeever, Chairman of the Police Federation writes here about his concerns about a range of police reform issues, including PCCs. He compares it to rolling the dice and not knowing how they will fall, when his feeling is that things had been going quite well, crime falling, etc., and that the police had been accepting of a reasonable level of reform and reductions, which have since been exceeded.
One point is that “It will not be long before the blame games start between the local councils and the PCCs (and not to mention the chief constable) as to who’s at fault when things go wrong. You can guarantee it will be our officers caught in the middle.”
Perhaps this is a little glass-half-empty, but there will be a clear need for PCCs and Councils to cooperate, often across political party boundaries, and we should not underestimate the upward pressures on crime likely to be present over the next few years.
What do you think? “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” or “If everything was improving for so long, why hasn’t it got any better?”