Keith Hunter’s 10 Questions for Police and Crime Commissioner Candidates

Posted on 02/03/2012 by samchapman

Keith Hunter is an applicant for the Labour nomination for Police and Crime Commissioner in the Humberside Police area. He has given TopOfTheCops.com permission to reproduce here his 10 suggested questions for Police and Crime Commissioner candidates, first sent out by him on Twitter. He prefaced his questions with a statement that they were to “avoid superficial (&/or worrying) PCCs undermining the balance in policing.”

Q1- What history can you evidence of interest in policing and criminal justice matters?

Continue reading →

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Recent updates

Posted on 01/03/2012 by samchapman

We have a slew of updates to our force-level pages, to keep you up to date with individual candidates and areas, so it’s worth checking out your area.

In the last day or so this has involved:-

Cllr Bill Weightman, Councillor in Knowsley and Chair of Merseyside Police Authority is seeking the Labour nomination in Merseyside.

Peter Thompson, an Independent Member and Chair of Durham Police Authority is seeking the Labour nomination.

In Hampshire, Chair of the Police Authority Cllr Jacqui Rayment moved from the undecided column to ‘in the running’ as the Labour nominations closed.

Anyone seeing a pattern here? Last week the Huffington Post reported that over 3/4 of Conservative applicants were members of police authorities. Whether that proportion will be reflected in actual candidates once nominations are settled remains to be seen.

Also:-

Cllr Afzal Khan is reckoned by Michael Crick not to be running for Police and Crime Commissioner in Greater Manchester, preferring instead to seek nomination for the Bradford West by-election.

Robin Tilbrook, chairman of the nationalist English Democrats, is running for the Essex job, right after he finishes running for Mayor Of London, which he doesn’t expect to win, but is standing for in order to get the Party Political Broadcast!

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Is policing too hard for ordinary people to understand?

Posted on 29/02/2012 by samchapman

Lancashire’s Chief Constable Steve Finnigan has expressed his concern about only one person overseeing policing in the county when the Police Authority is abolished, according to the BBC.

He said: “To ask an individual to cover [this] patch is asking a lot.” and added, “I have some reservations how a single individual can have the resilience, the energy and be able spread themselves thin enough to be able to really understand in different parts of this county what the complex issues are around policing and community safety,” he said.

Which is an odd point to make, because presumably he thinks that he manages to do these things.

Maybe you need the right background to be able to pull it off.

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A perfect storm for the new politics?

Posted on 29/02/2012 by samchapman

Today I did some old-fashioned political stuff, namely the distribution of a newsletter to local residents keeping them up to date with local developments. There was variable rain at just the wrong levels at the wrong times, and a range of interruptions from other commitments, so I didn’t get as many out there as I’d like. As with any such job, I’ll never know how many of those I delivered that were effective, in the sense of being read a little on the way to the bin. The recipients are defined by their geography, not their level of interest.

While I was doing this, I also popped back into the 21st century to call a Councillor who was ready to tell the world he would be running for Police and Crime Commissioner. This site was duly updated and the tweet and automated email updates went out in about the time it takes to deliver a handful of newsletters. Then the message began to be passed on, and within 5 hours, as far as I can track, it had got to at least 32,700 people who were defined by their interest in politics, policing, or both. There was no bending down to low letterboxes, no dogs, no wet leaflets, no-one heading to the bin, and no trees had to die.

Douglas Carswell MP, one of the fathers of the PCC idea, chose today to say that “politics could increasingly be done without political parties“. On the other side of the political spectrum, Lord Prescott, the highest profile PCC candidate, who also has the longest grounding in the old politics says “I’m also going to be using social media a lot. The audience reach is amazing and it doesn’t cost a thing. The days of printing leaflets and posters are a thing of the past.“

With these Police and Crime Commissioner elections we face a peculiar set of pressures. A lot of the candidates may not be well known, especially in their massive constituencies, local elections in May will have drained the resources of local parties, both in terms of cash and shoe leather, and November will be likely to be just a lot darker and more inhospitable than May. It may not be possible for candidates to run these elections the old way. They may have to do it a new way.

Is this the perfect storm that changes how we do politics in this country?

Posted in Campaigns, Perspectives | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Top Cops: Pure as the driven snow, but easily led

Posted on 28/02/2012 by samchapman

The Telegraph is currently carrying an interesting pair of articles online at the moment. In the first, Sir Norman Bettison, Chief Constable of Yorkshire expresses his fears that elected Police and Crime Commissioners could feel obligated to those people who helped them get elected. The interview has been widely touted as containing worries about corruption, so how disappointing it must be that it’s “corruption with a small ‘c'” that’s in view. Sir Norman is particularly concerned about younger Chief Constables, not ”old and crippled Chief Constables like myself”.

There’s a concept that deserves a little thought – those poor, easily-led, younger Chief Constables. Stand back for a moment and reflect that, as the service is currently configured, Chief Constables must start their career as PCs, and must get promoted to Sergeant, then Inspector, then Chief Inspector, then Superintendent, then Chief Superintendent, then Assistant Chief Constable, designated Deputy, and then they get to be Chief Constable. That’s right, a Chief Constable is 8 whole promotions away from the bobby on the beat, and I suspect that somewhere on that elongated and competitive journey they gain a little experience that makes them resistant to being pushed around too easily.

The second article gives an account of evidence from the Leveson Inquiry, showing how the investigation into phone hacking, and decisions as to its extent, and whether it would be reopened were impacted by what the paper calls “the cosy and potentially corrupt relationship between the police and News International”. It makes for a compelling read.

Also quoted at the inquiry today was the evidence of Lord Blair, including this gem :- “I believe that where the problem may have become significant is that a very small number of relatively senior officers increasingly became too close to journalists, not, I believe, for financial gain, but for the enhancement of their reputation and for the sheer enjoyment of being in a position to share and divulge confidences. It is a siren song. I also believe that they based their behaviour on how they saw politicians behave and that they lost sight of their professional obligations.”

Yes, you heard right. Those pure-as-the-driven-snow top cops again were corrupted by “how they saw politicians behave”. Really? Is this what happens when top cops believe their own hype?

So what should we be more worried about?

1) The hypothetical risk that a Police and Crime Commissioner could be unduly influenced by his campaign backers, and that this would impact on operational policing, despite the protection the Chief Constable has in the Policing Protocol?

2) The apparently real problem of operational decisions being made with an eye on the impact on senior officers’ mates in the press?

3) The apparently widespread idea in senior police circles that if one of their number does something wrong, it can’t be their fault, so we’ll have to find a politician who must have corrupted them?

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You’re in good company!

Posted on 27/02/2012 by samchapman

Michael Crick has issued an update on his lists of Police and Crime Commissioner candidates, linking to TopOfTheCops.com in the process, possibly as thanks for sending some tips his way.

So, what is there that we didn’t know before? See the results at our links on the right of this page for Avon & Somerset, Bedfordshire, Devon and Cornwall, Dyfed-Powys, Greater Manchester, Hampshire, Hertfordshire, Kent, South Wales, Staffordshire, Sussex, Thames Valley, Warwickshire, and West Mercia.

However, he’s not the only journalist interested in the news and views on the site, which is also being followed by BBC North-West’s Arif Ansari, the Daily Mail’s Chris Greenwood, the Guardian’s Alan Travis, the Huffington Post’s Chris Wimpress, the Yorkshire Post’s Rob Preece, Al Jazeera’s Brian Ging and the Belfast Telegraph’s Deborah McAleese (despite there being no Police and Crime Commissioner election in Northern Ireland, or the Middle East for that matter).

Prospective Candidates, and folk like Crest Advisory who seek to advise them, police authority members and staff, and politicians such as Douglas Carswell MP, Daniel Hannan MEP and Shadow Justice Minister David Hanson MP have all been along for a look in the last week or so. There are cops, there may be robbers for all we know and ordinary members of the public – all very welcome.

So if you want your voice to be heard, comment on our articles or drop a line to the editor – lots of good people are listening.

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Lancashire Labour TopOfTheCops contest hits YouTube

Posted on 26/02/2012 by samchapman

Councillor Chris Maughan, a Blackpool Councillor who is also on Lancashire Police Authority, has launched his campaign for the Labour Police and Crime Commissioner nomination in Lancashire with a series of videos, including the 666 video above, attacking spending restraint in Lancashire policing. This is the first known use of YouTube in this election. When we came across it, there had only been 20-odd views, but now it has been featured on the web’s premier Police and Crime Commissioner news site, perhaps it will go viral!

There is also a Facebook page, and Cllr Maughan is a very recent arrival to Twitter. Social media has already featured heavily in Lord Prescott’s campaign for the Labour nomination in Humberside, and looks set to be important in the election more widely as it is cheap, fast, interactive, does not require an army of volunteers to deliver and gets to interested people, rather than to those who put the expensive message straight in the bin.

Another feature in common with Lord Prescott’s approach is the quiet presumption that the candidate named has already got the Labour nomination. These campaigns look like they are for the real election, and there is an element of ‘see what I can do’ about them, but they are “bash the Tories” fare suited for the Labour selectorate, in whose decision the candidates are ultimately interested. As with US elections, the campaign is likely to veer to the centre again once it comes time to appeal beyond the party base, and this risks giving the impression that the candidate is two-faced or easily confused.

In Cllr Maughan’s case, the 666 video is nicely done, but it doesn’t do what it says on the tin, which is “This is a short video outlining why only I, as a Labour Police and Crime Commissioner, can be trusted to protect policing in Lancashire.” There is no information given about Cllr Maughan to support that big claim over the other candidates, including Labour candidates who will be known to the Councillor. There are two other videos, on Domestic Violence (he will “open the door” on it) and on Violent Crime (he will have “zero tolerance” for it), and they are nicely put together, awareness-raising presentations, though they don’t currently work on mobile devices.

Posted in Campaigns, Labour | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Is your TopOfTheCops election over before it has even started?

Posted on 25/02/2012 by samchapman

The election for Police and Crime Commissioner where you live could be all over, bar the shouting, by May. These could be the days of the real contest, and it may be happening while no-one is looking.

We have not had a TopOfTheCops election before, so there is no history of voting behaviour over the large constituencies that these elections cover, little experience with the supplementary voting system and an uncertain appreciation of the role of independents, but we are all familiar with the concept of safe seats in Parliament and the possibility this may apply at police force level.

South Wales perhaps is unlikely to become a Conservative heartland overnight. Surrey may not rush into the Labour fold. Barring the sudden intervention of a celebrity, a powerful showing by an Independent, or some other unforeseen circumstance the choice of a particular party’s candidate may in effect be the choice of the Commissioner. Naleem Walayat, for example, feels that whoever is Labour’s South Yorkshire candidate has an at least 70% chance of winning the election.

That choice for Labour will involve a selection and an election, with party members making the final decision in a ballot in each area. In other words, a fraction of the population may do the real choosing in these areas, and not necessarilly in public. For the Conservatives the method of choice is still uncertain, and may differ from one area to another, but as true primaries are expensive, the most public involvement one might get could come down to whoever is motivated to get themselves along to a public meeting.

This would have been an ideal testbed for the mooted public primary election system, but it is not to be.

So don’t leave it 9 months to tell everyone what you have heard about who may be standing, or to put a view about policies. The election is on right now. Drop TopOfTheCops a line and share what you know.

Posted in Conservatives, Labour, Selecting Candidates | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

First mention of hanging in Police and Crime Commissioner elections

Posted on 24/02/2012 by samchapman

Leicester City Councillor Sundip Meghani was openly considering a run for the Labour nomination in Leicestershire, but has announced that he will not run after all, as he enjoys his Councillor role too much, and has decided his reservations about the Commissioner position mean he couldn’t do the job in good conscience.

His announcement comes just a few days after Liberal England reminded everyone of his previous support for capital punishment. Are these things related? Is support for hanging fatal to a potential candidate’s chances of being selected by Labour members?

Even if Cllr Meghani’s statement is taken at face value, it raises questions for other candidates who have staunchly opposed the transition to elected police chiefs. If he couldn’t do the job in good conscience, how could they?

Posted in Labour, Selecting Candidates | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

The Economist considers elected police chiefs, past and future

Posted on 24/02/2012 by samchapman

The Economist has continued their coverage of Police and Crime Commissioners as the leading edge of outsourcing – or as one of our Twitter correspondents pointed out – Seeing ‘Commissioner’ as the process rather than a rank.
Meanwhile their Bagehot column looks at the experience of elected police chiefs in Jersey, finding a variety of populism that is effective and not as harsh as the stereotype.

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