My Two Pence Worth

Fraser Nelson has written his view on the battle for Elected Police Commissioners.  In his eyes it's becoming something of a balls up with very few suitably qualified candidates.  As Nelson cites, it has attracted the big political parties or other people for whom it's not clear what they will bring to the table.

Personally I'm not surprised.  It's window dressing for me from a man and a political process that isn't really interested in lifting  a nation off its knees.  It's a misdirection.  An attempt to make you think that that they're looking to take the fight to the criminals, something I have concluded they are not really interested in.

Why?  Well you only have to talk to serving police officers as I do with my friends.  One thing you will often get told is how they arrest people, often catching them bang to rights or with what should be an overwhelming amount of evidence, only to have the CPS decide not to proceed further.  One of my serving friends often refers to them as the Criminal Protection Service or Couldn't Prosecute Satan.  That is where the pinch point lies.  The police seem to be serving up a ready amount of work for them but for some reason they don't seem to have an appetite for it.

I'm sure there are fine people within the organisation but there's got to be something wrong when you pick up stories like this.

If you're looking to elect a role in the judicial process, you might want to consider the merits of electing a regional or district crown prosecutor.  Labour tinkered with a similar notion in their 1997 election manifesto when they said the public would know who their regional head of the CPS was.  We never did learn that but I believe Witterings from Witney did a recent post that referenced the farce of Labour's Election Manifesto with the observation that people shouldn't take a manifesto of a genuine indication of what they would do once in power. 

Probably the reason they didn't tell us who our regional crown prosecutor was probably had something to do with accountability and if there's one thing I've learned is that accountability is like Kryptonite to our political class.

That for me is why the Police Commissioner thing is a farce and pure window dressing.  It was give the illusion on tackling crime with actually having to tackle crime.  The real power on tackling crime lies elsewhere and they certainly don't want you having some power over that.