Brighton and Hove’s representative on Sussex Police Authority today criticised the government’s plans for elected police chiefs.
Ben Duncan, who is also the Brighton and Hove City Council Green spokesman on policing, said that the proposals would lead to policing being dominated by political parties.
Councillor Duncan said: “This is exactly what we have seen in London where a commissioner resigned not because of a policing failure but a political one – that he did not enjoy the patronage and support of the new mayor.
“Is this what we want to see throughout the country?
“Direct elections to police authorities will allow single-issue campaigners to be elected on the back of vigilantism, racism or homophobia.”
On Twitter he said: “Directly elected US-style sheriffs: a recipe for politicising policing: ‘Vote for me – I’ll ban the protests!’”
Councillor Duncan, who represents Queen’s Park on the council, said that a better way to involve communities in policing was to allow them access to spending decisions.
He said that the money needed for expensive new tier of elections would be better spent on encouraging neighbourhood policing.
He accused the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government of using the prospect of elections as a smokescreen for reducing local control over policing.
He said: “The reality is that talk of these elections is a smokescreen designed to obscure the fact that this government wants to centralise and politicise decisions about crime, policing and human rights and is more committed to and managing airport and immigration security than to giving neighbourhoods any real control over policing.”
Ben Duncan makes two big errors. Firstly he supposes that people are not competent to decide how they should be policed. Secondly that existing chief police officers are not already extremely politicised.
It is not unusual for people to fail to spot political bias when that bias agrees with their own view – Ben should think on this.
Perhaps he forgot to report his obvious conflict of interest – councillors that serve on these types of public body get additional cash to do so.
So Ben Duncan is happy to continue to
allow a police chief to remain in office
regardless of his actions.