Why the coalition’s police reforms will fail

The Home Office has radical plans, but they won’t come to much, says Alasdair Palmer. Less money and fewer paid officers will inevitably mean more crime

Last month when Theresa May, the Home Secretary, launched the coalition’s consultation document on the police, ‘reconnecting police with the people’, she said it would ‘herald the most radical reform of policing in this country for 50 years’.

Unusually for a politician, that was probably an understatement. If the reforms achieve what they are intended to, the nature of the police will be transformed in a way that has no precedent since a national police service was first set up over 150 years ago: control over policing will move from Whitehall and from local authorities to local citizens, reversing a century-long process of centralisation and professionalisation which has made the cops ever more remote from the rest of us.

The idea is a good one and badly needed. But there’s little chances of it actually working. The sad truth is that the coalition’s policing reform is more likely to be a failure, leaving us faced with more crime and fewer policemen.

It’s not the notion of devolving power that’s the problem. Giving people control over the police forces that are supposed to serve them is a great plan. Naturally it has been attacked (and not just by Labour: some Lib Dems have voiced the same anxiety) on the grounds that it threatens to create a police force that ‘panders to populism’. But what else, in a democracy, should the police, or indeed any state institution, do? Democracy requires trusting the people and believing that if we citizens are given the power to make major policy decisions, we will use that power sensibly and wisely — or at least with more wisdom and sense than unelected, unaccountable officials who don’t need to worry about the consequences of their actions.