By Douglas Carswell MP.
From yesterday, you're allowed to know how much crime there is where you live. But you're not allowed to do anything about it.
In yet another example of British government officials mindlessly aping American public policy, the Home Office has decreed that we shall all have "crime maps". Yet what works in America often works precisely because it has been allowed to evolve as a local solution to a local problem. Merely taking a US public policy solution to a particular problem and imposing it centrally across the UK, is unlikely to achieve the same success.
Pioneered by local US cities, crime mapping over there is a vital tool in allowing local people to assess for themselves the success (or failure) of their local criminal justice system.
While crime mapping in the US has helped revolutionise policing, it's not going to have anything like that effect in the UK.
We might have crime mapping now, but we've absolutely zero mechanism to hold chief constables to account. Americans are able to assess how effective their police bosses are - and then vote them out of office if they're not happy.
Without being able to do the later, the former is rather pointless.
The government has recently dropped the idea of directly elected police chiefs from the Policing and Criminal Justice Bill. The Home Secretary appears to have buckled after lobbying by the Association of Chief Police Officers, the Association of Police Authorities and the Local Government Association. (So much for the Local Government Association's belief in localism). Indeed, the Association of Police Authorities has actually been using your money to pay a firm of lobbyists to try to kill off moves that would have given you a greater say over local policing.
It's no coincidence that the government's announcement on crime mapping comes now. Having lost its nerve, the government now wants to use spin to make it appear that it's giving more power to local people. The fact is that you might now be able to know how much crime there is where you live. But the same "experts" who've presided over its increase are still going to be left in charge.
