Edward M J Boyd is a Research Fellow at Policy Exchange. Follow Edward on Twitter.
Police and Crime Commissioners are a good idea.
If people don’t like the school their children go to or the GP they visit when they’re sick, then they can increasingly choose to go elsewhere.
That’s not the case with policing.
If someone is fed up with a lack of police action to tackle the antisocial behaviour outside their house day after day, then they can’t request a different police service. They can’t even lobby their Police Authority to do something about it because hardly anybody knows that these Authorities exist.
The introduction of Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) to replace Police Authorities on the 15th November will change all this. For the first time the public will have directly elected individuals holding the police accountable, who will actively seek the views of the public and incorporate them into police force priorities.
Predictably, those who have always opposed PCCs want to use the expected low turnout to bash the idea, and to try to reverse the policy.
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