“Police Commissioners hopeless” say top-ranked police officers

High-paid Police and Crime Commissioners are ‘bleeding hopeless’ with ‘lousy judgement’ say Police and Crime Commissioners and top-ranked police officers

Elected  police and crime commissioners have been branded ‘bleeding hopeless’ and ‘not that bright’ by their colleagues and by top police officers. A damning report, signalling crisis at the top of the nation’s policing, accuses Crime Commissioners of being politically driven, abusive and ruthless. Some senior officers said they were being put off from applying for Chief Constable positions as they feared being ‘thrown under the bus for political expediency’ by their elected bosses.

The highly-paid elected Police and Crime Commissioners were introduced by the then Home Secretary Theresa May in 2012 to head up the 43 police forces up and down the country. At the same time, democrstic police committees, representative of councillors from local communities throughout the policing area, were done away with. Participation in the elections for these new posts hit an all time low with public participation down as low as 12 per cent in some parts of the country as few people knew or cared about what the Commissioners would do.

The Crime Commissioners, who can hire and fire chief constables, have been viewed with caution by police officers, not least because most of them tend to have no prior police experience. Indeed, those wishing to stand for election as a Crime Commissioner must not be a police officer or employed, either directly or indirectly, by the police.

The new report from the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) revealed that tensions continue to rise between officers and their elected bosses with some crime commissioners being labelled as  “difficult, unhelpful and unprofessional”.

One former Chief Constable who does not wish to be named says: “Why would any sane person place their operational independence and financial security at the whim of a politician? I have worked too long to place my personal reputation on the line, to place it at risk of being thrown under the bus for political expediency.”

Factors reported as contributing to an increasingly fraught relationship between Chief Constables and Crime Commissioners include the commissioners’ ability to ‘seemingly arbitrarily’ sack police chiefs. As a result, the number of applications for Chief Constable positions has sharply declined and is now at its lowest level on record. More than half of Chief Constables appointed in 2015 were the only candidate standing for the job and those who do take up thie ‘top cop’ position don’t generally stay long, with an average tenure of under four years.

Chairman of the NPCC, Sara Thornton said the report must serve as a ‘warning’ that the growing rift needed to be addressed.

Even Crime Commissioners themselves joined in the torrent of criticism – one describing a colleague as being ‘eccentric’ and having ‘lousy judgement’. He said:

“You must not assume that being eccentric and having lousy judgement are prerequisites for the job, even though some of my PCC colleagues exhibit these characteristics in spades. There are six or seven really good PCCs… and about 22 who are absolutely bleeding hopeless.” The majority described as ‘hopeless’ are not named.

In London, there is no Police & Crime Commissioner: the responsibility comes under the office of the mayor of London. But i Merseyside the £85,000 per year Labour politician who is Crime Commissioner serves alongside two equally highly paid Labour Mayors in Liverpool. The Crime Commissioner is also permitted to employ high-paid political cronies as deputies with no job description or equal opportunities policy governing the employment. Merseyside Commissioner Jane Kennedy (pictured) said originally that she would not employ such a deputy but speedily changed her mind. She has employed a whole series of Labour councillors to take the strain off herself.