In certain parts of the country this year, people will be voting for a police commissioner. Chelmsford is one of those places that will be doing thus. However, I am at a total loss as to why we even need to be doing this. Considering that the three main political parties will be fielding candidates, and it costs so much to do so that anyone with an independent mind will be priced out of the process, it seems that only large organisations can do so.

The deposit is £5000

http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/g ... -elections

All it’s doing is politicising the police, which should be wholly independent from any political processes (a position which seems hard enough to maintain anyway). It will allow political parties to unduly influence how a police force operates and what paths it takes in crime detection. It also has the potential to put the police at loggerheads with government (both local and central). In short, to me it looks like a train crash of a headache. I don’t know how they manage this in the USA (clearly this is where this idea has come from), but I suspect they have problems caused by this.

So, we’ll get the usual political parties standing, but, I guess, no one who actually knows about how the police works because of the deposit costs.

I have no idea at all why we even need to do this.

Because a lot of politicians, despite their patriotic rhetoric, in fact really really wish we were just like America.

Because politicising things is good for business.

Strength through joy!

Because in the end, everything will fail and G4S will patrol the streets. Curfew will be imposed.

You mean the army will patrol the streets?

Because then any problems can be thrown their way by the Government.

It happens with almost everything, they don't want to give power they want to get more people on board to explain why things are going wrong when the Government's bright ideas fail.

Pointless waste of time and money.

I don't approve of the idea, but it isn't a matter of importing American stupidity. The idea is that authority, where possible should be de-centralised and communities should set their own local priorities for state services to provide. In theory people get involved and all that civic pride and good stuff blooms. In practice, barely anyone will bother to vote for a policeman, and the few who would should probably be prevented. Elected mayors was a similarly envisioned plan, but iirc 9 out of the 10 cities offered the option decided not to bother (even though it is quite a good idea).

The de-centralisation of authority is actually quite an important factor in both Tory and Lib Dem ideologies. They think it's good, they want to give you more choice. It's local democratic accountability for something that has been traditionally managed from Whitehall, and fosters a little variety and opportunities to experiment with new and (hopefully) better ways of doing things. On the one hand it creates a kind of market for law and order policy, which runs the risk of encouraging short term fashions, but on the other it provides an opportunity for each town to prioritise resources according to local perceptions of need (which probably comes with an identical risk, because an excess of democracy tends to do that anyway).

The real problem is that they aren't going to allow serious experimentation, so the market will always be false. If elected policemen had the power to decriminalise prostitution or cocaine or something, some real work could get done. But those powers are going to stay tightly centralised. On the up-side, they also won't be able to reintroduce the death penalty or legalise landmines and those spiky pit things for home defence. So mister Rogers won't be pleased either, which is usually my rule of thumb for judging a policy to be sane.

This. This, in fact, is why 9 out of 10 cities voted against having elected mayors. It wasn't the case that people weren't bothered, it was a case of looking at the system that was going to be put in and seeing next to no value in it. It was sold as another layer of democracy when in fact all it was was another layer of bureaucracy.

The thing in Manchester with bringing in a congestion charge was similar. On paper it sounded like a good idea, but when you drilled down into the details, only half the conurbation was going to see any benefit but everyone was going to get charged. So, amazingly, loads of people voted against it.

I don't know if the people who come up with these schemes are stupid or they just think everyone else is. They have these ostensibly quite attractive ideas, but the implementations are uniformly terrible.