Music to a Blogger's Ears

Several years ago Nick Herbert MP's office contacted me for some views on needed reforms to the police. I understand his office contacted dozens more officers, serving, non-serving, anonymous and named. At the time, the Conservative paper produced resonated with many serving officers, but was meaningless because the party was not in power.

Now they are in power, and have released some serious plans for the police. Some quotes from the Home Office paper, which by some amazing coincidence appears to have been named after this blog...

• "We will abolish Police Authorities."
• "We will transfer power back to the people – by introducing directly elected Police and Crime Commissioners."
• "We will do away with central targets."
  
• "Police officers should be crime fighters, not form writers."
• "The Government... will have no role in telling the police how to do their job"
• "The service itself needs to examine its internal processes and doctrine which can lead to unnecessary bureaucracy. Action needs to be taken to challenge the culture of risk aversion that has developed in policing. Officers all too often collect information just in case it is needed rather than applying a common sense approach. This culture change will need to be supported and embedded by chief officers..."
• "[The CJS]* cannot go on being a system where half of the police say they would speak critically of it."

It's all good stuff, although we have heard some of it before. The difference now is that things HAVE to change, because there isn't any money to keep doing it the way we have been.

If all goes to plan, perhaps I can hang up my blogging boots in 2012.

Then again, there's nothing in Theresa May's paper that addresses how two youths who happy-slapped an old man to death may be walking free from prison in under a year.

The pair were also convicted of other attacks which could have ended the same way.

The little figure by the railings is the victim's three-year-old granddaughter, who remains traumatised.

Perhaps I won't ditch the boots just yet.

* Criminal Justice System

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