In recent years Governments of all hues have expressed a commitment to extend democracy into areas of life that our parents would not have been expected to participate in. Some of us have the opportunity to decide if our children’s school should remain under the control of the local authority, or if it should seek academy status. Others get the chance to determine how some proportion of our council budget is being spent. Recently the Government has presented all of us with another area to be concerned about, that of crime and policing. In exactly 10 months time on 15^th November all electors will get a chance to elect the first Police and Crime Commissioners, men or women who will be some of the most powerful elected individuals in the UK.   

These new opportunities to help shape our communities and select the strategic leader of services to combat crime, creates the need for all of us to better understand issues which until now we may have limited interest in. The alternative is that we might end up making a decision that is guided either by fear or ignorance.

Crime rates in the UK fell by 43% from 1997 – 2010 according to the British Crime Survey (BCS). This is a substantial reduction and clearly something all of us would wish to promote widely and see continue. Nick Herbert spoke at Policy Exchange on 23 Jun 2010 “Crime can never be too low; our streets can never be too safe, and there can never be excuses for inaction.” However in March 2011, a report called ‘Crime, Punishment and the People’ was published, based on interviews with 3500 people. A third of those questioned believed that crime had stayed the same over the period and nearly half, that crime had actually risen. Only 2% of those questioned believed that crime had reduced by such a large margin.

Those questioned also seemed to have a counter intuitive view on the nature of punishment. When asked to state the most important function that prison serves given a choice of 4 options, only 15% cited ‘REFORM AND REHABILITATION – preparing prisoners for life back in the community so they are less likely to commit further crimes’. But when asked why they thought a high proportion of offenders re-offend within a year of release, twice as many chose the answer that ‘Prison does not focus enough on rehabilitating offenders, through things like tackling drug addictions and preparing them for work’. These conflicting responses show that if we are to continue the good work of recent years, let alone achieve Nick Herbert’s ideal we will need to elect Police Commissioners who are willing to avoid superficial populism in order to deal with the deep-rooted problems which impact our communities.

We also need our national leaders to deliver on their promises to provide us with data to enable us to understand the true impact of crime. Nick Herbert in June 2010 stated “The public simply don’t believe the figures. So in due course we will announce our plans for how crime should be measured in future. Trusted data will be particularly important if we are increasingly judging success by outcomes – by how much crime there is and how confident people feel” Yet only this week in Parliament after 19 months he was asked if there was a way of measuring the number of victims of crime and his answer  could be interpreted as ‘not yet’ http://tinyurl.com/6tktrba Let us hope that by the time of the election on 15th November that Nick has got his ducks in a row and we feel sufficiently equipped to make this momentous decision.