No, Sir Hugh, you couldn't be more wrong

Sir Hugh Orde, chief of ACPO, the association of chief constables, on the Toady programme today contributed to the "defeat Cameron and Co" attempts of recent days.

He claimed that Chief Constables will resign on mass if the Tories are returned and pursue their policy of elected Police Commissioners. " We do not want political interference with our independence!". He is wrong on two accounts. At the moment they have political interference, - from Whitehall, dictating much of the way they behave, and what the Tories are proposing is not political interference but democratic interference, which is very different.

The Commissioners would not be party stooges or appointees, but people who have a personal democratic mandate from voters of all political persuasions. Their function will be to represent the public, even pressurising the chief constable in the direction the public wishes, because that is the only way the commissioner will be re-elected. The Commissioner would have little incentive in interfering otherwise.

I have little doubt that there would be overnight changes, with officers actually spending a minority of their time in the police station and much more time out meeting the public and learning much in the process.

I have no idea who our Chief Constable is. Our force is an amalgam of three or four county forces. I do not even know who his deputy in our area is. They are remote and inaccessible. We seldom see a constable, except speeding by in his car. I do not blame the police. They are operating under political interference.

Part of the problem is the size of forces, (And Sir Hugh this morning suggested making them even larger by further amalgamation) and their remoteness and unaccountability.

There is one problem I foresee with the Tory proposal. If forces remain in their present large size, and the area is part rural part urban, then the sheer number of voters in the urban areas will tend to impose urban needs on the commissioner, to the detriment of the countryside which has already suffered enough. The implication is that forces should be smaller and the areas more homogeneous.

Sir Hugh advocated further amalgamation to a few regional forces on the grounds that modern threats, such as terrorism, drugs, organised crime, etc, require bigger units. Here I agree with him. Such criminals do not respect police area boundaries, and policing requires huge resources at times.

The answer to this is surely to have smaller forces for "ordinary policing"- theft, disorder, motoring offences, etc., where local contact and knowledge is essential, and a parallel regional or national squad for the more serious crimes. (It could have local offices like the FBI in the US to liaise with local forces.) We already have this in some respects. Why not admit that this is a useful reform of the police?