gambit. Best to stick an oar in straight away.
‘So, what do your people down in Leicestershire think about the plan for elected police commissioners?’
She lifted an eyebrow at him over her glass. For a moment, he looked pained, as if she’d just kicked him under the table. But he recovered well.
‘The scrapping of performance targets and minimum standards is okay. But locally elected police commissioners? That’s not so welcome. Everyone thinks that, don’t they?’
Fry supposed that was true. As with all kinds of amateur interference, the role of elected politicians tended to be viewed with suspicion. Most officers preferred the idea of power resting in the hands of the chief constable. After all, he or she was a police officer, a colleague who had come up through the ranks.
That said it all really. It was ‘us and them’ again. The police and the public. The constant blurring of the lines was viewed as a threat. Even creeping civilianisation was regarded as an insidious disease.
‘Politics has no place in the police service. The idea of an elected commissioner with the power to sack the chief constable makes my blood run cold. Are police numbers sustainable in the face of budget cuts? Who knows? Who wants to wait around to find out?’
With eighty-three per cent of the policing budget being spent on staffing, it seemed likely that numbers would be reduced in the coming months. More than likely. If Fry had been a gambler, she would have called it a racing certainty.
So the big idea was to save cash through structural reforms, exploring the possible mergers of specialist units and back-office functions, sharing the purchase of expensive equipment and IT systems, forensic and legal services. Any merging of functions would have to be low profile, though, and needed spinning in the right way when it was announced.
An overtime and deployment review had been under way for some time. The police authority’s audit and resources committee was already looking at ways of providing value for money in policing. The addition of government budget cuts meant an ideal opportunity to look at streamlining costs. At least that was what the management team had called it in their emails – ‘an opportunity’.
It was all spelled out in the document currently sitting on Fry’s desk back in Edendale: ‘Policing in the Twenty-first Century: Reconnecting police and the people’. Her head resounded with phrases about mobilising neighbourhood activists, implementing radical reform strategies, stripping away bureaucracy in the partnership landscape …
The partnership landscape. Well, it was certainly a different kind of scenery from the one Ben Cooper harped on about endlessly. These days, her hills were mountains of paperwork, her valleys contained rivers of jargon, endlessly flowing. The only thing her landscape had in common with the Peak District was the number of sheep involved, and the amount of shit they left behind.
She was hearing more and more buzzwords as each day passed. Sacrifices, restraint, institutionalised overtime .
Fry looked at her companion. She really ought to get his name right, but he’d taken off his badge when they left Sherwood Lodge.
‘You know, when you’ve been in the job for a few years, everything seems to come full circle,’ he said. ‘It’s funny to watch the pendulum swinging. Take the question of force mergers …’
Force mergers. If she ever heard that phrase again, she would probably scream. Back in 2005, HM Inspector of Constabulary had pointed out that poor information-sharing between police forces had led to serious crime that crossed regional boundaries slipping through a gap. HMIC said that the forty-three-force structure was no longer fit for purpose, and proposed the creation of ‘strategic forces’. The result had been the government’s ‘superforce‘ merger plan, which had soon been abandoned in the face of local opposition and the cost of
‘So, what do your people down in Leicestershire think about the plan for elected police commissioners?’
She lifted an eyebrow at him over her glass. For a moment, he looked pained, as if she’d just kicked him under the table. But he recovered well.
‘The scrapping of performance targets and minimum standards is okay. But locally elected police commissioners? That’s not so welcome. Everyone thinks that, don’t they?’
Fry supposed that was true. As with all kinds of amateur interference, the role of elected politicians tended to be viewed with suspicion. Most officers preferred the idea of power resting in the hands of the chief constable. After all, he or she was a police officer, a colleague who had come up through the ranks.
That said it all really. It was ‘us and them’ again. The police and the public. The constant blurring of the lines was viewed as a threat. Even creeping civilianisation was regarded as an insidious disease.
‘Politics has no place in the police service. The idea of an elected commissioner with the power to sack the chief constable makes my blood run cold. Are police numbers sustainable in the face of budget cuts? Who knows? Who wants to wait around to find out?’
With eighty-three per cent of the policing budget being spent on staffing, it seemed likely that numbers would be reduced in the coming months. More than likely. If Fry had been a gambler, she would have called it a racing certainty.
So the big idea was to save cash through structural reforms, exploring the possible mergers of specialist units and back-office functions, sharing the purchase of expensive equipment and IT systems, forensic and legal services. Any merging of functions would have to be low profile, though, and needed spinning in the right way when it was announced.
An overtime and deployment review had been under way for some time. The police authority’s audit and resources committee was already looking at ways of providing value for money in policing. The addition of government budget cuts meant an ideal opportunity to look at streamlining costs. At least that was what the management team had called it in their emails – ‘an opportunity’.
It was all spelled out in the document currently sitting on Fry’s desk back in Edendale: ‘Policing in the Twenty-first Century: Reconnecting police and the people’. Her head resounded with phrases about mobilising neighbourhood activists, implementing radical reform strategies, stripping away bureaucracy in the partnership landscape …
The partnership landscape. Well, it was certainly a different kind of scenery from the one Ben Cooper harped on about endlessly. These days, her hills were mountains of paperwork, her valleys contained rivers of jargon, endlessly flowing. The only thing her landscape had in common with the Peak District was the number of sheep involved, and the amount of shit they left behind.
She was hearing more and more buzzwords as each day passed. Sacrifices, restraint, institutionalised overtime .
Fry looked at her companion. She really ought to get his name right, but he’d taken off his badge when they left Sherwood Lodge.
‘You know, when you’ve been in the job for a few years, everything seems to come full circle,’ he said. ‘It’s funny to watch the pendulum swinging. Take the question of force mergers …’
Force mergers. If she ever heard that phrase again, she would probably scream. Back in 2005, HM Inspector of Constabulary had pointed out that poor information-sharing between police forces had led to serious crime that crossed regional boundaries slipping through a gap. HMIC said that the forty-three-force structure was no longer fit for purpose, and proposed the creation of ‘strategic forces’. The result had been the government’s ‘superforce‘ merger plan, which had soon been abandoned in the face of local opposition and the cost of
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