Indirect Democracy

Abstract

On Friday 16th November 2012 police officers in England and Wales awoke to a new epoch in their long history — for the first cohort of directly elected Police and Crime Commissioners entered the landscape of policing governance. These elections swept aside the 50 year old tripartite system, which we saw in Chapter 3. The police authorities, condemned as invisible and ineffective, were replaced with a single figurehead who, according to official discourse, ‘has allowed for the Home Office to withdraw from day-to-day policing matters, giving the police greater freedom to fight crime as they see fit, and allowing local communities to hold the police to account’ (Home Office, 2011c: 6). Emboldened by an electoral mandate and empowered to set the strategic steer for policing, allocate resources and hire and fire the Chief Constable, they represent perhaps the most significant change to the governance of the police service in England and Wales since its inception in 1829.