Inside Justice

Local democracy is the vital component missing from police oversight, writes Tom Wood

Our former Lord Advocate Dame Elish Angiolini is always worth listening to and her recent preliminary report on the processes for handling police complaints is no exception.

As one would expect, it is a comprehensive, not to say wordy document, with many recommendations and worthy of a lot more media and political attention than it got. One recommendation jumped out: the encouragement of a learning rather than a blame culture. Hooray, it’s not before time that we accepted that, while it’s a lot easier to catch people out than help them out, learning is the only route to improvement.

Another finding was equally interesting, making the point that the relationship between senior officers of Police Scotland and members of the watchdog police authority was too close. It was “all too cosy at the top” .

This may seem pretty dry stuff but a healthy tension between a police force and its watchdog is essential. The role of a police authority is to challenge and support; to fail in either is to fail completely. As if to confirm that all is not well in the relationship between police and watchdog, in the same week, the Scottish Police Authority (SPA) chair, Susan Deacon, candidly reported that her authority was weak, ineffective and structurally unfit to scrutinise what is the second biggest police organisation in the UK.

Bold words from Ms Deacon – one can almost sense her frustration as she wades through the quagmire that is Scotland’s politics. The SPA was formed at the same time as the national force, to replace the old police boards that provided oversight of the previous eight forces. The old boards comprised councillors, balanced to reflect the local political make-up. The board members were a mixed bunch but they were usually wise older heads who knew their neighbourhoods and had a firm focus on local issues. Working with these boards was a constant reminder that, like politics, most crime is local – it still is.

But aside from local grounding and wisdom, the old board members had one other big advantage – democratic accountability. They had been elected so they were first and foremost accountable to their electorate and if they failed they could be voted out.

In the new SPA structure there are no such democratic checks and balances. Members are appointed for a fixed term and they will never have the local connections or accountability of their predecessors. This leads to a problem, for while the old police boards could and frequently did resist central government pressure by standing on their dignity and falling back on their democratic mandate, there is little to protect the SPA from the controlling tendencies of our Government.

There is, however, a simple solution: create three or four sub-boards of local elected members to oversee and help inform local policing plans. A slimmed-down national group could look after the big issues. This would restore local democratic involvement and accountability while retaining the balance of local and national oversight.

A win-win, you may think, devolution of power and responsibility. But there’s a problem, of course. To do so you must be prepared to give away power.

It takes confidence and strength to surrender power. We haven’t seen much of it in Scotland lately.

Tom Wood is a writer and former Deputy Chief Constable.