According to the Conservative Party website the Conservative Party will try to achieve the following if they gain power at the 2010 general election: Labour’s top-down approach to fighting crime has failed. They have ignored the professional judgment of police officers and denied them the freedom to do their jobs – violent crime has increased […]
Continue Reading Conservative Policies : Conservative Crime and Justice Policy
I think cutting the bureaucracy is a genius idea, the police force is solely dealing with red tape at the moment, getting rid of this should lower crime rates, and allow the police to be infinitely more effective.
Crime and justice part ;D I have wrote the following coz i think it fits into this policy ;)
The conservatives gave this country away by letting labour win.It’s so obvious when you think about it a little.
How could the EU become stronger and more dominant when there was a conservative party in power,the people wouldnt stand for it and go ballistic?Well, if they let labour win in 1997 then that would mean shifting the blame to labour.At the same time pretending that labour was to blame in the coming years.
Don’t forget that it was the conservatives who sold our heavy industry and destroyed many more supporting companies.
Now it was labour’s turn to destroy the countries backbone and identity by opening the boarders to all non europeans,to dillute your country and it’s identity at the same time as to suppress the majority through communist/marxist fear factor.
God know’s what’s going to happen next,but i think the BNP have this chance and this chance only to even the scores.
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I cannot see the cons making any difference, they are just as corrupt & self serving as the lying labour fiddlers. The police are so politicised at the moment it would need a big shake up to get rid of all the common purpose, marxists who currently infest many of the top positions. This would allow the bobby on the beat to STOP crime without having to look over his shoulder for the race card wavers!!
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“We will scrap stop and search forms and cut bureaucracy to allow police officers to spend more of their time on the streets fighting crime”
Is that really a good idea?
Yes we should cut bureaucracy to an absolute minimum, but not remove it completely. Do we really want the police to be able to stop anyone they want and not to have to record it somewhere so the public can see who and why they are stopping people?
David
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Well this one will soon be rather defunct as the EU courts have recently decided that the UK’s stop and search system is illegal for some strange reason, sometimes I do have to question the EU Courts.
“By introducing directly-elected police commissioners, and by requiring all police forces to publish crime maps and hold quarterly beat meetings, we will enable local communities to hold their police force to account.”
Won’t this add to bureaucracy within the police?
David
No I don’t think so, personally I think this could be a good thing, letting local people have involvement in who manages their police force.
I would like to see the elected person then be fully accountable to the community, holding meetings and giving the facts and figures to the local community rather than sending them to a central office to be colated and put in to yet another report.
Make the police force more accountable to local people and maybe just maybe we may give some respect back to the police officers.
It may add some cost but in my opinion it would be a cost worth paying to have the local community far more involved with the local police taking an interest in what’s going on.
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I was tying it into my other comment on stop and search bureaucracy.
Remove bureaucracy from one area of policing (stop and search where I think we need the bureaucratic controls) to add more bureaucracy in another area where it could be argued it’s just for PR reasons and won’t make any difference to the public’s perception of the police and crime.
If it does result in “Make the police force more accountable to local people and maybe just maybe we may give some respect back to the police officers.” that’s a good thing.
Problem is the people who disrespect the police the most aren’t going to be interested in crime maps (other than maybe targeting untapped areas for more crime!) and quarterly beat meetings. It’s going to be a very small minority of people who attend such meetings, couldn’t the time and resources be better spent in other areas?
For example would strengthening neighbourhood watch schemes be a better use of time/resources, couldn’t that generate better relations between communities and the police?
Look at it from the perspective of a home owner in a high crime area. Do you want to go to a meeting to be shown a crime map where your house is located and have the police explain they are doing all they can with the resources available, they regularly walk the beat etc… or go to a meeting to organise the community in tackling crime through a neighbourhood watch scheme?
David
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We do live in a high crime area, and I for one would like to know more about what the police are actually doing to combat that.
As for beat meetings, I think that would be extreme and costly, I was thinking more about the elected boss holding regular meetings with local councillors etc who would then diseminate that through the local community news papers etc.
And having an accountable police chief would then give the public a chance to question said person through the local councillor etc, that’s the way I was thinking about it.
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I agree with you, a single elected police commissioner type person who reports to the council etc… what’s happening locally could be a good thing. But I don’t think that’s what this policy is about, it looks like this policy is to copy what the US police forces do: example
The Guardian article below suggests its “quarterly beat meetings at community level”.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/joepublic/2009/jul/01/police-reform-england-wales
“Their plans to slash bureaucracy and form-filling, while strengthening stop-and-search powers and pushing more police on to the beat, sends out populist, yet vague, signals – as do reforms to “empower local people as well as police officers”. That means, potentially, the biggest structural change in police operations in 35 years, with a pledge to introduce US-style directly elected police commissioners, while requiring all forces to publish crime maps and to hold quarterly beat meetings at community level, where people can hold the police to account.”
That’s got to add a lot of bureaucracy to the police and be quite expensive at community level.
Something needs to change, the police are not respected or completely trusted by the public.
From the above Guardian article:
“Why, for instance, are many town and city centres virtual no-go areas for anyone over the age of about 25 at weekends, courtesy of high-tolerance policing of alcohol-fuelled mayhem? Compare this to the situation when a relatively inoffensive political demonstration is swamped by an intimidating riot squad bent on zero tolerance.”
That’s a damn good point, high tolerance for criminal behaviour, low tolerance at legal political demonstrations!
I see this beat meetings policy as a PR stunt that will be expensive to manage and ineffective.
Have to admit not sure what would work though!
David
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Where I see this working is by using technology to cut costs down, these police commissioners could hold these meetings using web cams and websites etc, cutting the costs, and that way anyone in any community that that commissioner represents could be watching that meeting and be involved using chat technologies etc, councils set us a Twitter style service to ask questions etc.
We are a technology driven world these days exploit that tech to bring costs down and get the public involved for little cost.
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My age is 82 and have seen the results of labour and conservative on crime and up to now they have not been any good at law enforcement the crims get rewards and victims pay the price upto now the high court judges dictate and they are over paid nitwits.
Well, it’s better than the current crime and punishment policies, but we need to make prison a real punishment and a real deterrent. There are people out there who purposely try and get themselves thrown in jail – you’ll have 3 meals a day, a bed and a roof over your head. There are many people in society for whom prison provides a better way of life. It needs to be a real punishment. I get the impression criminals are no longer afraid of prison. They should be.
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What do we have now?
Officers acting without any discretion for fear of criticism by superior officers whose only interest is mugging the public for statistics. The right to arrest anyone for anything being used to raise the arrest figures to create a pretence of doing something useful, knowing full well that the same effort expended on serious crimes will cost too much whereeas several easy jobs will look much better on the statistics chart.
Senior officers bending over backwards to encourage criminals into complaining against officers who might just have said something that the criminal should have been told long ago, to provide a pretence of fairness.
Front line budgets slashed whilst senior officers in highly funded quango positions work to produce nonsense such as policy, visions, lean-processing, doctrine and other idiotic self serving rubbish that gives the public nothing. More is spent on advertising (SPIN) than on doing the job, under the guise of raising public confidence. What it actually does is conns poor unsuspecting, trusting working people into thinking their money is being well spent. The minute Labour are voted out, the happier tens of thousands of real officers will be, and the sadder a few thousand will be who have hidden themselves away in self made Empires, talking corp-speak, having “visions” writing near soviet style doctrine and generally having a whale of time not doing any real policing.
Parents are terrified to challenge their own childrens bad behaviour for fear of being branded abusers, real abusers get ludicrous sentences, home owners put themselves in the position of losing everything if they dare to do anything but cower in the closet whilst their house and possibly their family is ransacked by burglars, decent people arrested for nonsense crimes, for expressing an opinion – whats the saying? “I may not agree with what your opinion but I defend your right to express it.” Teachers who might as well sit back and watch the class bully knock everyone around because to actually intervene is to risk everything, police officers afraid to intervene for the same reason, ad infinitum.
The question is not will the conservatives do any better, but to accept wholeheartedly that no one could possibly do any worse if they actually tried.
If you dont believe any of the above, stop a constable and ask them what they honestly think (be prepared to show ID as they may fear you are sent by the internal affairs dept to catch them out and sack them for being “off-message” or somesuch twaddle.
Research. Visit some police websites, visit a main station and ask to have a tour then count up the number of officers in uniform and responding to calls, and the sheer quantity sitting around doing nothing more than trying to justify their comfy role and avoid exposing themselves to real work that would only end up with them risking complaint, injury and criticism from quangos.
I dont advocate voting for any party in particular. I will however vote conservative because no government should be in power for too long, they stop trying, stop listening and think they have the answers without the bother of asking anyone else.
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