The Case Against ACPO - A Critical Look At The Association Of Chief Police Officers


We wish Mr Herbert well. In his jazz-loving Secretary of State he has an ex-Home Secretary and a QC with substantial gravitas and experience enough to counter Orde's accusation that Cameron's government is dealing with matters they don't understand.


That ACPO would co-ordinate a campaign of obstruction, distortion and disinformation in opposition to plans to introduce accountability to our police forces was not a difficult prediction for me to make; nor was the expectation that they would cry 'they don't know what they're doing'.


One police source said the policies contained the 34-page programme for government indicated that the new coalition had "no understanding of what policing is about".


We have argued vociferously in previous reports that forces appear massively top heavy with senior management, with too many rank levels and a poor manager to officer ratio. There are massive savings in the many millions that could be achieved by rationalizing the rank structure, with much of that saving contributing to the Government cuts and preserving the frontline visible numbers. The Metropolitan Force is an excellent case in point.


If the senior structure of the Met is anything to go by, what policing is mostly about is business meetings. Lots and lots of business meetings, emails, policy documents and the whole panoply of introverted, sterile, inward-focused bureaucracy. The Met has 38 senior officers of the rank of Commander and above - a small acre of silver braid - and they spend most of their time having meetings, and not only with each other. No, the Met's Commissioner, four Assistant Commissioners, seven Deputy Assistant Commissioners and twenty-six commanders have decided they need a further forty-nine senior civilian managers, equivalent (AND PAID) to Commander level or above. The list of personnel and their roles is staggering. What is more concerning is the value they bring and the cost associated with their employment. The list follows on the next page. These personnel substantially outnumber the senior Met police officers - 4 ACs, 7 DACs and 26 Commanders. Source : http://www.mpa.gov.uk/about


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