Too many police chiefs? - A review of police strength and costs in England & Wales 2010
SUMMARY OBSERVATIONS - ACPO - The Association of Police Officers
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Scrutinising the continuing value of 349 ACPO officers & 3,408 SMT Ranks, demanding that forces prove beyond doubt, the need for so many Chiefs drawing such a disproportionate percentage of the total staffing cost, both in numbers engaged and the bonus payments that are shrouded in secrecy.
Sir Hugh Orde, the president of ACPO, was elected on a platform of reforming the organisation. Those reforms must cut deep. It is ridiculous that senior police officers are also directors of ACPO Ltd. The public want police officers to be police officers and nothing else. Time is running out for ACPO to assert its role as the impartial voice of the service.
Few understand that ACPO is a private company, which is funded by a Home Office grant and money from 44 police authorities. But despite its important role in drafting and implementing policies that affect the fundamental freedoms of this country, ACPO was, until recently, protected from freedom of information requests and its proceedings remain largely hidden from public view. In reality ACPO is no more troubled by public scrutiny than the freemasons.
That is wrong. Senior police officers are acting with increasing autonomy in drafting these authoritarian new policies. If you wonder how it came to be that police officers are being equipped with 10,000 stun guns, despite the reports of hundreds of deaths in the United States, or how the automatic number plate recognition camera network was set up to record and store data from most road journeys, look no further than ACPO.
Too often it seems ACPO is the driving force behind policy, and the Home Office succumbs, either because of its own autocratic instincts or because the police are exceptionally good at pushing through the things they want. Police chiefs dig in every bit as stubbornly as Eurocrats, and for the same reason: they hate the idea of having to answer to the rest of us.
Abuse of the Public Purse
Daniel Hannan is a writer and journalist, and has been Conservative MEP for South East England since 1999. He believes that the EU is making its constituent nations poorer, less democratic and less free. He is the winner of the Bastiat Award for online journalism. He recently wrote in the Telegraph about the outrage of quangos spending taxpayers’ money to lobby for more taxpayers’ money. Quangos are not simply lobbying for a greater role for themselves: they are actively attacking proposals for democratic reform, even when those proposals are backed by all three parties.
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