Beyond Turnout: The Police and Crime Commissioner elections

Tomorrow most of us will have the opportunity to vote for local Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) for the first time. This is perhaps the biggest reform to the way the police is governed we have seen in a long time. Ipsos’s recent poll on PCCs conducted a month ago found only 15% of local people said that they were ‘certain to vote’. This immediately raised the important question of legitimacy and problem of sufficient democratic mandate, something that many commentators have also picked up on. If nobody turns up to vote on a cold day in November, what real mandate will those elected have, and what does that mean for the coalition’s localism agenda more widely? 

Moreover, it is not clear that the voting public will get the type of Commissioner they want. A Policy Exchange poll in June this year found that only 7% wanted a local councillor or politician as their local PCC. While these elections offer a chance for independent candidates to become the voice of the public on local crime and policing issues, in reality the lists of candidates across areas suggest the separation of politics and policing is not being played out in these elections. Nevertheless, it is not all doom and gloom, after all, no one continues to bemoan a turnout of just under two in five in the well-publicised London head-to-head between Ken and Boris (lower for some local council and mayoral elections), instead we focus on the here and now. Our research begins to show how people can be engaged by the prospect of directly elected Commissioners. Over three in five (62%) of those polled in October said they have at least heard of the elections, and our more recent on-going work seems to suggest awareness will be far higher still by the time polling stations open tomorrow. This is important because a fundamental part of the PCC remit will be to engage with the local communities and the role offers a new opportunity to address the public’s priorities in a way that has never been seen before. The public think PCC priorities should rest with the more low level and ‘visible’ interpretations of crime and policing. Addressing anti-social behaviour (45%) and putting more ‘bobbies on the beat’ (37%) rank highest in people’s list of priorities. It is therefore likely that these increasingly perennial issues will be those on which the local public will assess a Commissioner’s performance. This is a familiar story. Our previous Closing the Gaps report highlighted these issues as being crucial to public perceptions around crime and disorder across Britain. Being able to ‘see’ more being done and having confidence in the police have long been measures of success for the public. The Home Office have long been engaged in a battle to reduce the ‘perceptions gap’ between what people think is happening in crime and what is really happening. And, there are clear signs that the ‘perceptions gap’ already appears to be shrinking. While, the Crime Survey for England and Wales recently found that around a quarter (28%) of the public think crime is on the rise locally, this is a different picture to 2002 when around half (54%) thought this. Beyond tomorrow, the challenge for PCCs will be allocating their budget to increasing the community’s confidence in policing while also addressing the full range of local criminal justice priorities. They will need to continue reducing the gap between perceptions and reality, using their local positioning and public visibility. It will no doubt be a challenging role, but an exciting one that has the potential to make positive changes to the local policing and criminal justice landscape for the next four years.