Cllr Noah Khogali represents Strathearn on Perth and Kinross Council and is a political commentator with Young Voices UK.
Policing in the UK is broken. That much is clear from the case of David Carrick, a police officer who is finally being brought to justice after a decades long spree of violence in which he raped 48 women. The public’s faith in the strength of law and order in their neighbourhoods is waning, petty crime is an epidemic, and an abundance of rogue police officers are being outed every fortnight as the very criminals we rely on them to protect us from. We need to bring policing back closer to home. The friendly neighbourhood copper need not be a cosy myth of a time gone by, it can be a reality.
Councils are the answer. Lobby groups and politicians will regularly bemoan the lack of accountability in the public sector and parrot lines like “they work for us”, forgetting that “us” is now code for the crusty pen pusher who is likely stuffed away in some cobweb-ridden basement in London, Cardiff, Edinburgh or Belfast. We can break that hegemony, and once again give “us” the power to influence and shape the way our community looks and feels.
To do so, we’ll need to give more power to local representatives to hold Police accountable at a local level, and ensure they are delivering on the priorities of the local community. Special committees providing strategic policy direction and accountability on law enforcement, like Councils already have in the education sector, could be invaluable in providing that accountability. Why not empower local councils, where elected members are vested with the voice of the local community, to materially influence police targets and policies? That would go a long way to making sure that the idea of “community policing” is a reality, and not just a buzzword.
All councils are currently able to do is question the police on behalf of the public, to no real end. Empowering them to influence police priorities would put the general public in control of their own police force.
And since communities know best the reality of the problems facing them, that would be a recipe for efficient law enforcement — something that’s currently desperately needed. There are simply not enough police officers to have eyes everywhere, all at once. More integration between police forces and elected representatives would help fix the broken community reporting system that leaves victims feeling helpless and isolated. Currently, victims whose crimes go uninvestigated, have no recourse and are left floundering in chaos. If they could go publicly to their elected local representative who had the power to hold the police to account, they’d have a clear path toward restitution. With victims at the heart of crime response, we’d get more accountability from police and better outcomes overall.
It would also help restore public faith in police. If they were given an effective voice, people would be at least marginally more confident that their officers are not, in fact, the very same criminals that they’ve pledged to tackle. Giving people a public platform to air complaints about systemic failure would make it much harder to sweep allegations of wrongdoing under the rug. Public common knowledge is arguably the single most powerful tool in tackling localised crime, and that goes for addressing those criminals who are hiding within the police force too.
Enhancing committee systems to give locally elected councillors the ability to guide policy and dictate targets would go a long way toward fixing policing in the UK.