What kind of Met commissioner do officers want? A straight-talking one

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/04/new-met-commissioner-bernard-hogan-howe

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With the safety of 8.6 million people to maintain and more than 45,000 officers, support officers and staff to manage, the first question is: why would anyone want to be the commissioner of police of the metropolis? The working hours are terrible, the pressures are immense, and they will have to spend time in the company of politicians and solicitors. Despite this, there are sure to be several applicants battling it out for the position.

The new boss will face many challenges, including the growing London population versus the diminishing frontline. These are times of austerity, and you can bet the winning candidate will have to promise to deliver gold standards for tin prices. That is always a difficult vision to pitch to a workforce. The danger of terrorism in the capital is always at the forefront of decision-making and ultimately requires a huge amount of money and resources. This is not an area of policing where there can be compromise, but then, what is? Every public report or inquiry states the police must do more, invest more, place more emphasis, dedicate more resources and so on to whatever the hot topic of the report might be. This is usually accompanied by a quote from someone with a political agenda mixed with little real-life knowledge of the issue.

Rarely does the Met reply include the issues of lack of resources. Instead, the reply will consider the message of the current governing party and City Hall. The Met message will not consider rank-and-file officers. It will not mention the budget cuts already borne against a growing anti-police rhetoric in the media – which most officers blame on the inability of the police, as an organisation, to engage with the media in a direct and open way. Everyone respects a straight-talking copper, even if they don’t agree with the message being delivered.

Your basic street cop lives between a rock and a hard place. They see the increase in knife crime, and attend incidents of stabbings on the same estates where they are criticised for searching people for knives. Detectives encourage victims of sexual offences to come forward with better care, practices and results. They then have more investigations than they can cope with. Officers volunteer to carry a firearm against a growing firearm threat, and are promptly arrested if they use it, or have their actions judged against the skewed backdrop of North Carolina – which is not a London borough.

The new boss will need to tackle the fact that officers spend too much of their time attending incidents better suited to medical personnel, mental health professionals or social workers. These people have not got the help they need due to cuts to key services.

Ultimately, the commissioner is a political appointment in a police uniform, which is a tough balance to strike. That said, we want a true leader who will berate our shortcomings and celebrate our efforts and successes. We want a boss who will remind people that every officer is also a taxpayer and a member of their community that wants the same things for that community. Every day officers stay on at work for free just to make sure the job gets done. This is never acknowledged or admitted by the upper echelons, as this would be an admission that the cuts that were advertised as not affecting “bobbies on the beat” really have. Equally, it would be an admission that the criminal justice system is partly reliant on officers’ goodwill – which might be fragile. Bernard Hogan-Howe made sure to always personally visit officers injured while doing their job. It’s this kind of personal touch that has made a difference to those officers working for him.

Ultimately, what officers want from the new commissioner is what everyone else wants from the police: complete honesty without the political nonsense. Failing that, an individual who is at least two parts bona fide copper to the obligatory one part politician would be nice.