Next month Cumberland Lodge will host its 30th Annual Policing Conference. This year’s event, The People are the Police will discuss how police forces could respond to the challenges they face by developing partnerships with other organisations, whether in the private or third sectors. This is at a time when substantial changes to the structure and governance of police forces in England and Wales are being proposed. At the centre of the plans is a desire to make responsibility for policing more local, through changing oversight procedures and creating locally elected police commissioners.
If such a system is to be enacted adequate checks and balances need to be put into place, argues Jessica De Grazia former New York Chief Assistant District Attorney. These are essential to ensure that those elected do not make political expediency the sole driver of local policing policy or engage in unscrupulous, or indeed corrupt, activities. She argues that the types of protections they have in place in the US, such as independent prosecutors with their own investigative powers, do not exist within the current English legal system. She also highlighted the role of the media in guarding the interests of the public.
She suggested that the UK local media is not strong enough to be an adequate guardian of local interests. She has a point. The most successful local newspapers have lost just under half their sales in the past twenty years. Although the number of local newspapers being closed has slowed and some groups are now making profits, this is due to cost-cutting rather than a growth in circulation. This has left local journalists with fewer resources and less time to research and write their stories. As much as they may resist this, it has left them vulnerable to the seductive advances of public relations officers with offers of readily available content.
This is the context within which the Government are announcing a raft of measures designed to devolve power to a more local level from the Localism Bill I wrote about a fortnight ago, to the changes in policing mentioned above. These measures intend to give local people more say in the way locals services are run and delivered. However for these systems to function properly local people need to be informed and local politicians and their policies properly scrutinised. Will this happen in local newspapers where resources are already under huge pressure?
There is scope for ‘citizen journalists’ using new media to step into the breach, but the audience that these can reach and the resources they can draw upon are limited without the weight of a larger news organisation behind them. Therefore many local people will be deprived of vital information and local politicians may escape scrutiny.
If we are going to have more decisions made at a local level then this situation is untenable. For a strong local democracy to flourish a strong local media is essential.
Annie Gosling
King George VI Fellow
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