Conservative Proposals for the Police

Yet another Conservative policy review has come out, but I'm finding it hard to figure out exactly what they mean.

This time it's about the police. The Conservatives talk about "bottom-up local accountability" and replacing "state control with social responsibility." But, when you look at what ideas they are floating (and they're uncosted and not party policy), they include:

More work [being] handed over to civilian staff and private firms in a bid to allow officers more time on the beat, it says, to the point of paying commercial security firms to guard crime scenes, hunt down people who jump bail, monitor "at risk" prisoners and carry out security checks.

More local accountability means more privatisation? Is "social responsibility" a synonym for privatisation for David Cameron?

The other police-related item in the news has been "Talking CCTV" and Coventry being one of the first cities to receive "Respect agenda" funding for it. What will happen is the following. Anti-social elements simply won't litter near the cameras with loudspeakers. They'll do it somewhere else. CCTV doesn't solve crime, it pushes crime away to other areas of the city. CCTV doesn't prevent crime, it just records it.

The logic of CCTV is that you need cameras everywhere, so that crime doesn't get pushed. This has led to Britain having 4.2 million CCTV cameras (20% of the world's total). Inevitably, we'll see demands for more and more loudspeakers linked to cameras, so I view this as a slippery slope.

It's a bit disturbing that they're linking publicity posters for the Talking CCTV to a competition by children, getting the next generation used to cameras observing them everywhere, that's it's natural for loudspeakers to tell people what to do in public.