Since the creation of Police Scotland and the Scottish Police Authority, there has been limited local democratic scrutiny and no local accountability of the police service.

Policing was created by councils and relies on the trust of its communities. This deficiency has been partially acknowledged by the Strategic Partnership Agreement for Policing signed with COSLA. It commits the partners to strengthen their collaboration on strategic priorities – including local democratic scrutiny and accountability. With the details to be ironed out, now would be a good time to apply the lessons from Baroness Casey’s review of the Metropolitan police service.

She concluded the Met was racist, homophobic and sexist. For these to apply to the UK’s largest police force is catastrophic. Why? The police have extraordinary powers over all of us and because of this “appropriate governance, scrutiny and accountability systems need to underpin these responsibilities particularly in a system based on consent.”

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To support her views she quoted Lord Patten from his review of policing in Northern Ireland. “Given the extraordinary powers conferred on the police, it is essential their exercise is subject to the closest and most effective scrutiny.” He further outlined what democratic accountability looked like, “the elected representatives of the community tell the police what sort of service they want and hold the police accountable for delivering it”

In examining the Met’s democratic accountability and scrutiny systems, Casey noted this involved the Home Secretary, the elected Mayor of London and the Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime and the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime. The Greater London Assembly’s Policing and Crime Committee also has oversight responsibilities. There is, however, no accountability to London’s 32 boroughs.

Casey examined why despite this conurbation level of democratic oversight, the situation in the Met had deteriorated over the 20 years since the Macpherson Inquiry concluded the Met was institutionally racist.

Given the UK model is for the police service to operate by public consent based on public trust, she argued the absence of effective sanctions on the Met weakened effective local democratic accountability.

She contrasted that with the UK Government’s willingness to intervene directly and take over failing schools or councils.

We have as yet no such equivalent review of the UK’s second largest police service, Police Scotland.

Unlike the Met there has been no local democratic accountability for this £1.3billion/annum organisation since Police Scotland and the Scottish Police Authority (SPA) were formed in 2013 despite concerns then about local accountability.

This broke a long Scots tradition of the police being established by and held to account by their local councils dating from the late 1700s when the UK’s first police force was established in Glasgow. Local democratic control of the police was maintained over the following 200 years involving burgh councils then city and county councils and then regional councils.

That triangular relationship between the community, the police and local democratic accountability was understood, respected and reinforced for generations.

In 1996 regional council control ended and six joint police boards were established populated with councillors from councils in each board’s geographic area – except in Fife and Dumfries and Galloway where the boards were effectively council committees.

In 2013 the Scottish Government abolished all these boards, and replaced them with the Scottish Police Authority, an unelected board appointed by the Justice Minister.

None of the Board’s 12 members are required to be democratically elected.

The SPA’s accountability line is to the Justice Minister who in turn is accountable to the Scottish Parliament. That is a far cry from a local authority scrutiny of its police service where the Chief Constable was part of the council’s corporate management team and had direct accountability to a Police Committee of councillors.

Building safer communities, tackling crime and the causes of crime is a complex task involving health; housing; education; social work, planning and welfare – the sort of complexity that councils exist to tackle. Current council-based policing plans and police scrutiny committees are not there to hold the police to account.

Which takes us back to the Strategic Partnership for Policing, Patten’s views on the importance of democratic accountability and Casey’s conclusions on the importance of local sanctions.

As the details of the Partnership are worked out we must ensure that the commitment to scrutiny and accountability enables locally elected members to seriously hold the police to account including the ability to apply appropriate sanctions.

George Thorley on behalf of the Mercat Group of former council chief executives Bill Howat, Phil Jones, George Thorley, Gavin Whitefield, and Keith Yates.