The Liberal Democrats have accused Labour and the Conservatives of ducking hard decisions on police reform in favour of what the Lib Dems call a ‘sentencing arms race’. The Lib Dems launched their proposals for what they called a fundamental reform of the way the police are run.
The ideas, outlined in the paper Cutting Crime: Catching Criminals With Better Policing, highlight what the Lib Dems term the urgent need to move the criminal justice debate away from what sounds tough to what actually works, with a shift away from prison towards policing and detection. The 21-page paper that you can download from the political party’s website proposes non-custodial sentences ‘properly enforced’, more neighbourhood policing, less paperwork for police, a new recruitment drive for special constables, properly resourced probation, and ‘larger pilots of restorative justice programmes in the criminal justice system’ – many things called for by other politicians. But there are some more specific things, such as annual fitness tests for police officers, ‘and those who fail should be moved to a desk role or a civilian position in the force’. <br><br>The proposals include:<br><br>*Reviewing the police contract including lifetime employment for 30 years, the single point of entry and pay levels<br>*Annual fitness tests for frontline officers <br>*Decentralising the force by scrapping counterproductive central targets, introducing the local setting of priorities and budgets and the direct election of the majority of police authority members<br>*Creating a National Crime Reduction Agency to assess police and criminal justice policies on evidence and to spread best practice<br>*Respecting police pay awards from the Police Arbitration Tribunal<br>*10,000 extra police on the streets, paid for by scrapping ID cards<br><br>Commenting<br><br>Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, Chris Huhne said: &quot;For too long, policing and criminal justice policy have been decided by what sounds tough, rather than what works. Prison, a sentencing arms race between Labour and the Tories, and Labourโs legislative diarrhoea in creating 3,600 new criminal offences since 1997, have been used as a proxy for real action on crime. The radical proposals outlined by the Liberal Democrats today are designed to shift the debate away from posturing on penalties and towards catching criminals.<br><br>&quot;Labour and the Conservatives have repeatedly ducked the difficult decisions on police reform. Only the Liberal Democrats are committed to a review of outdated working practices in the police.&quot;
