Shabana Mahmood to get power to sack chief constables after West Midlands Police Israeli fans ban row
Shabana Mahmood will receive new powers to sack chief constables and other senior police officers following a row over West Midlands Police’s move to ban Israeli football fans.
Under the new measures, police will be made directly accountable to the home secretary and ministers will be given new powers to send specialist teams to failing forces to help them tackle crime more effectively.
New laws will also be introduced to impose mandatory review standards for all forces, following repeated failures to weed out rogue police officers, including David Carrick, one of the UK’s most prolific sex offenders, who was sentenced to 37 life sentences after being improperly reviewed in 2017.
The move is part of a series of reforms to be announced by the home secretary on Monday to overhaul failing police forces and “make communities safer”, the biggest changes since the force was established two centuries ago.
In the white paper, titled “From local to national: a new model for policing”, Mahmood is expected to outline a radical reform plan so local forces can protect their communities and the national police force. The reforms are based on simple goals such as catching criminals, reducing crime and protecting the public.
However, the most important part of the change is that the Minister of Internal Affairs is given back the power to dismiss police chiefs. This is a power the Conservative Party handed over when it established elected police commissioners in 2011.
Ms Mahmood said: “The police are the people and the people are the police. It is essential that the public can determine what they expect from their forces.
“I will make police forces accountable to parliament; I will raise standards so they can fight more crime in their communities.”
Ms Mahmood made clear how disappointed and angry she was at being unable to sack former West Midlands police chief Craig Guildford after he revealed he had lost confidence in him over his handling of an Aston Villa match against Maccabi Tel Aviv that sparked global outrage.
A damning independent report found that police under his leadership produced evidence showing Maccabi fans were causing trouble to justify their decision to ban them from last November’s Europa League clash; whereas the real problem was that extremist community groups in Birmingham were arming themselves to attack Israeli football fans.
This included using artificial intelligence at Google to generate information about a fictitious Maccabi match against West Ham, as well as misrepresenting the behavior of fans in a real match in the Netherlands.
After Ms Mahmood failed to sack him, Labor police and West Midlands crime commissioner Simon Foster allowed Mr Guildford to take early retirement.
To strengthen protection measures and ensure that those unsuited to the police profession are kept out of the profession, the government will also introduce laws that will impose mandatory review standards for all police services.
It comes after a review found more than 130 officers and staff at the Metropolitan Police, including two convicted serial rapists, had committed crimes or committed misconduct due to significant failings in the force’s vetting processes.
The new measures include the power to send experts from top-performing forces to those with poor crime-solving rates or police response times to help them catch more criminals.
Forces will also be directly accountable to the public, with new targets such as 999 response times, victim satisfaction, public confidence and trust. These results will be published and the strengths will be ranked so communities can compare.
The turnaround model has proven effective in improving failing councils in local government.
The failing Liverpool council was transformed by sending in experts to help the council, resulting in them achieving a balanced budget after facing bankruptcy.
To further strengthen accountability, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary Fire and Rescue Services will have the legal power to issue instructions if forces fail to act in accordance with its recommendations.
The Tony Blair Institute said in its newspaper that the government’s white paper was a “defining moment” for the government and the police force.
In his article, ‘Policing That Makes Britain Safer – Not Just Better at Crime’, Ryan Wain, senior director of policy and policy, argued that the white paper must “deliver visible order, real capacity and consistent competence”, that public trust could start to return, but “if it settles for incrementalism, it won’t” – “that’s the choice Britain now faces”.
It also called for a UK-wide police force to tackle serious and organized crime, cybercrime and terrorism, as well as a national digital forensics agency that increases capacity to tackle digital crime and recognizes that digital evidence is now at the heart of investigations.
