Localism 3: Lessons From The USA

When you hear the word ‘sheriff’ you imagine a typical American local law enforcement officer wearing a brown uniform, a cowboy style hat and a gold badge, right? Well, it’s coming to the UK. In November of next year people in England and Wales will be able to directly elect the local Sheriff to govern the police force in your area. OK, their official title will actually be “police and crime commissioners,” but I’m hoping that the word Sheriff catches on. These new figures will be locally elected officials who are able to appoint and remove chief constables and set budgets and policing priorities. These radical new reforms being implemented by the government are part of their localism agenda to restructure the police force in order to develop the type of ‘more police on the beat’ zero-tolerance policing that the public have long desired. 

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The crimes that worry people the most are actually not the serious ones. The main complaint of the current system is that police fail to pay real attention to “low-level” disturbances such as vandalism, harassment and general disorderly behaviour, which are the crimes that frequently do not get enough due attention. Police officers themselves complain that the culmination of human rights laws, political correctness and health and safety procedures have brought too much bureaucracy, paperwork and restriction into their day to day activities and not enough common sense. Surveys show that what people most want to see is more police on the streets, less anti-social behaviour and not to feel intimidated by “gangs of kids” with no respect or discipline.

The reforms proposed are designed to tackle these problems by making the police force more accountable to the public. Research by the Cabinet Office in 2007 found that only 7% of people would go to their local police authority if they were unhappy with their force and 68% wanted an elected person to hold their constabulary to account. The old public quango boards that notionally provide accountability will be phased out and the new Sheriff position will be the head of each police force, elected for a term of four years, and will be personally responsible for making sure that the force is run in the way that the people expect. (There will not be a directly elected Sheriff in London, which will have a slightly different system based around a new Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime.) Police chiefs will now have to do more with less funding and face tighter public scrutiny. One of the candidates that have shown interest in the new Sheriff positions is the former army colonel Tim Collins, known for his inspiring speech to British troops in Kuwait on the eve of the Iraq invasion. 

These reforms have already seen opposition from police chiefs, who naturally don’t want an elected outsider giving them orders. There is also opposition from the Liberals, who fear the emergence of a new Dirty Harry style policing with ‘wanted’ posters and local rewards etc. Many critics have said that the policy could cause “irreparable damage” as too much power will be in the hands of one person. If the policy works correctly however, the power will not be in the hands of one person, it will be in the hands of the citizens. It will be interesting to see the changes in public attitudes as people are given more responsibility. We may even see the rise of neighbourhood watch schemes and voluntary groups in some areas. People with complaints will be able to direct their issues to one focal point (the Sheriff’s department) who should actually be able to do something about it. The voters will have democratic control over the police. Hurrah for democracy! 

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The word ‘sheriff’ is derived from a combination of the words ‘shire,’ meaning district or county, and ‘reeve,’ a word used in feudal England for a royal peacekeeper acting on behalf of the king. The word Sheriff as we understand today is no longer used in England, apart from reference to the baddy in Robin Hood perhaps, but it has been widely populised in the United States. In the US, the Sheriff is an elected county official and typically the top law enforcement officer for each county. The US uses a more complex system of state police, federal police and specific policing units for large cities. The Sheriff’s department generally focuses on the less populated areas of the county, county property and in some states also incorporates local marshal offices and country coroners.

The direct election of a police leader, until now, has been almost uniquely an American tradition. The role of the local Sheriff comes from the concept that decisions should be made as closely as possible to the people they affect; the belief that the lawgivers should be rooted in the society and communities that must live by these laws. By this doctrine, the smaller crimes and anti-social behaviour that people complain about are understood and shared by the local enforcement officer who can make his or her judicial decision based on the principles which the local people uphold, and not be bogged down in the higher bureaucratic procedures on the state and federal level. These Sheriffs are therefore downwardly accountable, to the people, as opposed to the Chief Constables in the UK who are upwardly accountable to the Home Office and centralised budget targets and audit inspections etc.

Direct public elections are used for a whole range of positions in the US from the local school board and local sheriff to political party primary candidates to even the president of the country. This makes sure that the eventual winner is someone who shares the views of the voters and that person begins their term with a loyal voter base keen to see them follow through on their promises. The American system also has a number of democratic mechanisms such as term limits for elected officials and recall elections, meaning that the public can hold elected officials to account and vote someone out of office if the official’s original supporters are unsatisfied with his or her conduct; there are also citizens’ initiatives and referendums that allow citizens to gather petitions and vote on key issues that affect them.

So why is it that the system of democracy in the US is far superior to that which we have in the UK? And why has it taken us so long to realise this?

Much of it has to do with the culture and mentality of the people, which go back right to the foundation of the United States. The USA was born out of a revolt against a distant autocratic regime, namely the British Empire ruled by King George III. After the Americans won the War of Independence, the feeling of rebellion against the monarchy and new found freedom dominated the minds of the founding fathers of the US, who envisioned a new ‘land of the free’ with the beliefs that ‘all men are created equal’ and ‘no one is above the law.’ And so the constitution of the United States was written to create just that. It was written by the people, for the people, specifically to keep the citizen big and the government small, to guarantee liberty to all and to avoid the centralisation of power, the likes of which they had just overcome to gain their independence.

The European Union, on the other hand, was born in exactly the opposite circumstances- the coming together of countries that had been at war. The first paragraph of the first page of the Treaty of Rome, commits the countries to ever ‘closer relations,’ and therefore an ever increasing role of the central government. Whereas the Constitution of the United States guarantees rights to property, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the Constitution of Europe (the Lisbon Treaty) guarantees citizens’ rights to asylum, health care and strike action etc. The wording and meaning of a constitution bring about a natural tendency for the mood and way of thinking of the peoples who live by it. It is like the DNA coding of a nation from which the institutions and cultures grow organically. The people of the United States have a greater belief in their freedom as their given birthright and hence all of these institutions and democratic mechanisms, right down to the election of the Sheriff, have evolved naturally from the liberties that all Americans believe they are born with, the liberties they all take for granted, the liberties that stem from a constitution designed specifically to prevent the concentration of power and to make sure that the rulers are accountable to the ruled.

We in the UK, have enjoyed freedom for too long that we are too blind to see when it is being taken away from us, stealthily, by our own upper class and career politicians. It has got to the point now where individual states of the USA have more freedom than the sovereign nation states of Europe. For example the state of Texas can make its own decisions to use the death penalty or not, and can set its own business taxes etc. whereas a whole country like Portugal cannot do these things. It has given away these powers to the EU.

So let us hope that the USA does not become like the Europe of today and let us pray that we on this side of the pond finally wake up and put a stop to this madness, and that the election of Sheriffs is the first of many changes on the path to real freedom.