Commentary
| Published date | 01 December 2008 |
| Author | Daniel Gilling |
| DOI | 10.1350/pojo.2008.81.4.453 |
| Date | 01 December 2008 |
| Subject Matter | Commentary |
The
Police
Journal
COMMENTARY
There are several internal issues that the Metropolitan Police
must address to get their house in order and to deliver the kind
of service that Londoners demand. Police reform here includes
the continuance of a modernisation programme to ensure they
are fit to deliver local neighbourhood policing in the diverse
social context of twenty-first-century London, with the support
of communities being critical to the success, for example, of
their stop-and-search policies in pursuit of youth knife crime.
This New Year has brought with it the appointment of a new
Commissioner for the Metropolitan Police, in the person of Sir
Paul Stephenson. In the words of the enigmatic London Mayor
Boris Johnson, the decision to appoint Sir Paul demonstrated an
‘almost glutinous’ cross-party consensus between himself and
Labour Home Secretary Jacqui Smith. Now all concerned are
looking towards a brighter future for the Metropolitan Police
Service. Yet in going forward, we must learn lessons from the
past, and particularly from the less-than-happy experience of
the previous incumbent Sir Ian Blair, who officially left office on
1 December 2008.
Sir Ian’s three-and-a-half-year tenure as the 24th Commis-
sioner of the Metropolitan Police, which began in February
2005, was rarely a comfortable one. In the end he felt obliged to
become the first Commissioner for over a century to resign when
it became clear that Boris Johnson, in his capacity as Chair of the
Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA), had no confidence in him,
and believed it best that the Service should be under new
leadership. In taking over as Chair of the MPA, Johnson had
effectively made the Commissioner directly accountable to the
Mayor for the first time.
The fact that this expression of no confidence was more or
less Johnson’s first act on assuming the Chair at the beginning of
October 2008 was, to say the least, controversial. Despite his
protestations to the contrary, Johnson’s intervention looked party
The Police Journal, Volume 81 (2008) 275
DOI: 10.1358/pojo.2008.81.4.453
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