What kind of police service do we want? This question was posed a few years ago by Sir Ian (now Lord) Blair, the former Metropolitan Police commissioner, in his Dimbleby Lecture for the BBC. He quoted Robert Peel, who founded the Met in 1829: "The police are the public and the public are the police". The citizens of Britain, said Lord Blair, must decide what they want their police to do. A laudable concept indeed – yet the general public is routinely excluded from a debate that is conducted exclusively among police chiefs, politicians and others in the criminal justice elite.  If the rest of us were to be consulted, what would our answer be? For a start, most people would consider the police to be a force rather than a service – not because they want it to be aggressive or brutal but because its job is to keep order and uphold the law, not behave like another community agency or a branch of social work. We want it to be visible, accountable, sensible and local. The principal duty of the police remains, as Peel set out, the prevention of crime. Of course there are pressures on the modern force that were not around 40 or 50 years ago, such as international terrorism, cyber crime and drug smuggling. But there are specialist agencies to deal with these that could and should be expanded.  If there has been one overriding public desire in recent years, it is that the police should focus on stopping crime before it happens and preventing disorder when it does. To that end there are far more police officers than at any time since Peel – around 140,000, compared with just 100,000 in the early 1970s. So why have the Government's attempts to make the police more responsive to this public mood caused such consternation? The key reform is to have directly elected police and crime commissioners working alongside chief constables. But the latter don't like the idea.  Sir Hugh Orde, chairman of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), told his annual conference yesterday that the proposals "run the risk of compromising the safety of citizens for reasons of expediency". Sir Hugh said this was the greatest change in police governance for 180 years, but we really only need to go back to the mid-1960s to see the last big upheaval. This was when policing started to become much more centralised, as governments moved to create fewer and bigger forces. The Police Act of 1964 cut the number of constabularies outside London from 117 to 49. Further reforms reduced the total in England and Wales to the current level of 44. The consequence was that policing became increasingly remote from the public and the power of chief officers and of the Home Office grew.  Around this time, the so-called tripartite system was developed, ostensibly to give equal powers to Whitehall, chief constables and local authorities. In reality, it emasculated councils and the concept of operational independence was used to enhance the power of the police chiefs still further. The 1996 Police Act cut the size of the police authorities, scrapped elections to them and transferred control over budgets to the chiefs. The Home Office took powers to draw up national police priorities and further centralisation took place in 2002.  In other words, the history of policing over the past 50 years or so has been a long march away from the community, away from the streets and away from the priorities that most people would set. And the police would like to go further still. They still hanker after the stillborn plan of Charles Clarke when he was home secretary to merge forces into 17 regional super-constabularies.  Yet one thing we have learnt since the 1960s is that while mergers in the private sector bring economies of scale, in the public they result in even greater costs. More than that, the progressive creation of ever-larger police units has merely exacerbated popular dissatisfaction. People no longer feel, in the way that they used to, that it is "their" force. Where once officers lived in their communities in police houses, they now commute into work; where once police stations opened 24 hours a day, they are now closed at night or have been centralised in a county town.  Sir Hugh rightly praised the British impartial policing model as one "revered across the world", but it is a model whose essential element – its local roots – has been eroded over the past half-century. It is unfortunate that attempts to reverse this trend are happening just as the public sector has to make spending cuts and with police officers feeling the strain on their pay and pensions. Finding good candidates to put themselves forward as potential police commissioners will also prove difficult and controversial. With so many battles already under way, pressure is mounting for an NHS-style U-turn. Sir Hugh said it would be sensible for ministers to pause, reflect and "listen to the professionals" – as if they haven't said enough.  Doubtless there are some changes, such as the setting up of a National Crime Agency, that might merit a rethink if there is uncertainty over its precise role. But Sir Hugh's dire warnings of a grave threat to public safety cannot be used to stymie the core reforms to governance that would be needed even if the country was awash with money. Policing needs to be reconnected to the people, not further estranged from them. It is no good top cops like Lord Blair and Sir Hugh asking the public to say what they want from the police if they just keep ignoring the answer.
Sir Hugh Orde may protest but the force's march away from the community has to    stop, argued Philip Johnston.