Localism

Definition

Localism refers to the political and professional philosophy that policing should be organized, managed and governed at the most local level possible. This philosophy is in active tension with the trends towards national, transnational and global forms of policing, particularly to combat organized crime and counter-terrorism and to the universalist, social democratic principles of fairness, equality of treatment and national standards.

Distinctive Features

Although the creation of the Metropolitan Police could be seen as an attempt by Sir Robert Peel and the modernizers to create a more universal model of policing, the local basis of policing in England and Wales and Scotland before Peel was rapidly succeeded by a local pattern of County and borough police forces through the early Victorian era. This pattern of local forces persisted in policing in the UK right through to the early 1960s, when, despite a series of amalgamations of very small entities, there were still 156 police forces, ranging from the 18 officers of Shetland to 3000 in Lancashire. Moreover, the pattern of governance was local, with local ‘watch committees’ and ‘county police committees having virtually complete control over the local police. The Royal Commission on the Police in 1962 described the powers of the Home Secretary as ‘scanty’ – a situation that would also have been recognized across the Atlantic where the US system accorded (and, indeed, still accords) primacy to the local. The 1962 Royal Commission's recommendations that created the ‘tripartite system’ – a shared system of governance between the Home Secretary, Police Authority and Chief Constable – was, therefore, something of a watershed, accompanied as it was by amalgamations that reduced the number of forces to 51.

Over the ensuing decades, UK policing has experienced a gradual drift of power from the local to the national, driven through funding, the need to combat organized crime and terrorism and, most recently, the push to drive up performance through national targets and intervention. This trend towards nationalization has also been felt in a number of other European countries whose systems, as in Holland and Sweden, have traditionally been fairly decentralized. However, as with all swings of the pendulum, there is a point at which the swing reverses, even if the reversal appears to be happening in different ways in the various jurisdictions.

In the UK, the push for ‘neighbourhood policing’ and the rediscovery of ‘localism’ by all three major parties has produced a dramatic reinvestment in very local policing and a vigorous debate about the merits of different forms of local governance, ranging from the ‘community call to action’ (a trigger mechanism that is designed to allow local people to escalate concerns about policing issues through their local council) to proposals for locally elected sheriffs. In Sweden and Holland, after a debate about the potential for much greater nationalization, a similar pressure for local reinvestment has led, in the case of Sweden, to a 30 per cent increase in police numbers to provide more ‘local policing’. In the wider Europe, the Napoleonic Gendarmerie model has been adapted to provide more local ownership and, in several countries, such as Spain, a much greater emphasis on local, devolved police forces.

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