KENT HAD ONE for a few days then lost it; Humberside are going to get one despite the debacle in Kent, and Lincolnshire say they don’t need one. Youth Police Commissioner, that is, to go alongside the newly-appointed Police Commissioners that almost nobody voted for recently.
Ann Barnes, Kent’s Police Commissioner, decided a youngster on their payroll would be a good way to provide a “bridge” between young people and the police. She proudly trawled her 17-year-old appointee, Paris Brown, in front of the media, only to see the poor girl resign in tears a few days later after journalists uncovered some of Miss Brown’s rather injudicious tweets from a couple of years earlier. I wasn’t surprised by the nature of the tweets, which seemed typical teenage bravado, but by the fact that she used Twitter at all. God knows what she actually wrote on Facebook.
This is no more than the slop of cod psychology dished up as serious social policy.
The interviews with Miss Brown and Mrs Barnes proved mightily uninformative as to the duties of this pioneering, innovative post. The same words and phrases kept rising up and floating away like untethered balloons: young people and police “relating”, finding “views” and “needs”, “communicating”, “interacting” and making “connections”. This is no more than the slop of cod psychology dished up as serious social policy. Miss Brown obviously believed what she had been told – that if she got the views of other young people she’d be able to tell her boss, who would then “do” something. Oh, the naivety of youth.
Maybe I don’t get out as much as I should, or don’t frequent the right sorts of places, but it’s a mystery to me that youngsters encounter any police at all these days. I haven’t seen a copper walking anywhere for years; I catch sight of them as they drive around occasionally, but that’s it.
Anyway, according to this way of thinking young people deserve special treatment simply because of their age, which means they have qualitatively different needs from everyone else. Quite where the cut-off is between being young and not being young is no one can say, any more than they can say what those special needs are, apart from avoiding being bored, perhaps.
The pleasant and innocuous youngsters interviewed about the scheme couIdn’t be any more specific either. I suspect most of this comes down to making them understand that hanging around in big groups and making a lot of noise outside peoples’ houses does not qualify as “not doing anything” but does constitute a real nuisance, as does littering streets and parks with empty beer bottles, cans and cigarette packets.
The swift unravelling of this project is to be welcomed, even though it proved brutal for Miss Brown, who not only doesn’t get her £15,000 a year but has had to suffer a very public humiliation. Still, she’ll get over it. As will Mrs Barnes, who seems to be another example of the type of person who is keen to spend their life organising the lives of everybody else. One busted gimmick means nothing. There’ll be another along soon.
What I’d like to know, however, is where this idea of a Youth Police Commissioner came from, and why it’s also appeared in more than one part of the country. Is it just a coincidence, an example of telepathic groupthink or something else? If another one pops up you’ll know there’s something going on.
