cops and robbers

I was on a tube train today when I heard a typical exchange about the recent UK elections for the Police Commissioners.

I should note that London itself has been excluded from the voting; something to do with Boris, I think.

The exchange went something like,

"Did you vote?"
"No, not yet. When do they close?"
"What?"
"The Polling Stations?"
"Er..Yesterday."

It sort of sums it up for this piece of almost sabotaged democratic process. Hardly any publicity. No leaflets to voters in most areas. The official website for candidates gave slightly messy one-pagers from each candidate, which all said roughly the same things: More police on the street; clampdown on bad things; improve victim rights; control of finance.

And usually something about why whichever candidate is better than any other for some 'unique selling point reason'.

And mysteriously, quite a few candidates were ex Westminster politicians who had now mysteriously become experts on policing matters. Even some of the 'Independents' appear to be ex party folk too. It would surely be wrong to call the PCC a form of pension package?

So there wasn't really much to separate the candidates for a process that most of us don't understand, but which leads to the politicising of the police force.

Listening to the 'selected ones' in this 14.99% turnout process is also salutary. Instead of recognising that they have paper thin support and in some cases were only elected after the first and second choice votes were merged illustrates the point.

That they are declaring themselves 'victors', when they have maybe an average of 6% support from the electorate already illustrates a lack of ethical compass.

Trying now to search for the actual results is interesting. It reveals the people with the highest aggregated votes, but even the official PCC site and the Home Office site is keeping quiet about the actual numbers.


In the end, I did some quick digging myself and created my own graph. The average % from this graph is 5.88% of the electorate selecting the winning candidate - and remember it can use two votes because of the arcane Supplementary Voting system used - which I suspect many didn't fully understand in any case.

I know the selected candidates are calling this a triumph, but I'm not sure for what?