On the beat with a police commissioner ready to fight apathy

DURING our day together there’s a moment of mild excitement when Julia Mulligan is presented by one of her team with two brand new personalised high-visibility jackets – summer weight and winter weight.

She’ll use them for such outings as ‘farm watch’, when she will meet farmers and hear about their problems with rural crime, which include sheep rustling and theft of vehicles and machinery.

Visibility is what many people would say was missing from the countrywide campaign to find 41 police and crime commissioners to replace police authorities in England and Wales this autumn.

The first police and crime commissioner elected on November 15 was Angus Macpherson, who took up the post in Wiltshire and cheerfully admitted after 14.68 per cent of voters turned out for these elections across the country: “ I think they didn’t understand what the job is, they didn’t know who the candidates were and couldn’t make a judgment.”

Mulligan, a mother-of-two who lives near Skipton, agrees that the way the PCC election was run was by no means a triumph. The Government decreed that the poll was held in November, which was a factor in the low turn-out. This was compounded by the refusal to give candidates a free mailshot and failing to launch the election website until three weeks before the vote.

The election deposit was set at £500, and with campaign costs running to ten times that, strong independent candidates were deterred – leaving the field dominated by the three main political parties. All in all, not a great way to go about such a fundamental change to policing.

Macpherson, Mulligan and the rest now have to sell themselves to the public, making themselves relevant and doing a good enough job during their four years in office to encourage a respectable number of voters to bother next time.

Mulligan – salary £70,000 a year – will be responsible for controlling the police budget (which looks like it will be around £136m in the next financial year) and drawing up a police and crime plan setting out priorities.

One of her first jobs in North Yorkshire is to find a new chief for the force by the end of March. Deputy Chief Constable Tim Madgwick took up the post of temporary Chief Constable in May after the troubled reign of his predecessor, Grahame Maxwell, came to an end.

Maxwell and the previous Deputy Chief Constable Adam Briggs retired after they had become embroiled in a nepotism scandal. As a result, one of the issues Mulligan knows she has to address is public confidence in the integrity of the force.

Her office, staffed by the people who used to support the police authority, includes a chief executive, and is on a small business park at Melmerby near Ripon. Outside is the Prius in which she travelled around 6,500 miles back and forth across the country’s largest police authority area during the three-month campaign. She’s set up shop in a small meeting room, and is catching her breath between a briefing from police top brass and a meeting with community safety panel members from Selby. Later she’s popping in to a staff carol concert at North Yorkshire Police HQ in Newby Wiske near Northallerton, before a two-hour surgery of one-to-ones with the public at Scarborough library and a public meeting about the county council budget.

She has to draw up her police and crime plan by March. Much of her time is currently spent on a comprehensive listening exercise – meeting groups and individuals out in the community to hear what their concerns about policing are and incorporate proposals that will address these worries into the plan.

Mulligan was brought up on a farm in the Washburn Valley near Harrogate before the family moved to the Richmond area. She went to Harrogate Ladies’ College, has a degree in economics and started work in the car industry.

After that she moved on to publishing and eventually had her own business in communications consultancy specialising in social marketing. She worked with public sector partners – police, health services and councils – to change communities. Her main reasons for wanting the job are that she is interested in working with the community, making people feel safer.

“The role of PCC is very different to that of a police authority whose relationship with the police had become too cosy,” says Mulligan. “They mostly sat in a room and police came and presented reports. This job is about looking closely at how the police perform and what priorities should be.

“I’m also very interested in the victims of crime, and the experience they have of dealing with the police from the beginning to the end.”

She will be introducing a Victims’ Charter as part of her plan.

“North Yorkshire is one of the safest places in the country to live in and I want to make it even safer. So other priorities include anti-social behaviour, which I’ve heard about at many public meetings and surgeries.

“The PCC gives the public someone to go to who will listen to their concerns. I’ll also be looking at the wisest way to spend the budget we have – although all PCCs are managing cuts to some extent.”

Last year the North Yorkshire force shed 100 jobs – but those cuts have not been lost from front-line services, she says, and in some areas officers are being recruited.

It’s a bitterly frosty and foggy afternoon, but Mulligan is off to keep her appointments in Scarborough, grabbing a sandwich at a petrol station en route. Waiting for her at the public library are Pauline Carruthers and Andrea Miller from Hope Group, a specialist sexual abuse and rape crisis response and support centre in the town.

They tell Mulligan that the afternmath of the Jimmy Savile allegations has triggered a huge leap in demand for their charity’s services. “We’re very concerned that only 17 per cent of rapes get reported, and for that group there is only a four per cent conviction rate,” says Ms Carruthers.

The PCC asks what would help them. The two women want her to look at ways of improving both reporting and conviction rates by encouraging more openness and liaison between the police and groups working with victims.

“What would also help would be if there was someone at the police force who victims could talk to informally in the first instance,” says Miller.

Julia Mulligan promises she will discuss their suggestions.

The next appointment is with a local building contractor. He’s keen to find out from Mulligan what the procurement process is for police force contracts. He feels aggrieved that local trades people lose out on work because large contracts go out to tender and are won by companies from outside the area who bring in workers from all over the country. The good news, says Mulligan, is that she is keen to see local companies being used, but the bad news is that all procurement is now being handled at regional level.

A Whitby woman whose cottage in the centre of town is in a cobbled courtyard that’s a public thoroughfare with 20-odd pubs in the vicinity, complains of weekend revellers urinating and doing drugs on her doorstep. She wants the right of way removed and something done about licensing hours in the area. “Some people are too frightened to report these things in case there are repercussions, and the licensing authorities don’t seem to realise that people live close by,” she says.

Mulligan tells her that new legislation will charge levies from licensees to cover the cost of policing and clearing up mess after 12am.

Crime figures for Scarborough are going down, says Mulligan, “...but that worries me because there’s an incentive not to do anything about chronic problems that do exist. I tell people that they have to keep reporting everything to the police”.

At the end of her tenure, a huge measure of her success will be whether more than 14.32 per cent of the public is stirred to vote. She says she will throw everything she’s got at making a difference to people’s lives. She has four years to make herself recognisable.