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Paris Brown tweets: The true scandal's the fortune being wasted on non-jobs like hers

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You really do have to pinch yourself. No really, you say, this must be a joke, surely? Alas, it is all too true.

A few days ago, it was revealed that the new Police and Crime Commissioner for Kent, Ann Barnes, had appointed a ‘youth commissioner’ for the area, one Paris Brown. Ms Brown has just reached the ripe old age of 17.

She is to be paid £15,000 over the next year for a 37-hour week (with Mrs Barnes paying for one third of this out of her own salary). She will apparently be endowed not just with a desk and a telephone, but also an official car with her own emblem. But of course! A silver hoodie, perhaps?

'Very exceptional': A few days ago, it was revealed that the new Police and Crime Commissioner for Kent, Ann Barnes, had appointed a 'youth commissioner' for the area, 17-year-old Paris Brown (pictured)

Mrs Barnes has praised Ms Brown to the skies as a great choice to become ‘the young face of policing in the county' because she is ‘very exceptional’.

So is Ms Brown a particularly mature 17-year-old with views beyond her years about policing and society? Er, not exactly.

‘The only reason young people hang around on the street,’ she has opined, ‘is because there’s nothing else for them to do.’

So she’s going to ask them what would get them off the streets, thinks jobs are the answer and wants to ‘remove the stigma’ attached to the young.

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This is as original an opinion as you’d be likely to find in any sixth-form debating society. What’s needed, in the real world, is not the removal of stigma but an end to crime and hooliganism.

And does it really require a £15,000 salary and an official emblem to elicit the insight that getting a job is an effective antidote to crime?

Worse was to follow. At the weekend, some more of Ms Brown’s views were reported: to be precise, foul-mouthed rantings on Twitter, which were subsequently deleted once the balloon went up over them.

These revealed an apparent fondness for drugs and alcohol, alongside a number of violent, racist and anti-gay comments. Other messages referred to her cravings for sex and cakes laced with marijuana.

At the weekend, some of Paris Brown's tweets were reported, revealing an apparent fondness for drugs and alcohol, alongside a number of violent, racist and anti-gay comments (pictured with Ann Barnes, right)

The new young face of Kent policing also demonstrated her apparent disdain for the law, and endorsement of anti-social behaviour, seeming to support a hypothetical assault by her brother.

Is this what Mrs Barnes meant by saying Ms Brown was ‘very exceptional’?

A more suitable description would be ‘deeply immature’. It would be hard to think of a more ludicrously inappropriate choice for a post in law enforcement. Indeed, mouthing-off like this would make most employers reluctant to employ her at all.

Tweet storm: Is this what Mrs Barnes meant by saying Ms Brown was 'very exceptional'?

Such verbal exhibitionism is hardly surprising, since Ms Brown is at an age when teenagers are still negotiating the transition from childhood to adulthood.

Indeed, in trying to minimise the fall-out from her remarks, she claimed she had merely been showing off, and that she had never taken drugs and did not condone people who did. Nor was she an alcoholic, merely imbibing a small glass of wine from time to time ‘when I sit indoors with my mum’. In other words, an all-too-typical teenager who — understandably — lacks adult wisdom and still needs her mum to look after her.

So what on earth did Mrs Barnes think she was doing choosing an adolescent for a job requiring adult judgment and authority in telling the police how to behave?

Mrs Barnes claimed her protegee would ‘bridge the world of young people and policing’.

For sure, the police need to talk to young people. But what misplaced arrogance —and contempt for the police — to suggest that they have to be told how to do so by a 17-year-old.

Furthermore, Mrs Barnes is herself being paid £85,000 per year to bridge the worlds of the police and the community they serve. If she feels she lacks the ability to represent the police to the young of that community, and vice versa, she shouldn’t have taken the job.

Rather than bridge-building, this seems much more like empire building: creating spin-off posts to make the commissioner’s job seem more important and powerful.

It is astounding that, in this supposed age of austerity, yet another bureaucratic empire should now be spawning yet more jobs that have everything to do with power and status and nothing to do with what the public actually needs.

The curse of modern government is the exponential growth of bureaucratic non-jobs. Almost every institution in the public sector — the NHS, the BBC, the police — has been virtually brought to its knees by ever-increasing layers of pointless pen-pushing or politically correct mini-tyrannies being funded at the expense of front-line services.

Almost every institution in the public sector has been virtually brought to its knees by ever-increasing layers of pointless pen-pushing or politically correct mini-tyrannies being funded at the expense of front-line services

The NHS, for example, has employed meaningless ‘change facilitators’ and ‘sustainability officers’, while salaries offered for ‘performance support officers’, ‘staffing resource facilitators’ and website editors often far exceed that of a junior nurse.

Local authorities have protected posts such as ‘walking co-ordinator’, ‘cheerleading development officer’ and ‘future shape programme manager’. And at the BBC, a senior executive once admitted that she had no idea what a £58,000-a-year ‘decision support analyst’ on the staff actually did.

Yet now Mrs Barnes is throwing yet more taxpayers’ money down this particular black hole. And this at a time when the Kent police force has had to lose 500 officers to help make £52 million in savings.

Even after her judgment in appointing Ms Brown was revealed to be thus hopelessly flawed, however, Mrs Barnes remained utterly unrepentant.

Doubt? If Mrs Barnes feels she lacks the ability to represent the police to the young of that community, and vice versa, she shouldn't have taken the job

In response to her new recruit’s crude rantings about drugs, violence and sex, Kent’s Police and Crime Commissioner merely dismissed them. She was sure Ms Brown would be ashamed of these comments, she said — and that even though any parent encountering such sentiments on Twitter or Facebook would be shocked, ‘that’s what kids do’.

That is, unfortunately, what many ‘kids’ indeed do. But surely the appropriate response by an adult is to take action against such disgusting behaviour, rather than pay that ‘kid’ a salary as an authority on young people’s attitudes — and even sit in judgment over the police!

It is precisely this confusion over treating children and teenagers as if they are mature before their time that has led to their being effectively abandoned by the adult world — not least by the teaching profession, of which Mrs Barnes was a member — and thus left to lapse all too often into criminality.

What confidence can one now have in Mrs Barnes? And surely here’s the rub. For police commissioners themselves are an unnecessary, money-wasting development.

The purported aim behind their creation was to reconnect policing to public concerns about crime and disorder.

There is no question that policing has badly lost its way. The Government’s mistake, however, was to think that elected commissioners would solve this problem.

For elections often merely install people who are themselves inadequate, being  mainly interested in self aggrandisement, thus imposing upon the police yet another layer of crippling bureaucratic nonsense.

There are now 41 police and crime commissioners earning up to £100,000 per year. A number of them have appointed deputies and assistants, sparking allegations of cronyism and money-wasting.

Indeed, their already massively expensive election has given a green light to a new frenzy of useless empire-building and a further huge waste of public money.

The public showed what they thought of the whole idea by refusing in droves to vote for these new police overseers.

Ms Brown’s contract should be terminated before her appointment turns not just Mrs Barnes but police commissioners in general into a total laughing stock.

m.phillips@dailymail.co.uk





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