#120 - Lisa Townsend - Common-sense Policing: Drugs, Gangs and Hurty Words
The Peter McCormack Show
Peter McCormack
4.7 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 16 October 2025
⏱️ 130 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Lisa Townsend is the elected Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) for the Conservative Party in Surrey. In this interview, we discuss openly about the failure of prohibition, the politicisation of policing & growing crime.
We discuss: – Crime, police priorities & why frontline officers are demoralised – Drugs, gangs & the rise of middle-class shoplifting – Whether prohibition has failed & what to do about it – Policing vs mental health vs social work: who's doing what? – State bloat & NHS reform – The case for decentralisation, taxpayer control & back-to-basics policing
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TIMESTAMPS: 00:00:00 – Intro 00:04:45 – Public Safety 00:10:20 – PCCs vs Politicised Policing 00:15:30 – What the PCC Role Does 00:18:49 – The Real Job of Oversight 00:28:10 – Who Should Enter Politics? 00:32:00 – Can We Still Afford the State? 00:36:30 – Crime, Cost & Council Collapse 00:46:30 – Who Really Sets Police Priorities? 00:56:00 – The Shoplifting Spiral 01:01:30 – Middle-Class Theft Surge 01:06:30 – The Cocaine Hypocrisy 01:10:45 – Policing's Hidden Frontlines 01:16:00 – Has Prohibition Failed? 01:21:00 – Drugs, Markets & Legalisation 01:32:45 – What Should the State Do? 01:42:00 – The Mental Health Breakdown 01:51:00 – NHS Reform & Political Cowardice 01:56:00 – Can the PCC Model Work? 02:00:00 – Should PCCs Be Better Known? 02:06:00 – What's Wasting Police Time? 02:08:00 – Final Thoughts
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is one of the areas where I get into trouble for being... |
| 0:02.3 | Great. |
| 0:02.9 | Honest. |
| 0:04.6 | And I'm going to depart from a lot of my conservative PCC colleagues. |
| 0:09.3 | I'm not a libertarian. |
| 0:11.2 | I've said that. |
| 0:11.9 | I'm very much a one-nation conservative. |
| 0:14.1 | But there are certain issues and drugs is one of them where it seems pretty bloody obvious |
| 0:19.2 | to me that we've been doing the same thing |
| 0:21.6 | and expecting a different result. And that cannot be intelligent or sensible. I'm not remotely |
| 0:28.3 | ideal. One of the reasons I'm a One Nation Conservative is because I don't buy into sort of |
| 0:32.3 | this ideology and treating sort of various sort of political views as religion. |
| 0:40.0 | I'm a Roman Catholic. |
| 0:41.0 | I get the religion bit. |
| 0:41.9 | I just don't think that in politics of any place together. |
| 0:46.4 | And so as somebody who I would consider myself a pragmatist, |
| 0:50.8 | it's just the bloody obvious. |
| 0:52.7 | It doesn't work. |
| 0:58.5 | Prohibition, as we have designed it, does not work. |
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