Meet your Police and Crime Commissioner to save lives and protect our communities
PCCs are elected to make sure that local police meet the needs of the community – they work for you! You can contact your PCC to make a suggestion or a complaint about how your local area is policed. We want you to contact your PCC today to ask what they intend to do about our failed drug laws.
Arranging to meet your PCC is easy. You can contact your PCC’s office by email. Be polite and brief. Explain what you want to meet your MP about and the time and date you’d like to meet. If you haven’t heard back within a couple of weeks, then you can follow up your request with a polite phone call.
You can copy our template email we’ve produced here, or write your own if you prefer. Click the button below to visit the UK police website, where you can find your PCC’s email address. Please bcc info@anyoneschild.org into all emails, and forward any response to us so that we can keep track of which PCCs are contacted, and what they say.
Please remember to include your address to guarantee you get a reply!
If you do one thing to help shift drug policy and save lives this is it! Check out our guide for ‘How to meet your elected representative and become an empowered drug policy activist today.
Dear Commissioner < your PCC’s name >
Please meet me to discuss the impact our current drugs laws are having on people in our community.
My name is < your name > and I live in your police force area. I am writing to you because I am concerned about the negative impacts of the UK’s current approach to drugs and I would like to hear your views.
Effective drug policy should improve public health, reduce crime, and most importantly, protect young and vulnerable people. Overwhelming evidence shows that current policy fails to achieve this.
I am particularly concerned that people in our area are having their lives wrecked by current policy.
<If you have a personal story to tell, please add it here>
The harrowing stories of the families who campaign with ‘Anyone’s Child: Families for Safer Drug Control’ show that the lives of young people and the communities we live in throughout the UK are being damaged by our current criminal justice-led approach to drugs.
Reading their stories has convinced me things must change. I urge you to read them too: www.anyoneschild.org/stories
These brave families are uniting to push for drug policy reform to prevent others from suffering as they have. In the UK drug-related deaths are at record levels, our prisons are in crisis and drugs are getting stronger. One in three drug overdose deaths in Europe happen in the UK, which surely we can all agree is unacceptable.
It does not have to be like this. Around the world change is happening, from Portugal decriminalising people caught with drugs for their own use, to Canada rolling out supervised drug consumption rooms, to Switzerland prescribing legally regulated heroin in clinics. Cannabis is also being legally regulated across North America, and beyond. Legal regulation can take the drug trade out of the hands of gangsters and into the control of doctors, pharmacists and licensed retailers.
Here in the UK, Anyone’s Child is working with some of your PCC colleagues who are delivering options like diversion schemes, and heroin prescribing clinics, to reduce crime, health harms and drug related deaths.
I am urging you, as my Police and Crime Commissioner, to meet with me to discuss what can be done about this pressing issue, so that we can find a better way to keep our communities safe.
I look forward to hearing from you to learn your views on this vital issue. Please do let me know when and where it would be convenient to meet.
Yours sincerely,
<your name and address>
