ARE radical plans for elected police chiefs in County Durham, Cleveland and North Yorkshire a welcome injection of “people power” – or a disastrous recipe for corruption and scandal?

That will be the debate taking place at Westminster today, when the Government’s New York-style blueprint for police reform comes under the microscope.

First, Policing Minister Nick Herbert will put the case for police forces to be answerable, at the ballot box, to the residents they are paid to protect Later, Jessica de Grazia, New York’s former chief assistant district attorney – and a woman who ought to know – will tell us why it will all end in tears.

According to Ms de Grazia, the Home Office has learned all the wrong lessons after looking across the Atlantic for inspiration for its policing shake-up.

As a result, Britain will get the injection of energy from directly-elected police leaders...

but not the essential checks-and-balances to rein them in.

In a stark warning, Ms Grazia said: “There is always a risk of police corruption, but there is both a higher risk and incidence when you place the police directly under the control of an elected politician.”

Now, criticisms of elected police chiefs have rumbled on for many months, but this warning of corruption – from someone with hands-on-experience of such a system – is much harder to dismiss.

Last year, Councillor Dave McLuckie, the Cleveland Police Authority’s chairman, warned that extremists could seize control, saying: “The British National Party has already made clear they intend to field candidates.”

But it was easy for the Home Office to shrug off such claims as scaremongering by a Labour councillor with much to lose from the death of existing police watchdogs.

The other major gripe is the apparent unfairness of paying an elected police chief £122,000 a year, just as forces are sacking officers and slashing tens of millions of pounds from their budgets.

Ministers insisted it was money worth paying to give local people a proper say over policing.

Ms De Grazia is an unmistakably independent voice, a woman who was Manhattan’s most senior non-elected law officer, crossing the Atlantic to urge Britain to think again.

Her most serious criticism is an enormous concentration of power in a single “police and crime commissioner”, deciding key objectives and setting the budget.

In the United States, prosecutors can launch investigations separately. In Britain, those decisions are taken by a police chief. It is a criticism that must be answered, before people are asked to vote, on May 5 next year.

MEANWHILE, furious police officers are planning to march on Parliament to protest at their pay freeze and the hacking back of their overtime payments.

No doubt, students will be recruited to “kettle” the revolting coppers in Parliament Square – and whack them over the head with rolled-up loan application forms.

FINALLY, an interesting twist on the Libyan crisis from Tory backbencher John Baron and the sending of HMS Cumberland to rescue fleeing Britons. Was it wise to “send a warship named after a pork sausage to rescue Brits from a Muslim country?” he asked.