When the authors attended the Annual APCC Conference in Harrogate in November 2014, a delegate took Bryn Caless aside in a queue for coffee and told him that:

There was no guarantee then (or now) that Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) would still be around in 2024, let alone either of the authors. Waiting ten years before undertaking research is a utopian prescription that bears very little resemblance to the real world, and none at all to the pragmatic level that the authors occupy. So we soldiered on regardless of the dire warnings of ‘prematurity’; progressively studying the nature of governance of the police; interviewing confidentially both PCCs and members of their chief police officer teams; and accumulating the ‘rich detail’ of our empirical research, the outcomes of which we present in this modest volume. And we discovered something interesting on the way: many police officers and PCCs have found common cause and have learned to work together quite well, despite doomsayers (plenty of whom are to be found in the pages that follow) who thought that introducing PCCs was the apocalyptic end of the policing world as we knew it. The doomsayers may have had a point four years or so earlier. When PCCs arrived at police headquarters all over England and Wales after the November 2012 elections, police forces generally, and the chief officer teams in particular, were largely hostile to, or at least wary of, these elected cuckoos that had been foisted on them, ousting the old comfortable Police Authority from the nest and demanding instead to be heard, fed and obeyed. Understandably, police forces did not welcome with open arms these insistent newcomers. For their part, the PCCs anticipated hostility or resistance, and most already knew, or thought they knew, what was wrong with policing and what they needed to do to put it right. There was some tightly-controlled aggression on their part too, especially when they encountered surly opposition or even mendacity from their police teams.