Local democracy

Mary Beard writes about electing the head of a local police authority in her blog:
http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2012/10/who-shall-i-vote-for-a-police-and-crime-commisioner.html

I commented:

Democracy is a decision-making technique that works well when the decision-makers hold power and have a consensus on how to use it. So you get slave-holding democracy, feudal democracy, municipal/city-state democracy, etc, all working well until the hold on power is challenged and the consensus is shredded.
In the transition to a new power-sharing consensus power becomes the unvarnished exercise of force it always is in essence. We're living in a transitional epoch (capitalist to socialist ie non-capitalist  mode of production, a free universal association of working people) and none of the big historical events we live through can be assessed on the basis of formal democracy.
So we need to get real about the possibilities, limitations and risks of the vote as a problem-solving mechanism. Before any proposal is put to a vote for decision, it has to be devised and formulated by people with an interest in pushing it through. This process is real politics, and the conditions determining whose interests are served are what allow us to judge the adequacy of any claimed democracy. Good for slave-holders? Slave-holding democracy. Good for ruthless, murderous (think Bhopal, or Marikana for that matter) capitalists? Bourgeois democracy.
And it's the big picture that counts even in tiny local decision-making. If the arteries don't work, the capillaries clot up and gangrene ensues.
Sounds pretty much like gangrene setting in in the local organs of police power in Britain ;-)