The Home Office has been forced to acknowledge the need to activate innovative, transparent, understandable, and relevant ways of ensuring that those tasked with policing are held primarily to democratic account. The shift to a neighborhood reassurance policing philosophy foregrounds the possibility of more direct forms of accountability, or trust-based policing and new service delivery models. This paper concentrates its analysis on the proposals contained in the government Green Paper, Policing: Building Safer Communities Together to re-invigorate the structure of police governance in the United Kingdom. The paper begins by providing a brief overview of New Labor’s initial attempts to modernize British policing. It then explores why and how the broader political discourse of new localism came to inflect the unfolding debate about the need to revitalize police accountability. Lastly, a critical evaluation is offered of the latest attempt to reorganize the democratic structure of police governance. References