Our Police Prefer Playing Politics to Solving Real Crimes
Peter Hitchens
Mail On Sunday
How can the police be too powerful and too feeble at the same time? This is perhaps the greatest avoidable scandal of our age, and yet nobody ever does anything about it.
The decisions which led to this mess can easily be tracked down. I did it years ago, and have supplied the details to politicians (including Theresa May) and senior police officers. It benefits nobody, least of all the police themselves. So why is it never put right?
The amazing fall of Damian Green might serve some purpose if it led to action. But will it? I couldn’t care less about Mr Green. I may have met him once, but am not sure. I despise his party and the Government of which he was a member. But the behaviour of some of the police officers who searched his parliamentary offices, and have since gone public with pornography claims, seems to me to be disgraceful and wrong. It is an improper use of powers given to them for other purposes.
I shuddered when I first heard of the case, sensing in it a threat to freedom in general, as I often do these days.
The initial arrest was dubious and looked political. This doesn’t just affect politicians. Thanks to powers very foolishly given to them, the police now act as judge and jury in thousands of cases. They can publicly ruin a person by noisily arresting him in a well-publicised dawn raid, even though they have no real case against him.
They can make him unemployed by keeping him on endless so-called ‘police bail’. This is a sinister and lawless procedure, allowing police to punish individuals against whom nothing has ever been proved. And many of these decisions are taken by highly political people, trained and indoctrinated in the new dogmas of political correctness, quite distinct from the old-fashioned coppers who came from the normal world and shared the general view of right and wrong.
At the beginning of the 19th Century, Parliament feared that the police would turn into just such an engine of oppression and secret power. Only when Robert Peel came up with his brilliant idea of citizens in non-military, modest uniform, unarmed and with tightly limited powers, patrolling the streets on foot, did MPs at last agree to allow an experiment.
And it worked. It worked brilliantly. It never got too powerful. Its constables were the servants of the public, and knew it. Their presence on the streets prevented thousands of the sorts of crimes that now go undeterred and unpunished. They were a rallying point for the good and a warning to the bad.
They never got above themselves, wore baseball caps or disappeared to go on sociology courses.
The net of local police stations, open all hours and close to where we lived and worked, made it easily accessible. It never stopped working. Right into the 1960s, official inquiries confirmed that it was still highly effective.
The most advanced academic research, by James Q. Wilson, has since endorsed it as the best type of policing known to man. By discouraging small offences, it discouraged large-scale crime too. It wasn’t perfect. There was some corruption, and some brutality. But these resulted from the failings of human individuals, not the system itself.
Alas, a combination of liberal political reform and vain, fashionable innovation, backed by a few prominent journalists, ended it in a few short years. The police disappeared into cars and back offices, specialist squads and political correctness lectures. Wherever they were, they weren’t on the streets.
Besieged by louts? Call back next week, we’re busy. Burgled? Fill in this form, we’re busy. People openly using drugs on the street? Not interested. But ask the police to join in a Gay Pride march and they’ll be along, high heels and nail varnish at the ready.
Police stations were closed by the hundred (it is still happening). Those that were not sold off were closed for most of the time, and in many cases have come to resemble Soviet border control posts, with those inside them cut off from the public by thick glass and long waits. New stations were sited far from town centres, to emphasise that the police don’t need us and expect the same in return.
It is obligatory at this point to say that there are still decent police officers, and so there are. But St Francis of Assisi, or Superman, would struggle to do a good job under these conditions.
It has all been a terrible, unnecessary mistake. It would be easy, cheap and popular to put it right. Mrs May would become a national heroine and be remembered as long as Robert Peel if she would only do it. Well, why doesn’t she?
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