PETER HITCHENS: The police are revolting against the people of this country
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Our police chiefs have now quite obviously grown too big for their helmets. Their heads have got too swollen, while their feet, which they barely use any more, have gone soft from lack of contact with the pavement.
The sheer nerve of their new threat to stop investigating some crimes if they don’t like the size of their budget is an outrage. If Sir Keir Starmer wants to evoke a great cry of ‘At last!’ from the people of this country, he will very swiftly squash this disgraceful revolt against the public and Parliament by three of the most senior figures in the police hierarchy.
I think he would be surprised by just how popular he would be if he stood up to these smug, criticism-proof, overmighty subjects. They remind me of the worst of the trade union heavies who by the late 1970s had begun to think they could demand anything they liked, because they were so strong. Well, where are they now?
The police long ago squandered the respect they earned in the past. They have largely failed to do the jobs the public expect of them, yet they now threaten to do even fewer if they are not happy with their allocations.
The three are Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Gavin Stephens, head of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), and Graeme Biggar, head of the National Crime Agency (NCA). And what they said is pretty much insulting to the British people. They said that if the Government does not give them enough taxpayers’ money, they will face ‘stark choices’ about which crimes they investigate. Will they so? It looks to most of us as if they made those choices long ago.
If I were Sir Keir, I’d say that they could whistle for their money until they started doing their job again. And if, as I expect would then happen, they didn’t like that, I’d give them notice that their failed organisations would shortly be disbanded, just as soon as they could be replaced by new police forces willing to do the job they are paid for. I’d then immediately begin recruiting and training such forces.
Police investigations of burglary, shoplifting, vandalism, anti-social behaviour and illegal drug use are a fond memory. The real struggle is to find what exactly it is that they do investigate, though their desire to monitor the internet is a national joke that the police are the last people in this country to see.
It is another national joke that, if you tell them a weapon is involved they will come running, even if it is only a butter-knife wielded by a one-legged 92-year-old from his wheelchair, or an air pistol in a drawer of a university vice-chancellor’s residence.
But they can’t cover up the fact that it is more or less a waste of time for most people to seek their aid. Getting through on the telephone is a struggle. Visiting a police station, if there is still one anywhere near you, also gives the outsider the strong impression that those inside would much rather be left in peace. Gone are the open counters and friendly desk sergeants of fond memory. In their place are locked doors, armoured glass windows and (out of hours) intercoms, often linking the visitor to a distant office miles away.
These places always remind me of Bob Dylan’s 1965 song Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues in which he warned ‘The cops don’t need you and, man, they expect the same’. In those days we in these islands did not think of our police as ‘cops’ and would have been puzzled by the sentiment. Now the term has understandably taken root, as our police increasingly resemble a rather grim idea of what American cops are like – car-borne, swaggering, tattooed, flat-capped, clad in combat gear and accoutred with manacles, clubs and venomous sprays.
And now we all know what Mr Dylan means. No official continuous figures are now kept on police station closures, but in 2006 the government admitted that 900 of them had gone since 1998. Hundreds more have followed since. Most of those that remain are open only during office hours and closed at weekends.
So you may believe senior officers when they claim, as they often do, that ‘lack of resources’ prevents them from doing their job properly. I used to get this answer when, a quarter of a century ago, I began to wonder what had happened to the regular foot patrols that had kept this country orderly and peaceful for 100 years.
In fact, through a series of decisions taken in the 1960s, these patrols were deliberately got rid of, a process that took perhaps 30 years to complete. During that time, people might have wondered vaguely where the constables they remembered had gone.
But there would be plenty of political promises of more ‘Bobbies’ on the ‘beat’ even though there hasn’t been any such thing as a ‘Bobby’ for decades (they are ‘cops’ now), and the ‘beat’ (regular, preventive foot patrol) began to be abolished in November 1966.
Instead of preventing crime and disorder by a constant presence, police raced about in cars, trying to deal with crime after it had happened, like firemen trying to beat out forest blazes. It has never worked, and it can’t keep up with the demand it creates. If everyone is hoping for a rapid reaction, nobody will get one.
Anyway, what use is a police officer after a crime? He or she can’t unburgle or unstab or unmug you, or unlift your shop.
By April 2000, when the Mail interviewed a young policewoman about her fitness regime, she confessed that she spent a lot of her time cruising around in a patrol car, and a fitness expert concluded her job was ‘not very active’, suggesting ‘any exercise outside working hours – even chasing her toddler around – will not go amiss’. A waitress and a gardener interviewed for the same feature both had higher fitness scores.
That was a pretty fair summary of what had happened to foot patrolling. But was its disappearance really caused by manpower shortages? No. The number of officers is far, far greater in modern times than it was when foot patrols were normal.
Of course, the figures go up and down a bit. But the total number of officers in England and Wales was 148,886 at the end of September 2024. And this is for a population of about 68.3 million. Well, in 1961, when Dixon of Dock Green was still flatfooting around his beat, the equivalent figures were 75,985 officers in England and Wales, not much more than half as many as we have now. But the population was 46 million, about two thirds of what we have now.
What is more, in 1961, police were responsible for prosecutions (taken over by the CPS), security of commercial premises (taken over by private security firms) and parking enforcement (taken over by local authorities). And yet, police forces have acquired armies of back-office staff they never used to have.
If any commercial organisation stopped doing its job on this scale, with such feeble excuses, people might just take their business elsewhere. Well, maybe the time has come for that. How much would you miss the police we have today? How long would it take you even to notice they weren’t around any more?
On Mail podcast Alas Vine & Hitchens, acclaimed columnists Sarah Vine and Peter Hitchens debate one big weekly idea from news, culture, and society. Search wherever you get your podcasts now. New episodes every Wednesday.
