I no longer trust the police. Hold the phone: I never thought I’d say that. It’s not quite as definitive as it sounds, however, because I would of course dial 999 if I heard someone mucking about downstairs in the middle of the night. I’m just not sure the police would actually turn up. Or that they wouldn’t charge me with a hate crime against burglars.
I was raised with the myth – it was always a myth – of the community bobby who kept the streets safe by being visible and authoritative. Nowadays the police seem to react to crime rather than prevent it, and there’s no guarantee even of that. It turns out that the West Yorkshire force has set a target for “screening out” 56 per cent of cases brought to their attention, in other words they won’t be investigating the equivalent of 145,000 offences per year. One academic speculates that it’s probably theft, criminal damage and vandalism that will be ignored.
This is the pinnacle and the greatest depth of the target culture: imagine schools setting a target for churning out illiterates or the NHS for cancers gone untreated. Perhaps the West Yorkshire coppers are just being realistic about what they can and can’t do, but that’s little comfort to the locals living with a recorded crime rate that’s gone up 11 per cent year on year.
It’s not all the fault of the police; the Government has cut funding. The kind of crime reported is also changing, becoming more complex and difficult to investigate (Dixon of Dock Green never had to deal with emails from generous Nigerian princes). In times past I’d call for more cash and sympathy for those who put their safety on the line to maintain law and order – and leave the column at that. But there’s a niggling feeling at the back of my mind that what the police have become isn’t a product of only necessity but also of choice. That the millions spent on historic sex abuse cases or the obsession with hate crime or the endless celebration of diversity and equality represent a conscious decision to do one thing rather than another, to crack down on abusive tweets rather than, say, vandalism. And it’s motivated by ideology.
A lot of white, middle-class people are learning something that everyone else has always known: the police are political. We like to imagine that British institutions are run by objective public servants. The reality is that schools, hospitals and police forces are all arms of the state, and they reflect the values of those at the top of the power pyramid. Remember that the original policemen, or Peelers, launched in 1829, were distrusted and feared as a war on the poor and the disorderly, which is ironic because the very first Metropolitan policeman was sacked after just four hours on the job – why? Because he was drunk. The Peelers were given blue uniforms rather than the red type worn by the army, but many minorities have always seen them as an occupying force. Ask Scargill’s miners or the parents of any black child that died in custody.
Most Britons, however, have long regarded the fuzz as their friends because the cultural values of those in power has broadly corresponded to their own. But a change to the establishment that began in the Sixties has percolated slowly through the liberal welfare state and increasingly public services don’t do what many long assumed they existed to do: schools care less about teaching, universities discourage intellectual inquiry, Conservatives don’t conserve and Labour has little to do with the working-class. The police haven’t stopped policing – that would be a ridiculous assertion – but they do it in a different way than they did, shaped by new priorities. For anyone who doesn’t share their contemporary world view they risk becoming, well, like an occupying force.
Haven’t you noticed how the police suddenly look like soldiers? Covered in tasers and sprays, the uniform hidden beneath a luminous vest, often in shirt-sleeves, they’re a confusing mix of the informal and the intimidating. One neither instinctively feels respect nor familiarity, and thanks to their well-advertised war on prejudice, I’m terrified that if I ask them for directions I’ll give myself away as a conservative and wind-up in prison. One of the real miseries of political correctness is that it forces us all to pretend to be what we’re not, to obsess about saying the “wrong thing” and lose our natural relationship with those who we ought to feel totally at ease with. If I were married to a police officer, I guess what I’d be thinking is: “I can’t talk to you anymore. You’ve changed.”
I want to believe that beneath the surface, the police force is still stuffed with old-fashioned coppers who simply want to keep the streets safe – and maybe that is the truth. But when on the one hand you see crime going up and on the other all you hear the police talking about is political correctness, one has to assume they’re no longer interested in doing the job as it was once defined, which is dangerous because if the public feels unprotected they will take the law into their own hands.
Originally Posted by SWv2
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