When the great Tory statesman Sir Robert Peel founded the Metropolitan Police almost 200 years ago, he declared it would win the support of the public not with boots and cudgels, but ‘impartial service to the law’.
That rigorous outlook made our unarmed police the envy of the world. In Britain’s remarkably crime-free society of the mid-20th century – the one I remember from my childhood – officers commanded respect.
‘The gentleness of English civilization is its most marked characteristic,’ wrote George Orwell at the height of the Second World War.
Yet it would be absurd to write those words today, where the shadow of violence and thuggery hangs over our streets. Faith in our justice system is plummeting, with our prisons barely able to cope with the influx of criminals and our courts paralysed by backlogs.
Meanwhile, the majority of our forces have lost their way, their sense of purpose undermined by warped priorities, their efficiency by wokery and cant.
As the former police commissioner for Thames Valley, I look on with utter despair at what is happening in the fight against crime – and I fear where things are heading.
Research published this week shows British police forces failed to solve 92 per cent of burglaries in a year ending last March. Across no less than a third of the country, not a single case of this devastating crime was cracked by constabularies.
The conclusion should be obvious: burglary has, in part, been decriminalised. Shockingly, out of 185,000 cases of forced entry where an investigation occurred last year, the police were unable to identify a suspect in 143,000 of them.
British police forces failed to solve more than nine in ten burglaries in a year ending last March
It is the same wretched story with phone theft, where the clear-up rate is beyond dismal, and where in central London the authorities have taken to putting signs on the pavement warning people to take care of their devices, rather than cracking down on the thugs who snatch them.
Just 1 per cent of these disgusting robberies leads to anyone being punished. Yet again, this is decriminalisation by neglect.
How on earth did we get to this point? There are a number of factors: changing social attitudes, dwindling resources – but most of all, politics.
As I saw in my time as commissioner, a creeping woke agenda has caused an insidious politicisation of many constabularies, some of which seem to believe their role is implementing the liberal orthodoxy of the State – ‘diversity, equality and inclusion’ – instead of keeping the public safe.
Swathes of officers no longer see themselves as stern law upholders, but instead as part-censor, part-propagandist, part-social worker, part-political operative.
Before I was commissioner I served in the British Army and had spells of duty in Northern Ireland. I noted despite the Troubles the province had a very low crime rate.
Why? Because the Royal Ulster Constabulary had a tremendous sense of mission and dealt efficiently, sharply with even petty offences.
By contrast, at Thames Valley I was often appalled at the way political correctness destroyed that very spirit.
Before I was commissioner I served in the British Army and had spells of duty in Northern Ireland, writes ANTHONY STANSFELD
I was lucky to have three outstanding Chief Constables over my time but none of us could halt the spread of Leftist dogma, particularly at the College of Policing which trains senior officers and is riddled with wokery.
Here is one example of the College’s pernicious activities, from an official document. This warns: ‘We need everyone in policing to develop a deep understanding of the many causes of disproportionality [sic]. We must develop effective and robust strategies to eliminate disparity [sic], empowering our workforce to challenge discrimination.’
That sounds more like a Green Party manifesto than a police training manual.
Senior officers persistently complain about a ‘lack of resources’ as an explanation for their pathetic failure to tackle burglaries and shoplifting. Yet these same officers invariably seem to have the personnel to dispatch absurdly large and intimidating squads to arrest otherwise law-abiding citizens for comments made online.
Only last week, businessman Sam Smith revealed 12 officers had turned up on his doorstep to question him after he had made some disparaging remarks about the police on a blog. Having been held overnight in a cell and had his computer seized, he is now planning to sue his Hertfordshire force for £70,000. I wish him the best of luck.
Far too much of this kind of heavy-handed and officious behaviour is taking place. We are sliding towards becoming a society in which we suffer some of the worst aspects of a police state – above all, an insidious and dangerous erosion of our freedom of speech – with none of the more tolerable aspects of authoritarianism, specifically its stern punishment of petty offenders.
As a result, gangs of criminals are acting with almost total impunity while ordinary members of the public are arrested for holding views deemed ‘unacceptable’.
Just take the appalling case of Graham Linehan, the brilliant sitcom writer who was arrested at Heathrow Airport last year by six heavily-armed officers purely because he had dared to criticise transgenderism. Or consider the fact that, while it is not an offence to pray in public – as mass prayer events by hundreds of Muslims in Trafalgar Square recently showed – there have been a disturbing number of cases in which a devout Christian has been arrested simply for mounting a silent vigil near an abortion clinic.
This is an affront to all the best British traditions of democracy and liberty. Ours is the country that pioneered Parliamentary governance, invented the concept of constitutional monarchy and defeated Nazi tyranny in the Second World War – yet now the flag of freedom flutters low across our land.
It is time for police to remember what their real job is: tackling violence, theft and fraud. At Thames Valley I watched plenty of good senior officers leave on generous redundancy packages, leading to a wholesale clear-out of experienced and able staff. Mediocrities replaced them. Those are the very people now in charge of policing – and it shows in the results.
We must inject new talent at the top, and the Government should scour the highest echelons of industry and the armed forces for them. There are too many chiefs with meaningless paper qualifications but no leadership qualities.
One exception, as Daily Mail readers may know, is Sir Stephen Watson, who became Chief Constable of Greater Manchester in 2021. Immediately he ditched the defeatist approach of his predecessor, in which police said they did not even have funds to record all crimes, including burglaries. Sir Stephen has turned around crime-fighting by concentrating on the basics, raising morale and introducing proper recording systems.
As he put it in a recent interview: ‘Here’s a novel idea: arrest bad people.’ That used to be the police’s approach in Britain – and it worked. Why don’t we try it again?
Anthony Stansfeld was Police and Crime Commissioner, Thames Valley, 2012-2021
