What has happened to the British policeman? Once, he was the embodiment of British orderliness, civility and trust — a gentle and humane figure as portrayed in Dixon of Dock Green, known to his community and visible on its streets. Today he is an individual who symbolises contemporary British disorder: lazy, secretly unpleasant, obsessed with regulation, an enforcer of petty tyranny, and an ignorer of civil disturbance. The transformation of the archetypal cop from kindhearted neighborhood guardian to cowardly bully is an extraordinary development that has occurred across the course of my lifetime. It is not a fair story to tell about the many decent men and women who go into policing out of a desire to serve the public, but this collapse of a once invulnerable mythology reflects the emerging reality of a failed policing culture.
In recent days, seven police officers were sacked for “offensive” WhatsApp messages — just the latest in a string of firings for online messaging groups; a story that reflects both the often absurd excesses of political sensitivity, but also the growing perception of nastiness when it comes to the character and conduct of our cops. As grim as their private banter might be, these were perhaps seven officers we could ill afford to lose, as police forces are still struggling to recruit and return to their 2010 levels. Trust in the police has reached new lows, with 52 per cent of adults reporting that they lacked confidence in the police, as compared to 39 per cent in 2019. So how did we get here?
The history of policing in Britain is unique. In much of the Western world, professional police forces were gendarmeries — paramilitary organisations whose main remit was enforcing the authority of the state and suppressing public disorder. You can see the legacy of these forces when travelling abroad and encountering their modern day heirs with pistols on their hips and a swagger in their walk. In Britain, where the Common Law placed both enforcement and adjudication of guilt into the hands of ordinary people, there was considerable resistance to the idea of a uniformed police force. Faced with the problem of enforcing the law in newly massive industrial cities and towns, a unique compromise was arrived at under Robert Peel. We invented the first truly civilian professional police force, one that would be unarmed, and governed by the so-called “Peelian Principles”. Perhaps the most important of which is the instruction “To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.”
The new era of reform that followed has proven catastrophic
But in the last 60 years, under the pressure of new technology, social change, migration, and centralising governments, this essential insight has been diluted, and arguably lost entirely. Race riots and industrial disputes saw British police drawn further into the gendarme model, with the Home Office taking direct control of national policing. Foot patrols ceased and officers disappeared off streets and into cars. As policing became reactive and aggressive, and police officers less deferential to members of the public, the press and public in turn became more sceptical of the police. Corruption stories and controversies over race plagued police authorities throughout the 70s and 80s, culminating in the Stephen Lawrence scandal in the 90s, when the Met failed to secure a prosecution for the racist killing of a black teenager.
But the new era of reform that followed has proven catastrophic. On the one hand the British police remain highly ineffective as a paramilitary force, regularly failing to stop disruptive climate protests in a timely manner, even when they involve a handful of individuals. On the other, they are falling badly short as a “community” policing force, as anti-social behaviour spirals, public trust and ethnic minority relations have declined, and widespread perceptions of “two-tier” policing take hold.
The obsession with accountability has effectively destroyed the thing it sought to secure. Moving away from Home Office control to local democratic accountability sounds good, but rather than returning to the old Watch Committees which involved local councils and magistrates, the novelty of implementing directly elected Police and Crime Commissioners created a poorly understood, vaguely defined role, with only 15 per cent of the public participating in elections. Likewise, the Macpherson Report in the wake of the Stephen Lawrence scandal was well-intentioned, but looked not only at the procedural failures, but also fixated on the strange and ideological notion of “institutional racism”. What began with the very serious matter of failure to prosecute murder, somehow led to a policy of reporting and recording all “non-crime hate incidents”. These were defined in the report as “any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person”.
British coppers have become an unholy union between a paramilitary and community police force
Rather than a focus on criminal acts motivated by racism, or clearly identifiable racist individuals within the Met, this resulted in a vast bureaucratic cloud of “institutional racism” and non-criminal policing of offence. 20 years on, this approach has led to scenes like the arrest and detention of a 71-year-old retired special constable for criticising anti-semitism online. Police led him away in handcuffs, searched his home and electronic devices and combed his bookshelf which, they claimed, contained “very Brexity things”.
British coppers have become an unholy union between a paramilitary and community police force. This high-vis clad civil guard sees its job as managing “community relations”, whether that means looking the other way on Pakistani grooming gangs or kicking down doors over offensive tweets. During the pandemic, the principle of British citizens as self-policing was entirely breached at every institutional level, a situation only confirmed by the “two-tier” approach of the justice system towards the Southport riots.
British police forces are at once under-resourced, disrespected by the public, and lacking in a coherent ethos. Turning that around will be a generational challenge, and more complicated than just returning to a lost golden age. Even so, the Peelian principles are a crucial guide to the road ahead. The British public must once again feel that sense that they are responsible for enforcing the law and public order, and that the police are there to support them. That means police getting out of cars and offices, and back on the streets. It means reopening local police stations, and investing more money in police and courts. It means tearing up the bureaucracy weighing down officers, and establishing clear, democratically accountable oversight in its place. It means dropping DEI and enforcing the law without fear or favour. It means police getting out of the business of litigating offence and personal conflicts, and a return to common sense, human judgment in day to day policing.
