Anyone who dares to criticise the British police pays a price. It’s one I am prepared to pay because sometimes one just has to speak out. But, apart from the NHS, which has succeeded in obtaining Sacred Status, and whose fundamental principles cannot be criticised by anyone in public life, I know of no body which is so incapable of listening to reasonable criticism. The NHS, however, does have many redeeming features. It does cure some illnesses and patch up the injured. But the police, however pleasant individuals may be, spend their time doing the wrong thing. And however busily or diligently they do it, it doesn’t work.
Each time I criticise this vast, unresponsive nationalised industry, the Police, a strange thing happens. There is almost total silence from police chiefs themselves, who are well aware of what they are doing and don’t care what I say about it. There is silence from the politicians whose actions have created this very considerable national failure.
But there is a frenzy of (often rather spiteful and personal) abuse from individual officers. When I beg them to read my book ‘The Abolition of Liberty’ , they suggest that I am doing the whole thing to make money. It is quite amusing if you write serious books on serious subjects, to find that people think these are generally a major source of income, much as they also think that TV appearances are in general hugely rewarded. Ho ho. I’m not complaining,. I’ve been very fortunate in life, but it isn’t usually so. I want people to read them. They can do so through libraries. It’s nice if they buy them,
These police critics will often complain that the change in methods is not their fault and they aren’t free to oppose it. In that case, surely they should view me as their ally. Yet they take the side of their oppressors against me. In which case, how can I believe their claims that they don’t in fact support the reshaping of the police which began in the 1960s?
Others urge me to ‘go out on patrol’ with them, or assume that I have never done so and that if UI had I would agree with them. Wrong on both counts. Were they to ask, I would tell them that I have done so, in London, Johannesburg and Dallas, Texas (all surprisingly similar). And that it is these experiences of futile response to things that have already happened, which led me to the views I now hold. They can be summed up in this question. What, exactly, is the sue of a police officer after a crime has been committed? He or she cannot unburgle, unmurder or unmug the victim. He or she was hired to prevent this taking place at all, not to arrive afterwards with a screech of brakes and a notebook.
Others point out that they work very hard (which I don’t in any way doubt) and suggest I lighten their load by joining up as a special constable ( a genuinely hilarious thought) .
Well, here’s a metaphor for them. If this country was full of factories producing aeroplanes made out of lead, what would it matter how hard their workforces toiled at their task, or how nice their staff were?
What would it matter if they were short of workers?
Even Saudi Arabia isn’t going to buy lead jets from us.
Because they won’t fly.
And the point about modern policing is that it doesn’t fly, either. It never has, and it never will, because it is based on a wrong principle. But the sort of policing which it replaced *did* fly and did work, and nobody has ever shown that it did not (the 1962 Royal Commission explicitly endorsed it as sound), or shown why the new form is better. On the contrary, James Q. Wilson’s ‘broken windows theory’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory which says that a failure to act against small breaches of the law leads to general disorder
Is both obvious common sense and has been found to be sound, especially in New York City, thought it attracts the usual ‘correlation is not causation’ attacks which serve critics when they have no other ammunition.
This was what I thought on those ‘ride-alongs’ with police in various places, as we turned up in dingy apartments to question men and women who had been beating each other up, or in streets where people had been stabbed, or at the scenes of burglaries or muggings.
We couldn’t actually do anything except take notes.
All that charging about at high speed with the sirens and lights going was simply not as important as it looked or felt. The paramedics, by contrast were needed. So were locksmiths, glaziers, the local vicar, all kinds of people. But not the police. The best they could do would be to take the first steps towards a prosecution which, if it ever happened, would be so delayed and so feeble that it would do little to deter any such action happening again.
It seemed to me that the police themselves had been beguiled by a TV image of themselves as knights errant, armed and armoured, hurtling to rescue amidst howling sirens and multicoloured strobe lights or (better still) clattering through the sky in their most favourite toy, the helicopter.
The doubt nagged away at me. Time, the chance to read and research, the growing problem of police seeming to take sides against people who defended themselves (I saw a lot of these cases in my correspondence. They were real. They do happen), made me think more deeply.
I was also increasingly puzzled. Where had the police gone, who once used to be visibly walking the streets of the city where I had lived, on and off, for decades? They sued to be there. Now they weren’t. But I didn’t recall any announcement that, like the railways slashed by Dr Beeching and Ernest Marples, they had been abolished. It had just happened.
Why was it that the local city force, whose coppers knew most of us by name, had vanished, to be replaced by a vast territorial ‘service’ covering a huge and varied stretch of Southern England, whose officers didn’t even know where my street was when I called them up ? When and how had it happened? Was that better? Small, we had learned by then, was beautiful. Why was big supposed to be best when it came to policing? I had noticed, in two years living in the USA, that policing there was still almost totally local, and largely (if not universally) popular, responsive and efficient too. There were other problems, the racial one being the greatest, but Solomon himself, in all his glory, could not solve that, I fear. And we had a form of it too.
Unlike most people, I had the time and the facilities to find out what had happened. First I trawled through the wonderful newspaper cuttings libraries, going back more than a century, to which I have privileged access. Eventually I plunged into the British Library, led from one book to another by footnotes, and from there to forgotten official documents that nobody now ever bothered to read. I spent all my days off, and many evenings, pursuing this.
And a picture emerged.
A huge and lasting change, so profound that it had more or less reversed the polarity of policing in this country, had taken place.
It had never been fully debated. It might well have been an accident, though it took place largely under the direction of Roy Jenkins, a pestilential reformer who seems never to have liked any English institution or custom, and who more or less wrecked that most precious inheritance of all, the Jury system.
At that time, as I well remembered, there was a certain belief that newness was goodness and that all change was for the better.
The American influence (not real, but misunderstood, through car-borne TV police series such as ‘Highway patrol’) was there, making actual British officers jealous of their fictional American counterparts with their huge flashy cruisers and militarised uniforms. (This doesn’t just affect police officers. Thousands of British journalists were influenced forever by the film of ‘All the President’s Men’, in which heroic reporters were played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, and a brave, tough editor by Jason Robards).
Also influential was Eric St Johnston, Chief Constable of Lancashire and another pestilential innovator, responsible for much of what happened and on good terms with the Labour government of the middle 1960s.
But you can sense, as the ‘experiments’ in car-borne reactive policing, foredoomed to be successful as so many official experiments are, were repeatedly lauded in the ‘Times’ newspaper, that there was someone somewhere in the Home Office who wanted this.
Perhaps they hoped to save money, which is quite funny given what happened later, as police manpower hugely increased and police budgets rose and rose. In those days the police had some problems with both recruitment and retention, and there were genuine shortages of manpower. Though the numbers of officers, both in raw numbers and per head of population, were much , much smaller
E.g.:
In 1961, there were 75,161 police officers in England and Wales
There are now 126,818
Bear this in mind the next time you hear the parrot cry of ‘we don’t have the manpower to do it the way we used to’. It’s not true.
It’s also worth noting that in the intervening period police have been relieved of their statutory duty to secure commercial premises (now done by private security firms) , of their role in enforcing parking laws (taken on by local authorities) , and of their role as prosecutors (taken over by the CPS) ; and they now have many tens of thousands of non-uniformed staff, few of whom existed in 1961, to help them with bureaucracy. So, while there is no doubt that the police now face the tedious demands of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 and its codes of practice, manpower isn’t the central difficulty. It’s policy and leadership.
Whatever the motive, what was not in doubt was that, without any good technical or practical reason, a successful and established system of policing – preventive foot patrolling – was extinguished between about 1966 and about 1970, the final blow being delivered by the police force mergers imposed by Roy Jenkins after 1966 and mostly implemented in 1968 and 1969.
It was bipartisan. He did this under powers given to him by a Tory Act of Parliament of 1964, itself based on the Royal Commission report of 1962, the era of ‘big is beautiful’. In some ways the thoughtless ‘progressive’ consensus on this mirrors the simultaneous one which destroyed the grammar schools in the same era, and which would massacre English local government in 1974.
Crime, disorder, vandalism and drug abuse have continued on their upward spiral ,along with the prison population, ever since. I’d be the last person to say that these deteriorations have no other causes (dare I mention another of my books ‘the Abolition of Britain’?) . But it seems reasonable to say that the disappearance of uniformed authority as a presence on our streets and in our countryside has played its part.
It was in late 1966 that the Home Office Police Advisory Board urged the abolition of preventive foot patrolling, and its replacement by car-based surveillance. The Home Office could be reasonably confident that the new heads of the new forces, which would be increasingly under the eye of central government, would be sympathetic to this instruction. I recently had an exchange on this era in the correspondence columns of ‘the Times’ with an officer who said I was wrong because there were still some foot patrols after 1966 (no doubt there were. I never said they all stopped on the stroke of midnight at the end of that year. They just weren’t typical or normal, that’s all, and they didn’t last) . Alas for his argument he noted that he himself had started to patrol in a ‘Panda’ car (this strange name is explained in my book ‘The Abolition of Liberty’) in 1968.’The Times’ has yet to publish my rebuttal, which pointed this out.
Anyway, we switched from making planes that fly to making planes that don’t fly, and those who cruelly point out that this is so , in our rather mad country, are attacked for being anti-police’ and ‘lost in the past’, whereas those in charge of turning out the non-flying lead aircraft which stand in their vast unsold, immoveable rows, continue to think they are terrific, and to attract vast slabs of public money.