No-one ever refers to a ‘golden age’ of policing; a time when crime was low, the police were courteous and efficient, law-breakers were rapidly apprehended and carted off to prison, and the sun shone every day. No-one ever refers to such a halcyon period because there never was such a time, and probably never will be.
Policing has been described to me as “the bastard child of social policy and class distinction”. Constables patrolling beats in the palatial squares of Belgravia in the nineteenth century were under strict instructions to ‘offer assistance to members of the gentry when entering or alighting from their carriages’, and were charged with ‘preventing idle and disorderly persons resorting to, or taking their rest’ in the parks and gardens of Belgravia. Surprisingly little, in a philosophical or operational sense, has changed since then.
For policing was, and is, concerned with the protection of rights and privileges. It has always been about the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’. The subservient deference of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have long since disappeared from the social landscape, only to be replaced by a hierarchy based upon the vested interests of a range of power-brokers.
Despite the fact that it is over thirty years since he was on our TV screens, many still refer to ‘the Dixon of Dock Green style of policing’. Today, the this style is viewed by the police establishment as something between an embarrassment and an anachronism. To the present generation of police officers, George Dixon and all that he stood for in the minds of the public is ancient history. Modern policing, they argue, is about targets and performance. They do not want to see a return to patrolling beats in all weathers, having face to face encounters with the public, (the majority of whom they have been trained to regard as the enemy). Community policing of the Dixonesque sort is beneath them.
None of this would matter very much, but since 1997 vast amounts of ill-considered legislation has invested the most junior police officers with sweeping powers that impinge upon every one of us. Officers can now arrest, handcuff, and DNA-sample anyone for any offence, no matter how trivial; they can stop and search anyone without having grounds that the person has done anything wrong; they can search premises without the need for a search warrant. We have some of the most extreme police powers in the western world and few people have noticed what has happened.
There is a growing body of evidence that a significant minority of officers are alienated from the public, see them as ‘the enemy’, and have little or no interest in preserving legitimate rights of protest. Such individuals inflict huge damage on civil society. A healthy democracy cannot function without respect for the rule of law, the maintenance of civil liberties, and accountable policing. George Clemenceau’s oft-quoted comment to Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 that ‘War is too important to be left to Generals’, could, with value, be re-cast to describe the law and order challenges facing twenty-first century Britain– ‘Policing is too important to leave to Chief Constables’. Indeed it is probably too important to leave to politicians until something is done about the cavernous democratic deficit that currently exists.The coming generation needs to face this challenge head-on.
